How many ways can we rewrite the allegory of the cave?

I don’t give a shit about David Hasselhoff, but Knight Rider without Mr Feeney as KITT wouldn’t be the same

My solution for this type of situation is MicroBin running on my home network from a non-standard port, with a port knocker to open and close the port when needed.

My router handle DDNS so I can always contact my home network easily. I port-knock to trigger an iptables command on the router to forward traffic to the MicroBin host.

I also have my phone set up to connect via openvpn to my home network so that I can remotely do things like start and stop services, set port forwarding rules, etc.

I believe what they’re referencing is sites that require you disable your ad blocker to access; they’re saying you will be able to bypass those gates while keeping your ad blocker enabled

Still enshitification though. Fuck everything about this

Bibi-chan? Is that you?

Oh boy, let’s take this piece by piece…

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A LAWYER AND THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE

First: let’s talk about the difference between copyright, patents, and trademark

A patent protects a method of doing something - like a novel piece of code, or a newly invented drug formula - from being duplicated and used or sold without your consent.

Copyright protects creative works - like art, books, and computer software - from being mimiced. It literally deals with the rights to copy something

Trademark protects brands - like a logo or company name - from being used by other people for profit. It usually deals with marketplace confusion, as when someone creates a competing product with a similar logo to try to benefit from the logo’s recognition and popularity.

So, with that said, what are YOU dealing with?

Well, since you’re not selling software or utilizing anything from the WatchDogs game universe, you’re pretty much free and clear on both patent and copyright.

What about trademark?

Well, on the one hand, you are not competing with Ubisoft in any way, nor are you attempting to represent yourself as related to WatchDogs. So, by the letter of the law (in the US), they don’t have a valid complaint.

However, trademark under US law has this funny feature where an entity that holds a trademark is required to vigorously defend it when they become aware of potential infringement. This is to prevent the selective application of trademark. That is, if I know John is using my trademark and I don’t go after him, then Steve uses my trademark too, I can’t suddenly claim to have an interest in defending it when I didn’t care before. Steve can point at the fact that I didn’t go after John and say “you already gave up your trademark by failing to enforce it”.

So how does this impact you? Well, unfortunately, even if you are technically allowed to use “dedsec” under US law, if Ubisoft has a trademark on the term “dedsec” specifically, AND if someone at Ubisoft became aware of your use of their trademark, they would likely come after you for trademark infringement just to cover their ass. You might even win in court, but it would cost a whole lot of money that you would likely never be able to recover.

The good news is that the very first step in a trademark dispute is a cease and desist letter. They’ll demand you stop using their trademark. At that point you can either comply, refuse, or offer to settle the matter by selling them the domain.

What you do with this information is up to you.

I will always read this meme in the voice of George Carlin narrating Thomas the Tank Engine, and then immediately post this exact reply with a link to this video: https://youtu.be/2a_gW1KvuFk?si=hR834siCZlYvOei1

Yeah, hasn’t that person seen the incredibly accurate journalistic masterpiece documentary “Weird: The Al Yankovich Story”?

I don’t think he’s seen the 100% true film, using only authentic footage from his life, “Weird: The Al Yankovich Story” 😮

Yeah, their truly bigoted attitude came out down that so I just blocked and reported xD

And now you’ve entered the territory of labeling trans people as psychologically troubled. Clearly you’re just a bigot.

Muted and reported for blatant bigotry. Nobody wants you around. Enjoy your isolation

You’re so close to getting it. You literally just used the phrase “some people” and still can’t grasp why the joke is transphobic for making a broad generalization about the desirability of trans women.

Because you’re exactly right: some people don’t. But other people do. Which is why the joke is transphobic for implying that the reader will immediately agree it’s “bad news”.

And don’t give me some shit about the author and their characters because you and I both know that these are one-offs and the joke is “uh oh you got duped that girl is actually a guy hahaha”

First: don’t be a loser. Refer to trans women as women. Or are you a captive to your barbaric past?

Second: you’re allowed to have a preference, but projecting your preference onto the world is transphobic. Making a joke that implies all trans people are undesirable to everyone is transphobic and self-centered.

You can be a better person than this. Give it a try. Otherwise you’ll be left behind as a relic of a less civilized time

Exactly this. Everyone has their own preferences and judging a person as a good/bad fit solely based on their gender identity and not any sort of subjective compatibility is fundamentally transphobic. It’s assessing that trans people are objectively undesirable. Pretty messed up.

Anyone else immediately go check if it was daylight savings tonight?

