I really wouldn’t write off the Shield completely. It’s a few years old, but it works really well. My TVs are all disconnected from my network, and each has a Shield attached. The Shield can stream 4k HDR from Jellyfin, play ad-free YouTube with SmartTubeNext, and handles remote game streaming at 4k/60 with Sunshine/Moonlight. It’s really a versatile little box.

It really depends on how far back you want to look.

If the US was to suddenly stop projecting its interests internationally, then as others have mentioned, then likely the world work become somewhat more socialized. European countries would probably step up and try to keep China in check, but without the US contributing to these efforts, it would cause a significant strain on their military resources.

If the US was to take an isolationist policy 100 years ago, then there is a good chance that WW2 would have been won by the Axis. The Allied forces likely would have put up a good fight, but I’m not sure they would have emerged victorious against the combined Axis forces. The war in the Pacific would have raged on much longer, and without nuclear weapons, there would have been an extreme loss of life invading Japan. At the very least, WW2 would have lasted much much longer than it did. Depending on the outcome, plenty of countries might currently be speaking German and debating if they should tear down 80-year-old statues of Hitler.

Personally, I’d be happy with a web browser that doesn’t make me jump through hoops to access a HTTPS site with certificate errors on a local IP address.

I don’t care if 192.168.1.1 is using a self-signed certificate. I just want to configure my fucking router.

Sounds like a solid plan. I’m glad I could help.

I understand what you’re saying. As far as using your school account to sign in to Microsoft Office, the fact that you use a school account should not make a difference in terms of privacy. If you’re using Outlook and Teams for school, just don’t use them for personal things, and you should be fine. If you’re using the web versions through a web browser, then you have nothing at all to worry about. If you actually install the apps, you still likely have nothing to worry about, although I would make sure they’re at least signed out and closed when you’re not using them. You don’t want to accidentally send a message to your school’s Teams group when you’re drunk and watching YouTube videos at 3am.

As far as “enrolling in your school’s environment,” I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean by that. I know that some companies will install corporate nanny-ware on systems that they issue out to their employees (you’ve probably heard about CrowdStrike), but if you’re using a personal laptop for school, that’s not going to happen unless you hand it over to the school’s IT department and say “please fuck up my computer.”

Most likely the “cloud” file you see in your documents is a Microsoft OneDrive account that comes included with your school’s Office subscription. You can use it as a backup for schoolwork, ignore it completely, or just uninstall OneDrive. I like keeping my important stuff on local storage, but if you want a place to back up a project, go ahead and use it. Maybe don’t copy your porn stash over to your OneDrive account.

I am a strong advocate for keeping things separate on your computer. Not necessarily from a privacy standpoint, but more so just to keep everything tidy and easy to manage. If I was just using Teams and Outlook, maybe logging into an online portal, I’d probably just do exactly that without a second thought. If you find that you’re installing a lot of different applications for your studies, like I mentioned before, you might consider setting up a VM. A VM (Virtual Machine) essentially acts as a second computer within your own. You would install a hypervisor (I’d recommend VirtualBox for you), and inside the hypervisor, you can create separate “virtual” computers. You install your operating system, boot up the virtual machine, and use it just like you would a whole separate PC. When you’re done, you shut it down, and when you no longer need it, just delete the VM, and your PC isn’t cluttered with a bunch of stuff you don’t need. The “hard drive” for your VM lives in a single file, and once that file is deleted, it’s as if your virtual machine never existed. One way to think of it is like building a house inside a room in your own house. You still have a bedroom, a kitchen, bathrooms, and a living room. Only in this “virtual” house, you can paint the walls, throw parties, trash the carpet, invite hobos to live on your couch, whatever you want. When the house gets too trashed to live in any more, you just hit “delete” and it disappears; the actual house you live in is still in pristine condition.

So just as a summary, my opinion is just use your computer normally. Log into whatever school resources you need and don’t worry. If you need to install a whole bunch of school-related stuff that you don’t want cluttering up your PC, set up a VM.

It’s probably also worth noting that your school almost certainly isn’t trying to damage your computer or catch you doing something you want to keep private. They’re providing resources (a free Office subscription, for example) that they think might help facilitate your studies. You can use those resources, or not, but your computer is still your personal property, and your school isn’t trying to infringe on that.

You may need to elaborate a bit more on what your are trying to achieve; it looks like your post is missing a bit of backstory. It sounds like your concern is keeping your personal business and school activities separate, though.

