It’s probably because TLS uses your system clock to validate certificates. If your clock doesn’t match the server you’re connecting to, TLS fails and you get an “https failed/connection is insecure” error. And Windows likely uses https in the store to ensure MITM attacks can’t replace valid downloads with malicious ones.

Microsoft: “Let’s fire our QA teams. We’ll force our dev team to use AI in coding. Then we’ll have the public test it.”
Also Microsoft:

Yeah, there have been a few instances of that happening. Notably, it happened when the governor of Arkansas tried to use the national guard to bar black students from entering a (recently desegregated) white school in 1957. Eisenhower federalized the guard, and ordered them to protect the black students instead. And the governor was forced to watch as all of “his” troops (who were already on the ground and ready to work because the governor had called them in) about-faced and started following the POTUS’ orders instead of his. It backfired on the governor pretty spectacularly, because they wouldn’t have been in place to enforce the desegregation unless he had ordered them to be there in the first place.

And Walz isn’t dumb. He undoubtedly knows that story. He doesn’t want a repeat of that, where he calls in the guard, then has them turned against him.

Yeah, mods on proton get weird sometimes, especially if they require things like Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable packages/runtimes. I think ProtonTricks allows you to install those directly in the prefix, but I personally haven’t had any success with that. Every time I try something that involves stuff like that, I end up getting white screens, black screens, or just full CTDs.

Yeah, the sad reality is that there are some critical pieces of software that just outright refuse to support other OSes. Personally, I’m forced to use Macs at work because QLab is the industry standard for my line of work, and that software is only available on Mac.

I already had you tagged as “MAGA chode” for this and it always manages to prove true.

The US Military “Simple Sabotage” handbook literally says that if you can’t overtly sabotage things (like attacking supply lines, bombing factories, etc.), then you should try to covertly sabotage things by getting a job in middle management. Then just do your very best to embody the phrase “middle manglement”.

Demand unreasonable deadlines from other departments, to force them to drop what they’re doing and focus on your stuff. Fail to forward things where they need to go. Miss your own department’s deadlines, so their projects are delayed. Fire too many employees, or “encourage” them to quit. Fail to hire employees to fill vacancies. Implement tons of repetitive busywork to force employees to spend extra time on projects. Make sure vendors don’t get paid on time. Etc, etc… Basically, do everything you can to gum up the works.

Ratcheting taxes for unoccupied houses and apartment units. Allow a grace period of one year, to allow for flips. But after that, every home you own after the first is considered unoccupied if it is vacant for more than three months of the year. And taxes on vacant homes become increasingly expensive as you own more and more of them.

Like the first vacant house you own may be near a normal tax rate, the second makes both more expensive, the third makes all three super expensive, etc… And these tax penalties should get expensive fast. Like up to (or even over) 100% if you’re sitting on more than like five or six properties. Then take the proceeds of these higher taxes, and put them towards first time homebuyer assistance programs. I’d even go so far as to say that renting a single family home shouldn’t totally eliminate the tax, only reduce it. This would solve the three largest issues with the housing market right now.

First, it solves the “sitting on vacant houses to drive up the price of rent” problem. Actively force landlords to keep their apartments and houses full, driving down the price of rent. If the unit is occupied, the tax is lower. And again, even the most expensive landlords should only be able to feasibly own three or four extra properties before the taxes get prohibitively expensive, even after being mitigated by occupation.

Second, it solves the “buying a dozen houses and only selling one of them” problem. Corporations do this to be able to game the market and drive up prices on the few they do sell. But by making it prohibitively expensive to sit on vacant houses, you preemptively wreck any kinds of profits they would make by sitting on them.

Third, it would allow for more low interest loans for first time home buyers, and could even be used to offset the potential downpayment costs.

But of course, this will basically never be implemented, because the lawmakers are all bribed by the corporations that own thousands of vacant homes.

Which is a concern, but can largely be mitigated by encouraging work-from-home jobs. If people are able to reliably WFH, (and COVID proved that many jobs can be done entirely from home), then the local job market doesn’t tend to matter as much.

Yup, they estimate the 80th percentile.