Troll mode: Rip the first 5 minutes of each movie then splice in Rick Astley

Troll activist mode: Rip the first 5 minutes of each movie then splice in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion live reading

Troll comedian mode: Rip the first 5 minutes of each movie then splice in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian

Activist mode: Find a set of movies to rename that teach about the harm religion has caused

Ethical absolutist mode: Refuse to host them, and explain why

Non-confrontational familial support mode: Give Mom a unique user and make the god movies only accessible to that user

In all seriousness it depends on what your priorities are. Is it more important to you to provide judgement-free support to your mom so she knows she can rely on you, or is it more important to try to reduce harm in the world by deplatforming harmful media? Or maybe it’s more important to try to teach your mom what’s wrong with those movies and you can come to an arrangement where she can watch those movies only if she agrees to watch movies you choose in equal amounts (since you can track it) to counteract the propaganda?

What is most important to you?

That’s a non-trivial number of devices, so I would recommend a decent router that will last into the future, including service upgrades. Especially if anyone in the house is gaming and streaming movies at the same time

I recommend purchasing the modem and router as two separate units.

For the modem, because you have symmetric gigabit service, you’ll need one that supports gigabit upstream. That means the less expensive SB8200 is out. Instead, you’re looking at the ARRIS SURFboard S33. You can also find a comparable product from Netgear, the CM2000

For your router, I personally like and trust Asus. Their user interface is robust but user-friendly, and their firmware is well supported by the home networking community (including a stellar ‘expanded’ version called AsusMerlin that frequently has features pulled into the official firmware)

While you could go with an older model that only supports WiFi 5 (AC), those models have reached end-of-life and will only receive critical security updates. Instead, it’s worth spending a bit more for the WiFi 6 (AX) version.

The minimum you’ll want to support a symmetric gigabit connection like what you have is the Asus RT-AX86U. However, to support possible higher speeds in the future, and to get the most rock-solid performance, I recommend the Asus RT-AX88U. This is what I personally own for my symmetric gigabit connection

NOTE: There are older versions with the same model number that have extra LAN Ethernet ports (8 total) and no 2.5Gbps port. Do NOT get them! There are known issues when using ports 5-8 on these units

Again, you could find a similar product in the Netgear Nighthawk brand.

Anything above that is going to be extra bells and whistles. Things like extra WiFi bands, stronger radios, more 2.5Gbps ports, support for link aggregation, and some one-click gaming features that I personally think aren’t worth the money.

Depending on the size of your home and your personal use case, you may also find value in adding mesh WiFi nodes to your network. Asus and Netgear both have their own implementations here. Asus’ version is called AiMesh and is pretty seamless. All of their modern routers can act as the primary mesh node.

Personally I do not game on WiFi, so I went with 3x Asus ZenWiFi AX Mini (XD4) mesh nodes. They can be connected wirelessly to the main router, or by Ethernet to reduce latency. If I were going to be gaming on WiFi, I would have gone with the beefier ZenWiFi AX (XT8) nodes instead

Hope that helps, and let me know if you have any questions! Happy to go into more detail on whatever you need

Based on your edit, what you need isn’t MoCA. What you need is a cable modem and a router (preferably as separate units, not a combo one like you have. Happy to explain why if you care)

• What is your ISP?

• What is your current advertised upload and download speed for the internet plan you have?

• Do you get TV or phone service through the same provider?

• Is your house wired for Ethernet? Coax? Both?

• How many people live with you?

• How many sqft is your home?

• How many devices well be connected? How many are wired? How many on WiFi?

• What is your use-case? Simultaneous streaming in 4k and latency-sensitive gaming? Mostly non-competitive gaming? Big downloads? Do you plan to stream content from your home while traveling or similar?

Help me help you :p

Just to make absolutely sure: you are POSITIVE that the device you’ve been renting is a MoCA-WAN router, and NOT a cable modem?

In the US at least, most of the single-unit devices that receive a coax input are DOCSIS 3.x, not MoCA. They are combining two pieces of hardware in a single physical unit: a docsis modem and a router.

Prior to having fiber internet, when my provider was Comcast, I owned two separate devices instead of renting the single device from my ISP: a DOCSIS 3.1 modem from Arris, and a standard Ethernet router

Just want to make sure you are absolutely confident about what your ISP is actually providing before you spend money on new hardware :)

Right? Waymo is already several times safer than humans and tesla’s garbage, yet municipalities keep refusing them. Trust is a huge problem for them.

And yes, haters, I know that they still have problems in inclement weather but that’s kinda the point: we would be much further along if it weren’t for the unreasonable hurdles they keep facing because of fear created by Tesla

The shame of it is that despite this limitation LLMs have very real practical uses that, much like cryptocurrencies and NFTs did to blockchain, are being undercut by hucksters.

Tesla has done the same thing with autonomous driving too. They claimed to be something they’re not (fanboys don’t @ me about semantics) and made the REAL thing less trusted and take even longer to come to market.

Drives me crazy.