• Switching away from Google is overall a good thing for privacy, but if your goal is privacy from your school, not from Google itself, it makes no difference who you want to use for email.
• Creating an additional account on your PC is not detrimental to privacy; in fact, some might argue that having a separate account for separate tasks is actually a good thing. I have multiple accounts on my servers, depending on what/who needs to log in. It doesn’t hurt to do the same on a desktop PC or laptop.
• Simply accessing school resources on your PC isn’t going to send the school your personal information, browser history, pirated movies, whatever. Clear your browser cookies between sessions if you’re concerned. Better yet, just set your browser to automatically clear cookies when you close the window, and make sure you exit the browser when you’re done with school work.
• Do you really need to use your school e-mail for anything other than school? I have a work email, but I only use it for things that are directly related to my job.

What you’re saying doesn’t really make a lot of sense. A lot of people here are probably happy to help you out, but you’ll need to be a bit more clear on what your goal is. I get the impression that you’re concerned about your school having some kind of privileged access to your computer because you check your school email and work on school assignments using personal computing resources. That’s not something you need to worry about; it’s really not how technology works. Logging into your school’s online portal doesn’t give them access to your files any more than buying something on Amazon.com lets Jeff Bezos browse your system.

If you’re really, REALLY concerned about privacy, just set up a VM using VirtualBox (it’s free and easy) for school stuff and continue to use your computer as you would normally. If you’re already comfortable re-installing Windows, then you absolutely will be able to set up a simple Windows VM. To be clear, I wouldn’t consider this necessary, but if you want to do it for peace of mind, then you have nothing to lose.

This situation becomes vastly different if you have a company or school-issued computer. In that case, then I wouldn’t use it for anything other than strictly business (or school)-related activities. Given the fact that you’re able to reformat and add/remove accounts, though, it doesn’t sound like you’re using a computer managed by an IT department.

On a side note, if your school did some how manage to gain access to your personal computer without your permission, find information that was detrimental to you, and somehow use it against you, I would ask you two things:

• What the hell kind of school are you going to?
• Do you like money? Because you and your lawyer are going to get a lot of it.

I’m old. Not old enough to need a prostate exam, but old enough to potentially have children in his target demographic. That being said, he essentially has found a winning formula for videos that amounts to “give away lots of money and make it entertaining.” I’ve watched a lot of his videos; they are entertaining and a decent way to kill 10 minutes.

I’m assuming you asked this question because of all the recent information that came to light calling him a fraud, and to be honest, it’s kind of a big deal. Part of his brand has always been “these are random people, competing or doing a challenge to win a life-changing wad of cash.” He’s made a point on multiple occasions to say that his videos are never faked. It’s not too dissimilar to any cable TV game show. The fact that these aren’t random people and are employees or actors, and that the outcomes are fixed, makes the audience feel deceived.

It’s the difference between why people watch pro wrestling vs MMA or boxing. With pro wrestling, we all know it’s a show; it’s a scripted performance, just like a movie or a play. People still watch it and enjoy it, but they know it’s no different than watching a fictional TV show or going to the theater. In MMA or boxing, you’re watching two people compete to see who’s the better fighter. It doesn’t have a predetermined outcome; you’re watching a real competition.

The problem is that he has always presented himself as being “boxing” when in reality, he’s “pro wrestling.” The people featured in his videos aren’t random subscribers trying to win money to send their kids to college or put a down payment on a house. They’re employees or paid actors who are putting on a show for our entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with mindless entertainment, but call it what it is.

TLDR: Fake videos, unsubscribed.

Apple.

I refuse to pay a premium for locked-down proprietary hardware solely because it looks more visually pleasing than an alternative that performs better.

I don’t want to buy 2 or 3 burgers to feed homeless people. I mentioned this in another comment, but the group of people who are homeless and the group of people who are addicted to meth, heroin, whatever are largely the same group, maybe with a few outliers. Why the hell would I want to buy lunch for someone who’s going to go out and rob or harass someone for $20 so they can go buy a bag of their drug of choice?

People like myself (and others in this comment section) don’t hate the homeless. We hate drug addicts who shit all over society (sometimes literally) in order to get their next fix.

Here’s an experiment you can try: The next time you see a homeless person begging for money so they can buy some food, refuse to give them money and offer to buy them food instead. They’re probably going to call you a piece of shit and if you’re lucky, they might leave you alone after that, but probably not.

People need to have sympathy for the homeless, but not for addicts. We should have social programs to house the homeless, as long as they can pass a drug test. Food banks, work-placement programs, they should all exist and be taxpayer funded, as long as those using them can pass a drug test.

It’s true that not everyone fits stereotypes, but be realistic. The vast majority of homeless people are drug addicts, alcoholics, or both. Addicts with no legal source of income are going to steal.

I don’t hate homeless people at all, and I legitimately have sympathy for someone who fell on hard times and is trying to get their life together; I do hate addicts who are willing to take advantage of hard-working people. The venn diagram between homeless and addicts is very close to being a circle.

