Paid VPNs are dirt cheap worldwide… If you can already afford a PC capable of playing HD2, you can afford a few bucks a year for a reputable VPN.

You have actual clueless first-worlder logic

If 60 to 160 USD per year is “dirt cheap” to you, you have absolutely no place to speak. Hundreds of dollars over the course of 5 years just to circumvent stupid geolocation restrictions and nothing else – about the same cost to twice the cost of a low-to-mid range gaming PC BTW – is not affordable to most people. How do you compare basically throwing away hundreds of USD yearly opposed to a one-time purchase of an important utility in the modern age? How do you view that as cheap for people in countries where that could be a large chunk or most of their salary? Are people not allowed to buy expensive things for themselves rarely and actually enjoy them without having an unnecessary subscription expense tacked on just because they were born in a poorer county?

How would you feel if I told you there were a “fuck you” fee of 10% of the cost of your house every year just because you’re American or Canadian or British or some shit, on top of your income & property taxes? I mean you’re a homeowner so you can obviously afford it.

A lot of the time it’s about being lucky enough be able to have or form connections with rich stupid people. Those kinds are a lot more willing to throw insane amounts of money at someone/some company they vaguely know to do things they know nothing of but hear a lot about.

Or just working at a company that’s well-known in the area and deals with clients very intimately while the product is being created.

Sometimes charging more for the same service makes them want it more, to them it means it’s premium programming (as opposed to the off-brand wish dot com programming). But sometimes they demand disgracefully cheap yet world-class service and throw a tantrum when they can’t pay you $5 an hour for a full rebranded recreation of the Amazon web service.

old

money 100

doubt

Security that is impossible to defeat is literally logically impossible

try to not go deaf by 40 after suppressor bans challenge [impossible]

don’t let the US military know that you don’t like desert camos. they’ll get real mad

i installed nobara and while everything was simple to set up, the nobara installer doesn’t recognize the ssd i flashed it on. going great

HDDs are your best option for long-term storage. Every storage mechanism fails eventually but HDDs are convenient, last long, and have excellent data recovery.

I don’t work on any widely-used languages (I’ve made my own but not anything important) but I do think the designers of Zig and Rust have very good reasons for using semicolons – I read some reasons from the Rust devs themselves somewhere but I can’t remember them other than it vaguely being about how Rust is expression-based and intended to be lightweight and how whitespace significance can create confusion around how to read and write certain things and bla bla bla…

but my personal opinion, what I generally I would imagine it’s for other than readability, is because the code can look a lot cleaner when an expression returned from a block is just the expression, and not expression plus some token like return. It’s especially nice in long closures or extremely short and simple blocks. I would rather consistently have to write expressions broadly like let a = { b + c }; rather than let a = { return b + c }. The semicolon has significance as a “result discarder” so expressions can be the default, so it’s on the surface a lot more functional-friendly.

Also this is more specific but I hate the way WS languages generally handle quotes

That said, with how few expressions are return values, I do wonder why semicolons are the default rather than adding a special character to indicate return values.

you mean like return/break/etc.?

because Rust was designed to remind you of functional programming despite not being very functional, and because semicolons allow way better syntax rules in Rust and are generally pretty vital for good, readable lowish-level code. it also allows Rust programmers to use newlines/indents and stuff to pretty up their code a lot without littering it with random \ and |> and begin end and such everywhere, which, given how dense Rust code can be and how much it uses iterators and weird trait magic, is a big plus for readability

yea let them just name the other 200 countries’ authorities which are responsible for transportation documents, i’m outraged that this isn’t the case >:(

Well IIRC, for America, the funding money amount for Ukraine is usually just an estimate of the worth of already manufactured goods, mainly of weapons that we have stored that we weren’t gonna use in the first place, and only a small portion of the dollar amount is stuff like clothes, food, etc. which would be seen as an actual cost to the US. We have sent Bradleys and M1 Abrams, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t in use by the military and weren’t planned to be upgraded for use any time soon (but I’m just guessing, I can’t Google it rn, I may just be completely wrong on that).

