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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Nuclear is the worst possible option to fill said gaps. Nuclear reactor need to run at a mostly stable output permanently, they are slow to react to changes and can’t be switched on or off at will.

    You could use them to generate a stable base power level, but that’s the opposite of what we need. It wouldn’t change anything regarding the need of energy storage.

    The best option currently as a gap filler is gas cause it can be turned on or off in minutes when needed.

    Not keeping up with demand is a self-made problem. Multiple EU countries already have multiple days a year where they use 100% renewables.




  • Tbh, that’s pretty much the only thing Youtube did in the last few years that I can’t really complain about. I despise their business tactics, but using your VPN to get regional prices just fucks it up for everyone. In first world countries, it’s one or two hours of work. The same price in poor countries would be up to a monthly wage, that’s why it costs them less. Abusing this will only end in most companies removing regional differences and blocking VPNs completely.

    There are other methods to get the same functionality, use them instead of creating problems for others.






  • As long as even basic features like push notifications are locked behind Google services, I’d hardly count that as a win. The Google monopoly on android is even worse than the Microsoft monopoly on PCs. Microsoft has at least some good alternative with the current Linux environment, but Googles only competitor is apple with an even worse system.

    Sure there are projects like LinageOS and GraphenOS, but both are still reliant on micro G or containerised Goggle apps.



  • Vanadium is purposefully made this way. It tries to minimise profiling by making your actions noise in a big mass of users. That only works if you use the standard config without anything to discern you.

    Mull is the other extreme of this. They try to eliminate fingerprinting by reducing the amount of trackable things in your browser.

    It’s hard to say what really is the better option. You can’t completely eliminate fingerprinting, and the more you try, the more you will stick out of the masses.



  • It works as advertised, I’d say. The Email service works fine, no issue to date.

    The VPN has the same issues as others, meaning some sites block some servers entirely, and others force captcha after captcha at you. There also was the problem with missing portforwarding options in the app (at least on Linux), but that is fixed now. Overall it works fine, never had too much of a problem with it, at most had to switch servers if my connection got blocked from the site.

    The calendar is a calendar, end of sentence.

    Proton pass is a bit weird. They don’t offer any desktop app, you can only use the website or the browser plugin. There is no benefit I could think of over bitwarden and I’d even recommend bitwarden more than proton for password management. But it does work without problems.

    No idea about proton drive. Last time I used it you had to manually upload each item into the online safe. But from a quick look it seems like there is a desktop app now that offers automatic backups/uploads.

    For me it’s worth it since even the recent news articles show that they keep their privacy promises. But I also got the money to spare for it. You could get all functionalities for less money and to about the same level of privacy, but it takes more effort and time. It’s for you to decide if the convenience is worth it.



  • No, it’s not. You paying them money won’t stop them from collecting data about you. It only stops them from selling it to show targeted ads.

    Don’t get me wrong, I despise meta for it and think they should be prosecuted for that immediately, but that has nothing to do with the article or what the EU is saying.

    Mixing these two things just cause you hate meta will get us nowhere. Their data collection of non-users is straight up illegal, but the pay with money or data model is something that especially news sites have been using for a long time now.




  • If there is any benefit to it depends on how discord sells your data.

    The baseline assumption is that they just collect and sell everything as is, considering how shitty their privacy policy is and the general track record of corps following gdpr guidelins. With that barely anything changes.

    If we belive the claims in their policies, then things get a lot better. Only aggregated and anonymized information is shared for marketing. Apart from that only their direct partners get more personalised information. Sadly, Google will probably get a lot of it since they are one of Discords cloud service providers but it should still be less then them collecting it themselves.

    Now if we also assume they are following all GDPR laws, than even Google should only get very restricted information about you needed for their services.

    What they really do with your data is anyones guess. I assume its somewhere between 1 and 2, but there is no proof I know of. The only benefit I really see is that it’s a lot easier to just block the one Discord API instead of 500 individual brokers.


  • “Hardmode” is just a fancy name for blocking all 3rd party scripts, which there aren’t even any to block here in the first place. What does happen is that two of the three Discord domains get flagged and blocked:

    One is Discord.gg which is the Websocket to get and sent events, so it’s needed for functionality.

    The other is Discordapp.net which is pretty much their media server.

    If you block all 3rd party scripts, frames and connections, then yes, your number of blocked items will shoot up into the hundreds. But if you knew what you are doing and just took a look at what was actually blocked, you would realise that it all was just requests for media and profile pictures. Even with fully enabled hardmode, there wasn’t a single request from a 3rd party advertiser or data broker, not even Google.

    Your arrogance for using hardmode is completely unfounded if you don’t even know what it really is blocking. All you are doing is looking at a number go up and are patting yourself on the back for it.


  • I’m not really sure what you did, but it certainly wasn’t just opening discord.

    I just tried it and there isn’t a single third party script in the browser version according to Ublock and noscript, there are only three scripts activ in total, all from different Discord subdomains. Maybe a few more if there are media links in the chat.

    If you look through the blocked connection requests they are also all made from the same source, namely the Discord science API, their internal data collector.

    The Discord homepage has a Google integration and a few embedded YouTube videos, but it’s hard to find a website that doesn’t have some form of Google scripts.

    Heck I don’t even want to defend Discord here, but ia call bullshit on your story.