I tend to agree, but I would set the age lower. A person can graduate high school at 18, get a 4-year degree, and still be 3 years away from “adulthood” by your definition. There are plenty of professionals in the first 3 years of their career who are contributing members of society. Shouldn’t they be able to drive to work, sign a rental contract, etc? I’ve been in my career for over 20 years, and I have always worked with young people who may be lacking experience but are still productive employees. I think you’d be cutting out a significant portion of the workforce by excluding those in early adulthood.

I was actually thinking about something similar today. We’ve already had an actor as president, then with Trump, we had a reality-TV star. Social media is the new “TV” for the younger generation, so it’s only a matter of time before we have an influencer or a YouTube creator as a candidate, right? Let’s see MrBeast go toe-to-toe with Trump.

I probably should have specified I’m using libcurl, but I did try the equivalent of what you suggested. I even tried setting a list of user agents and having it cycle through. None of them work. A lot of anti-scraping methods use much more complex schemes than just validating the user agent. In some cases, even a headless browser will be blocked.

Speaking from experience, be careful you don’t become over-zealous in your anti-scraping efforts.

I often buy parts and equipment from a particular online supplier. I also use custom inventory software to catalog my parts. In the past, I could use cURL to pull from their website, and my software would parse the website and save part specifications to my local database.

They have since enacted intense anti-scraping measures, to the point that cURL no longer works. I’ve had to resort to having the software launch Firefox to load the web page, then the software extracts the HTML from Firefox.

I doubt that their goal was to block customers from accessing data for items they purchased, but that’s exactly what they did in my case. I’ve bought thousands of dollars of product from them in the past, but this was enough of a pain in the ass to make me consider switching to a supplier with a decent API or at least a less restrictive website.

Simple rate limiting may have been a better choice.

I still enjoy the second-wave stuff from time to time, but you’re absolutely spot-on with what’s been coming out in recent years. I’m really into groups that have kept the original BM music style but embraced modern production. A few that come to mind are Faidra, Spectral Wound, Asarhaddon, and Funeral Winds; fantastic bands that play “true” BM but have good recording quality.

Like you mentioned, the big change is just how many “crossover” bands there are, and I’m all for it. You didn’t ask for suggestions, but I’m going to offer some of my favorites anyway:

• Harakiri for the Sky - One of the best post-black bands.
• Anomalie (shares members with Harakiri for the Sky) - BM plus what I can only call “tribal” elements.
• Psyclon 9 (at least their older albums) - BM plus industrial/aggrotech.
• Dawn of Ashes - See above.
• Anaal Nathrakh - BM + grind + industrial + ?
• Darkthrone (yes, THAT Darkthrone) - Blackened hard rock? I don’t know what to call their new stuff, but it’s not bad.
• Gaerea - Radio-friendly BM
• Kanonenfieber - Blackened melodic death metal? Maybe?
• Afsky - Folk-inspired BM. Seems like this is a really popular combination.
• None - DSBM, but with the exception of their filler tracks, more on the BM, less on the DS.
• Ernte - Fairly traditional BM, but with female vocals.

This might be an unpopular list, but I’m ranking games in terms of overall enjoyment.

• Red Alert 2
• Mass Effect 1 - 3
• Doom 2016
• Doom Eternal
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Starfield
• Doom (the original)

I’d like to hope that by the time Win10 is no longer supported, we have Win12 that doesn’t suck. The way things are going, though, I doubt it. I’m expecting that Win10 will be the last version of Windows I use.

I still prefer Windows over Linux for gaming and software development, but everyone has their limit. I am strongly opposed to advertisements, and when I can no longer block ads from my operating system, it’s dead to me.

I use a mixture of Linux and Windows 10 LTSC on my PCs/servers/VMs. I will be the first to admit that Windows does sometimes make sense to use. My desktop PC and my dev environment are both Windows 10.

That being said, what is the advantage in using Windows 11 over 10? As far as I can tell, it’s worse in every way. Built-in ads, a crappier UI, forced obsolescence with TPM requirements, and “feature” bloat that nobody asked for.

10 was a clear improvement over 8, but 11 just seems all-around worse.

I have the utmost respect for the ffmpeg developers; writing ASM is a skill I do not possess. I do have to wonder, though, would it be easier for cross-platform compatibility to write in C instead. I have always understood that C generally compiles almost directly to assembly with little to no abstraction overhead, and it would not require platform-specific ASM code. What is the logic in choosing ASM over C? I have no doubt there is a good reason.

COVID-19. People simply refused to do the absolute minimum to stop the spread of the virus. At least in my community, everyone was still socializing with friends and family (without a mask, of course), going out to eat, taking part in recreational activities with other people. Something as simple as “stay away from other people until we get this under control” was too hard for the American public. It certain changed my view of the people around me.