It’d be so much better for everyone if we just took all of the funding going to Israel and redirected it to Ukraine. And then we nuke Israel or smthn idk

Erdoğan would if he could

Depends on the language. I’m not gonna find shit to copy-paste for what I’m doing in Scala 3 or F#, but in Rust or C++ I’ll frequently Google an issue I can’t figure out and someone will have some fancy black magic hacker solution with super-iterators and turbofishies and weird type inference that I couldn’t think of myself and just throw it in my code with some minor modifications :)

… people just send SMS to random phone numbers?

it was nice while it lasted, which was until loud conservatives and ““libertarians”” started flooding in a few months later

i was even fine with the tankies, but the alt-right kit 'n caboodle is just too much

There’s nothing wrong with feeling bad about the way you look. You can’t be blamed for the ways you tend to perceive yourself. Although the obvious thing to say is “there is no such thing as looking like a girl”, it’s obvious from the context that you mean you’re worrying about your looks not meeting most cultural expectations of what a woman is and/or generally not passing as a woman. Not that it’s any consolation, but plenty of cis people are in the same camp there… there’s not much some rando like me could say that could make you feel better, but it’s always good to think that now is better than before, and the future will be better than now.

Hopelessness is the worst feeling, and I remember frequently just reading and writing and thinking on and on, all in hopes that eventually I’d stumble upon something that solved my problems and suddenly get the drive to completely turn around my life. But that wasn’t how it worked. It’s a tempting and addicting path to spend all your time and effort boiling alive in your own stresses, and it’s hard to push yourself away from harmful coping mechanisms since they can be ways to get stress off your chest temporarily, and they can introduce a low-level comfort in the short term. Even though you’re still feeling anxious the entire time and it just makes it worse in the long-run. To me it feels like when I drink tons of caffeine…

The only way I was able to eventually mostly detach myself from my stress-cycle was by cutting myself off from the mechanisms I used to dump stress on (including Reddit and Discord, and other social media/forums/boards/comment sections), to keep attempting to rationalize that the gods can take my executive functioning but they can’t take my ability to obsessively write cursive variants of foreign scripts (I mean to say that I have at least a little control as long as I tell myself I do), and most importantly trying to accept that nothing will happen when I want it to happen (or even near when I want it to happen) and that the betterment I hope for, while they’ll come eventually, aren’t coming now or even in a week from now or even a month or year from now. And that I will not have any radical sudden change in my life whatsoever.

Saying “just stop feeling the way you feel lol” isn’t very insightful, but my gist is that sometimes your goal should be to avoid focusing on the grandiose illusions of what you want for yourself, to avoid having big dreams and big expectations, and to avoid feeling that you need to constantly be changing or improving or doing something with your time/life. There are no deadlines. You just started young adulthood, you have like 10 years minimum to get around to doing the stuff you want, you’re not imminently becoming a retirement home grandma or anything (although with my back sometimes I’m not so sure). Some days you can get up and focus for a bit, many days you can’t. Any progress is good and there are no set-backs.

My experience relates to other aspects of myself and my life, both flexible and immutable, especially neurological disorders (mostly ADHD & Dyspraxia) and things caused by them plus inadequate parenting (I’m sure everyone on this community could tell you this, but that sort of thing is a recipe for a pretty awful self-image). I haven’t experienced HRT or any significant form of gender-related treatment or anything.

femicide is rad

Okay then, I’ll ask you this. What can you demonstrate that you have prevented extremely large corporations or the government from doing with your information by replacing some of your services with “privacy-focused” services? Do you really think that, say, the NSA and Amazon don’t know you better than you know yourself regardless of your efforts? What do you think is prevented by using some isolated services while you still, no doubt, have most of your data being collected and used by other things?

Could you prove that your life would be any different if, for example, every single piece of information Meta has about you that you don’t know they have were wiped off of their servers? Or that anyone here’s life would be different?

The only thing I could imagine you could demonstrate is that targetted ads could be “worse”. Which is a non-answer, many peoples’ ads are completely inaccurate regardless, and ads aren’t such a good metric to base the government’s or Nvidia’s or whoever’s access to your data off of.

Fact of the matter is is that, unless you’re mega-Amish, your efforts to prevent powerful entities from collecting your data are meaningless, they don’t work well, and without strong privacy laws it will forever be that way unless everyone suddenly agrees to only use FOSS user-friendly products and all the ISPs are replaced by good guys. I guess some people here have spent thousands of dollars and hours in an attempt to keep their privacy in their own hands in spite of that, so they have to convince themselves it does work… I don’t blame them, government corruption & corporatism has made me desparate before too.