I’ve been using KOReader on my phone now, ever since my Kindle one day decided to be unrecognisable on my computer. Couldn’t find a solution to fix it so it became a glorified paperweight.

The screen real estate is slightly degraded, but fuck if I give Amazon any more of my money. Besides, I get to store epubs as epubs instead of converting to that god awful mobi format.

I switched to Pipepipe from Newpipe because I wasn’t sure Newpipe was being maintained. Pipepipe has SponsorBlock.

I have a similar setup and decided to install it on my degoogled phone because I definitely wanted to use a VPN to connect to Whatsapp and my other phone is an older Android without the global VPN option.

I have it completely isolated from my main account by using Shelter from F-droid, installing Aurora store in that sandbox and then installing Whatsapp from Aurora into the work profile created by Shelter.

This way, my main contacts and media are not accessed by Whatsapp. It does its own separate thing and I have no other apps interacting with it.

The reason they are blackboxes is because they are function approximators with billions of parameters. Theory has not caught up with practical results. This is why you tune hyperparameters (learning rate, number of layers, number of neurons ina layer, etc.) and have multiple iterations of training to get an approximation of the distribution of the inputs. Training is also sensitive to the order of inputs to the network. A network trained on the same training set but in a different order might converge to an entirely different function. This is why you train on the same inputs in random order over multiple episodes to hopefully average out such variations. They are blackboxes simply because you can’t yet prove theoretically the function it has approximated or converged to given the input.

Most of the Paradox games support Linux natively. I play Europa Universalis 4, Stellaris, Crusader Kings 2 (haven’t bought 3 yet but it has native support), Hearts of Iron 4. Victoria 2 doesn’t have native support and I didn’t get Vic 3 but it is supported. Rimworld is native, so is Factorio.

Have a look at what you want to play on protondb.com and figure out if gaming on Linux works for you. Baldur’s Gate 3 has a gold rating (gold being one level lower than platinum - the best rating for non-native games) which for all practical purposes should work.

EDIT: I recommend installing Proton Glorious Eggroll in addition to the native Proton on Steam if you can’t get a game running with the native Proton despite protondb reports saying the game works. The installation is fairly straightforward, just read and follow the installation instructions on the page.

That is the fundamental problem with email as a protocol, yes?

Zero knowledge inbox, externally audited code, a company actually caring for user privacy definitely is a win for me when the alternative is Google hoovering up your data. Is this what you meant by saying it is the next best thing?

How much more private than end to end encryption do you want? Unless you mean something else by private.

I play World of Tanks which has frequent battle passes. I used to try and grind earlier but then came a moment where I said fuck it, this feels like work and not fun. So now I just treat the base game as what I get. Any other reward is just a bonus. This change in mindset has worked quite well for me.

It maybe comes from an all or nothing mentality. I would have tremendous Schadenfreude if Reddit does indeed die, but the culture there changed and I don’t really care if all of Reddit migrated here. As long as Lemmy is active enough, I am content.

This was my first introduction to the Witcher world. Currently playing this too and I love it. I actually abandoned the game halfway the first time because my computer was overheating. By the time I fixed it, and a couple of many Paradox games later, it was more than year before I went back to the Witcher. Restarted, and holy hell, this game amazes me in how many different paths one can take in this game.

Serial lurker, even on Reddit. But trying to be more involved with Lemmy.

Europa Universalis 4. Actually most Paradox games.

The cake is a lie, anyhow.

I go back to World of Tanks every once in a while but it is impossible to enjoy it even though I want to. The concept is great, there are tactics involved, but the skill ceiling is just too damn high. So now whenever I get the urge to play, I instead watch a couple of streamers. Skill for his entertaining streams and well, skill (but he gets annoying when he starts raging about not being able to achieve his personal goals), and Dez for the generally chill vibes.

World of Tanks would have been a great game had it not been plagued with the entire pay to win aspect. And don’t get me started on the whole crew training and retraining nonsense. I hate that aspect of the game, and still don’t understand it. Do I keep the trained crew in a tank I enjoy playing or move them onto the next tier tank and then have terrible stats on the new crew and lose interest in the tank I started enjoying? Uff!

Even if there is nothing wrong with Meta trying to federate with the Fediverse, I do not want them here.

Honestly, at this point I am quite jaded and sick of the shenanigans of big tech. Repeatedly they have violated the trust of their users. Unless they show active change in the way they conduct their operations for the benefit of the end user and not advertising agencies, I would prefer to not have them in my life if I can help it.

EDIT:

I might have misread the intention of your post. If you are asking about the fallout of Meta federating, there is a possibility that they attract too many users to their platform. This is my personal anecdote. I wanted to get rid of all products owned by Facebook to the point where I told my contacts that I am switching to Signal and will be uninstalling Whatsapp. I even reasoned with them that I wanted to choose not to use Whatsapp, and that I still wanted to communicate with them, albeit on Signal. I even emphasised that I wasn’t asking them to uninstall Whatsapp. Ultimately, only about a third of my contacts joined Signal.

Everyone says there is a choice in not using Whatsapp, but is it really a choice when there is no one to talk to on Signal? That is my worry that something similar would happen with Threads.

I’ll finally know all the answers in the next episode of No Such Thing As A Fish!

I did the same too. I liked my current instance’s affinity to technology and figured I may as well join a smaller server to avoid the strain of the Reddit exodus.