Basically, civil engineers estimate the top speed that 80% of drivers will be comfortable going on the road. And that estimated number is now the speed limit. That’s also the number they use to time traffic lights for ideal flow. That means 20% will naturally feel like it’s too slow, and will naturally end up speeding unless they constantly watch their speedometer. Because the number is estimated off of comfort, and 20% of drivers naturally feel comfortable going faster… And anyone below that 80th percentile will end up causing congestion as they crawl along below the limit and cause traffic lights to stop drivers who otherwise would have had a green.

And it’s worth noting that, in many cases, very little actual math or real world data goes into that estimation. It frequently boils down to a civil engineer basically going “well other streets like this one have a speed limit of 40, so 40 will probably work for this one too…” Civil engineering does have a lot of math for traffic, (for instance, turn lane length is determined by how many vehicles they expect to use it per hour,) but speed limits are often just a best-guess situation.

Yup. The reverse proxy takes http/https requests from the WAN, and forwards them to the appropriate services on your LAN. It will also do things like automatically maintain TLS certificates, so https requests can be validated. Lastly, it can usually do some basic authentication or group access stuff. This is useful to ensure that only valid users or devices are able to reach services that otherwise don’t support authentication.

So for example, let’s say you have a service called ExampServ running on 192.168.1.50:12345. This port is not forwarded, and the service is not externally available on the WAN without the reverse proxy.

Now you also have your reverse proxy service, listening on 192.168.1.50:80 and 192.168.1.50:443… Port 80 (standard for http requests) and 443 (standard for https requests) are forwarded to it from the WAN. Your reverse proxy is designed to take requests from your various subdomains, ensure they are valid, upgrade them from http to https (if they originated as http), and then forward them to your various services.

So maybe you create a subdomain of exampserv.example.com, with an A-NAME rule to forward to your WAN IPv4 address. So any requests for that subdomain will hit ports 80 (for http) or 443 (for https) on your WAN. These http and https requests will be forwarded to your reverse proxy, because those ports are forwarded. Your reverse proxy takes these requests. It validates them (by upgrading to https if it was originally an http request, verifying that the https request isn’t malformed, that it came from a valid subdomain, prompting the user to enter a username and password if that is configured, etc.)… After validating the request, it forwards the traffic to 192.168.1.50:12345 where your ExampServ service is running.

Now your ExampServ service is available internally via the IP address, and externally via the subdomain. And as far as the ExampServ service is concerned, all of the traffic is LAN, because it’s simply communicating with the reverse proxy that is on the same network. The service’s port is not forwarded directly (which is a security risk in and of itself), it is properly gated behind an authentication wall, and the reverse proxy is ensuring that all requests are valid https requests, with a proper TLS handshake. And (most importantly for your use case), you can have multiple services running on the same device, and each one simply uses a different subdomain in your DNS and reverse proxy rules.

Yeah, Putin could release 100% verifiably true proof that Trump rapes kids every Tuesday… And nothing would change. Trump would continue raping kids every Tuesday, while republicans circle the wagons, Trump fires any investigators who try to dig into it, and maybe the democrats would write some strongly worded letters (to be read by nobody). Fox News would report that it’s all a hoax made up by the evil dems (if they reported on it at all) and Trump’s voters would believe every word of it.

Worth noting that dementia often affects fine motor control, like the ability to independently control your fingers. It usually becomes apparent when people lose the ability to dress themselves, (buttons, zippers, and buckles become hard or impossible), cook for or feed themselves, (chopping ingredients, using utensils, etc. becomes difficult), and write/type.

For real though, I’d be wearing that like a god damned badge of honor. I’d be making t-shirts that said “The President of the United States told me to f*ck off after I called him a pedo protector.” I’d get enamel pins made from the grainy footage of Trump throwing the bird, to wear on my gear. I’d have that photo printed as a vinyl sticker to keep on my water bottle. I’d be writing and/or drawing children’s books about how adults making you keep secrets from your parents is bad, and those adults should be reported. I’d be doing interviews and podcasts, where I can call him a pedo protector with the widest audience possible.

I hope that dude’s pillow is always cool, his socks are always dry, his teeth are always healthy, and his cock is sucked so hard (by a consenting adult!) that he gains an inch and a half.

