I see the Extend part of Embrace Extend Extinguish is about to start…

You should be able to kind of do both through android settings

Settings -> Apps -> YourApp -> Mobile data usage -> Allow Network access and Mobile Data

For VPN you’ll need to add a VPN and then Settings -> Network and Internet -> VPN -> YourVPN -> Always on VPN and Block Connections without VPN. This blocks all apps. There is 2 issues with this though, Blocking connections will block split tunneling connections set up through VPNs and also potentially this depending on the apps you’re using https://mullvad.net/en/blog/dns-traffic-can-leak-outside-the-vpn-tunnel-on-android

I’ve used https://github.com/Softcatala/whisper-ctranslate2 before for transcribing English and translating non English audio into srt files and its been pretty good for TV shows for me. Its not perfect but it usually gets me about 95% of the way there

Oh nice, I haven’t heard of Vanguard! I love how creative some fan games are, especially compared to the main games that have gotten a bit stale. I’m definitely adding it to my list now, thanks!

I’m the type of player that needs the bright yellow markings, that people seem to hate, to be able to get around! So I constantly have to read the signs in Control and even then I still second guess myself.

I did the part where you have to answer the phone at the end of the hallway thingy. The amount of times I just walked off the edge because I didn’t understand I had to pull the chord is embarrassing. And then trying to get back from the motel thing I genuinely thought my game was bugged, I was so comfused lol

Ah damn, I know how you feel! Alan Wake remaster kept going black screen every few seconds for me and the only way to fix it was to pause it for a few seconds every time so I had to give up.

Maybe updated drivers or something could have fixed the bugs since then, I definitely recommend checking it out again for a fun linear single player game that doesn’t take weeks to finish

Yes! I feel like there really aren’t enough games like it! Just a fun little linear shooter with some cool time travel/ superpower elements.

I heard there were references to each other, that’s why I wanted to start with Alan Wake before playing Quantum Break but tbh I’m so bad with names and stuff I probably wouldn’t even notice them anyway lol

I didn’t know Remedy didn’t own the rights to it, that’s unfortunate because its such a good concept but at least we got Control after it, hopefully they continue with more games like them

I finished Quantum Break, I loved it! I’ve never really played a game with superpowers, especially like these. I also love games that give unlimited ammo in the starting pistol since I have the worst aim ever, I constantly find myself having no choice but to melee enemies in other games. And the slow motion after doing the dash was so nice!

The final fight was so bad, I could not understand why I was dying even when I was doing exactly what someone on YouTube was doing but other than that it was so fun! And I actually liked the story, usually I’m not a big story person, I just like running around causing chaos, it also probably helped that I finished the game in 3 days, so I didn’t forget what was happening.

I had to give up on Alan Wake Remaster, the visual bugs were just too much so I moved onto Control. I was expecting a more linear style, similar to Quantum Break so I ended up running around in circles being so confused, especially the elevator at the start, I spent way too long looking for that lol but having the force like a Jedi is super fun

I also started GoW Chains of Olympus and I kinda regret playing the series in chronological order instead of release order because going from Ascension to this is not so great, since it was Originally designed for the PSP but hopefully the original series will look better when I get there

Quantum Break got me to put down BG3 for now since I’m looking for shorter games that I don’t accidentally spend 10 hours on a Saturday playing

Its also convinced me to get back into RE4 remaster. I started it in November and got to the part where I’m in the little boat on the lake but I got a bit bored of it. I think my expectations were too high, I loved 0,1,2 and 3 especially 2 and 3. And since everyone always says 4 is the best, I just expected more. I still want to finish it and continue the series because they are fun games tbf

Ha, we’ve been doing the same thing for the past few months! I just made a generic Immich account that we all log into and upload to that. I auto backup the library to other places as we go, just in case. Once we’re done, we’ll all get copies of the directory to do with as we please.

I have Immich set up to keep the name of the files instead of giving them a random name. As we scan we name the files with the peoples names and generic tags like Tom.Mary.Birthday.1992 and putting Mary before birthday indicates that it was Mary’s birthday. So that if I decide to try and add meta data to the files it will be easier.

I haven’t figured out a plan for adding meta info to the files so they at least have the year/month they were taken and I don’t know if I even want to since we’re 1000’s of photos in now

I caved into my urges and started playing Baldurs Gate 3 again, this time as a dark urge

I finished it for the first time a few weeks ago and have wanted to do nothing but play it again but I never replay games like ever. I held out for as long as I could but no other game was calling to me like BG3

I never understood how people could keep replaying games, I always thought the new game+ concept was pointless but now I get it, now I understand why people have put thousands of hours into Skyrim

I nearly never even bothered to try BG3 because I’ve never played anything with turn based mechanics and I know nothing about D&D but now its all I want to play, I’m worried I’ll never want to play anything else again lol

I started Alan Wake Remaster but it has really bad visual bugs, my screen keeps going black every minute or 2 and I have to pause the game for a few seconds to fix it so I don’t know if I’ll keep it going lol

I started it because Control and Quantum Break look so fun so I might just skip to them instead. Happy to see another positive opinion of Control, I’m super excited to try it!

