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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Crackers mostly post the cracks to IRC sites, cs.rin.ru, and private torrent sites. Repackers are the main way releases make it to the mainstream torrent sites.

    Repacking isn’t that complicated anymore, it’s more about reputation. There was a time when games were big and internet speed was slow so saving every MB of size was important. Repackers would reencode video files and find other ways of dramatically reducing the file size. Nowadays they don’t do a lot of that, but repackers are still important for casual pirates who just want to easily play pirated games and not worry about malware.



  • Cracks are usually released separately from the uncracked game files. Repackers take those cracks and package them with the correct version of the game, compress the files and add an installer. Then they upload them to the more mainstream public trackers.

    Repacks have several benefits. They tend to be easier to setup and usually more reliable. They download faster and use less data because they are compressed. They are also sometimes packaged with extras like soundtracks, mods, etc.

    Fitgirl repacks are known to be more compressed, so the files are a little smaller but take a fair amount longer to install.





  • If when you run a fingernail over it, if your nail catches in the scratch, the scratch is very likely too deep to fix with paint correction(like buffing/polishing).

    A proper fix will require prep, painting and blending, which you shouldn’t try to do yourself. You could buy a touch up stick that matches your paint to cover the scratch. It won’t look perfect and won’t last forever without clear coat on top, but it will prevent rust.

    Before you decide how you’ll deal with this, you can bring it to a body shop for an estimate, most shops will do that for free. Most shops can give you an estimate from photos emailed or submitted to their websites.


  • I’ve had issues that I’ve been able to work around.

    I have previously had the error, “settings could not be applied”, which I worked around by uninstalling my YouTube updates, installing the recommended version and clearing revanced manager data. I now get an error about not being able to load the original APK. I work around this by deleting the two apks in /data/abd/vanced before patching.

    I’m rooted and have to repatch on each reboot. Not complaining, just want to share my experience in case it helps others.

    I love revanced, and feel so thankful for it. I can’t afford YT premium, without revanced I would miss out on so much great content.


  • I was a binge drinker. I would buy a big bottle of whiskey and drink until I fell asleep, then wake up and start drinking until it was gone. Then I’d be sober for a while and eventually binge again.

    I had a sort of similar gradual experience with quitting. I was enjoying it less and less, mostly just getting depressed and feeling sick from the constant changes in body chemistry. I went from being blackout drunk 2 days a week to 2 days every other week, and then every month or so. At one point I realized I had been sober for 50 days and decided I needed to be done with it forever.

    Now I’m at 200 days and almost never think about drinking. I have basically zero desire to drink, all I can think about is how bad it made me feel.

    I don’t go to bars or really socialize in person at all. I would recommend trying to find other ways to socialize that don’t involve bars, but I have known sober people who can happily hang out with people who drink.


  • For most purchases, people really only have vanishingly few choices of companies to buy from. A truly free market might work, but the profit motives that have corrupted our political, legal and regulatory systems has made most markets into oligopolies. These companies work together to manipulate prices, without ever directly communicating in a way that can be punished.

    For a free market to really drive prices down there needs to be real competition. When eggs went up in price, they allegedly did so because of avian flu. But that flu only affected a small amount of the production. Cal-Maine, the largest egg producer in the country, lost no egg production at all. Yet they increased their prices massively. If the market was working as you say it does, Cal-Maine would have kept their prices low to capture more market share. Instead they saw that other producer might have to raise prices and preemptively raised their prices.


  • I’m not convinced statistics can be used like this on big questions where we know so little. Just because we believe the universe to be massively large and ever expanding doesn’t satisfy the basic premise that underlies the assumption that there is so much stuff that some of the stuff must be alive. I don’t think we know enough about the universe to make the assumption that because it is so big, it must be infinitely variable.

    But what do I know, I’m just some idiot on the internet.




  • I have many of my services open to the internet, but behind authelia w/2fa and a reverse proxy. I haven’t had a security issue yet, been running this way for a few years.

    I think it’s pretty safe as long as you keep them up to date. I run backups weekly and do updates at least once a month.

    Using geoip restrictions will also help a lot because you can block most of the scanner bots by denying connections from outside your geographic region. These bots detect what services are open to the internet and then add them to databases like shodan. If a security flaw is found in one of those services, hackers will search those databases for servers with those services running and try to exploit them. If you aren’t in those databases they can’t easily find you before you are able to patch.






  • I think SSO is less important than having everything behind the reverse proxy. The importance of the proxy is that if there is a security hole in the web server component of your service, it cannot be exploited without a second flaw in the proxy. It’s an additional layer of abstraction and security that doesn’t add a ton of overhead.

    An attacker would have to find an exploit in nginx, which is used by most of the big tech companies, so it is well secured compared to the services many of us selfhost.

    Another advantage of using SWAG is being able to use fail2ban and geoip restrictions. Any ports open to the ipv4 internet get scanned by security services and malicious actors many times each day. It’s nice to be able to have nginx refuse connections from any of them that repeatedly fail to login, or that come from outside your geographic region.