I’ve just started God of War Ascension today, I’ve never played any of the series so I decided to play them in chronological order, well at least the ones I can play since the mobile one doesn’t seem to be available and I don’t have FB to play that one.

Its super fun, I love that they put the button prompts on the side of the screen that the button is on since I’m using an Xbox controller. But I’m not a big fan of how often they zoom out while I’m in the middle of fighting monsters. I just kept spamming quick attack on the back of the snakes because I couldn’t tell which character I was lol

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-execs-decrypt-rival-apps-usage-snap-youtube-2024-3

This is a ‘man-in-the-middle approach,’" the email said.

Yep, this article has more details about it

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/417 it was requested back in 2019 for Firefox and is listed as a known issue on Mull https://divestos.org/pages/broken#mull it seems like Mozilla has no interest in implementing it. If you’re rooted you should be able to access the file though

I’m pretty sure Element stays active in the background, it may have asked you to turn off battery optimisation and have a silent notification always active. This decreases battery life which is why most apps don’t do this but it allows the app to constantly ping the server to check for new messages and is one way around using FCM.

Fair email uses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP_IDLE instead of FCM, I’m no expert and this is just my guess but it seems to also need the app to run in the background for this to work.

Silence is SMS and MMS only and so doesn’t use internet and so has no need for FCM or any alternative anyway

For android, Google uses Firebase Cloud Messaging, basically a server that pings the phone when a notification for an app is available, which wakes the app up to receive the notification. There are alternatives but they need to be adopted by app devs for them to work.

For people running a degoogled android, they’ll notice most apps won’t receive any notifications until they open the apps since most apps rely on Google Play Services to receive a ping from FCM.

I don’t have any google play services so most of my apps don’t give me push notifications but I do have WhatsApp installed and that still receives notifications, they’re sometimes delayed by a few minutes which makes me think Meta have their own implementation/alternative to FCM but I’m not sure.

For Signal, their servers tell Googles FCM servers that you have notifications waiting on Signals servers and to wake up your Signal app so it can communicate with Signals servers to receive your messages.

WhatsApp and Signal claim/have end-end encryption on their messages but that shouldn’t matter when specifically looking at Googles FCM servers so, at most it would be meta data that could be obtained from the FCM servers.

https://jami.net/unifiedpush/ has a pretty basic explanation of push notifications on android and also showcases an alternative to FCM https://unifiedpush.org/ which has a nice little diagram about push notifications on android. Unfortunately, Unifiedpush is not widely adopted by many applications.

So there are ways to avoid Googles FCM servers on android using Unifiedpush or always having the application on in the background but for the most part FCM is used.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-geep-iphone-recycle-shred/ and they’ll sue you if you try to stop them from making more E-waste! https://youtu.be/rZjbNWgsDt8

The issue with this is the difference between GB (1,000,000,000 bytes) and GiB (1,073,741,824 bytes) https://massive.io/file-transfer/gb-vs-gib-whats-the-difference/

HDD manufacturers use GB, which is a metric measurement, because its better for marketing while computers use GiB, which is a binary measurement. So people think they’re buying 15GiB but in reality they’re buying 13.5GiB marketed as 15GB

You probably need to set up split tunneling in your VPN app on your phone. Either enable split tunneling for the apps on your phone that you use to connect to your home server or enable split tunneling in the VPN app for the local IP address of your home server so that you can use any apps to connect to your home server while still having the VPN enabled for any other websites you visit in those apps. I know ProtonVPN and Mullvad both automatically have split tunneling set up for local IPs on PC but not for Android, this would explain the differences between your laptop and phone

AI regulations is definitely needed, selfregulations never works, look at how Google and Meta have been operating and even now with GDPR in place they’re still getting away with abusing users data with no consequences.

OpenAI did not tell us what good regulation should look like,” the person said.

What they’re saying is basically: trust us to self-regulate,” says Daniel Leufer, a senior policy analyst focused on AI at Access Now’s Brussels office.

I should hope OpnAI didn’t tell them how to regulate OpenAI and I really hope this isn’t the only regulation that we see since technology is constantly advancing we’re going to need to constantly update regulation to keep companies like OpenAI from getting out of control like Google.

OpenAI argued that, for example, the ability of an AI system to draft job descriptions should not be considered a “high risk” use case, nor the use of an AI in an educational setting to draft exam questions for human curation. After OpenAI shared these concerns last September, an exemption was added to the Act

This bothers me, job descriptions are already ridiculous with over the top requirements for jobs that don’t require them, feeding these prompts into AI is only going to make that worse.

With regards to drafting exams, does it not start to make these exams redundant if the experts on the material being examined can’t even come up with questions and problems, then why should students even bother engaging with the material when they could just use AI because of this loose regulation.

Researchers have demonstrated that ChatGPT can, with the right coaxing, be vulnerable to a type of exploit known as a jailbreak, where specific prompts can cause it to bypass its safety filters and comply with instructions to, for example, write phishing emails or return recipes for dangerous substances.

Unfortunately since this regulation isn’t global and there are so many open source models that can run on consumer hardware there is no real way to regulate jailbreaking prompts and this is always going to be an issue. On the other hand though, these open source low power models are needed to give users more options and privacy, this is where we went wrong with search engines and operating systems.