Which is why I said it is taken to the extreme logical conclusion. Many denominations believe that baptism and/or repentance is enough to wash away and forgive previous sins. After all, that was Jesus’ whole thing. So why bother believing for the majority of your life, when you can simply accept God on your deathbed? No need to believe your entire life, when believing right at the end is enough.

I run all of my audiobooks at 1.25x speed as a bare minimum. If a narrator is particularly slow, sometimes I’ll even bump it up as high as 2x. Any half-decent audiobook player will have built-in speed controls.

For instance, if you’re running AudioBookShelf for self-hosting your audiobooks, Plappa (an unofficial but very well done listening app that syncs to your server) has it right there on the bottom:

On my particular color scheme it is purple, but you can change that in the settings. You can also set things like auto-pause (after {x} time, at the end of the chapter, or at the end of the next chapter), and bookmarks (which you can label) to come back to later.

Yup. Almost 0 in 2024, to over 50 in 2025. Spun up my AudioBookShelf instance in May, so that number will likely be a lot higher in 2026. Just from listening while doing chores or driving to/from work.

That’s Pascal’s Wager, taken to the logical conclusion. Pascal’s Wager is basically the idea that debating whether or not God exists is meaningless; If you simply live life as if God does exist, then there are no downsides. Just be someone who God would want in heaven, and the actual belief doesn’t really matter.

But then when you take that to a logical conclusion, it basically turns into “there’s no downside if I’m wrong, and repenting on my deathbed means all my previous sins are forgiven. So why not repent right before dying, so my previous sins are forgiven and I’m dying with a clean slate?”

Different denominations have different opinions on it. Baptists tend to take the “fire and brimstone unless you repent, but you’re all golden after repentance” stance. So they would tend to agree with this scenario. This is also why southern baptists tend to be such cunts, because they tell themselves that their actions are righteous and backed by God, because they have repented. Basically, justifying evil is easy when you change the question from “is this morally evil” to “is this backed by my god?”

Catholics used to have a very hard “baptism washes away (almost) all sins” stance, but have recently adopted a more fluid “how you act in life is just as important as what you believe” stance. So older Catholics would have likely agreed, but modern Catholics would tend to disagree.

The more liberal denominations (like United Methodists) would scoff and say that faith without works is dead.

Yup. Either eliminating a competitor, or getting ahold of some obscure patent that they don’t want to be stuck leasing indefinitely. Or they want to be the ones to lease the patent for exorbitant amounts, and they’re willing to write off a short term loss for longer term profits.

It’s worth noting that illiteracy isn’t simply a pass/fail test that depends on if you can read individual words. Literacy is largely determined by critical thinking skills and the ability to intuit things that aren’t directly stated.

For a good example, a large part of higher literacy is based on being able to see a piece of work, (a news article, video, book, song, etc.), and identify who the intended target audience is. Usually, the answer is not “me”. But I mention this specific example because people have become accustomed to laser-focused algorithms that only show content that is directly relevant to themselves. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, etc all have finely crafted algorithms that are designed to keep you engaged. And they do so by serving content that is directly aimed at you.

As algorithmic media feeds have become more common, people have literally lost the ability to identify when something is not meant for them. People used to see an irrelevant piece of media, and they would just go “oh it’s not for me” and move on. But now they tend to be surprised that they’re seeing the media, and they tend to get angry when something doesn’t directly confirm their lived experience. And they tend to take it out on the creators. We have literally seen content creators start changing the way they make their media, to avoid people getting angry when something isn’t directly relevant to themselves.

For instance, maybe I make a TikTok about the proper way to throw a football. Pretty basic stuff, right? Previously, if I left it at that, anyone who wasn’t interested in throwing a football would just move on. But now, I’d inevitably get angry comments about “but I’m in a wheelchair, what about me”, “why is this on my feed, I hate football”, “I have a torn rotator cuff, why are you excluding me” types of comments.

Now, content creators literally add disclaimers in their content, to directly state who the intended audience is. To go back to that same example, I’d probably have step 0 of the tutorial be something along the lines of “okay so this is obviously just for the people looking to check their throwing form. If you don’t like football, can’t throw a ball, or have some sort of disability that stops you from doing so, you can obviously move on.” Because if I don’t have that disclaimer somewhere near the start, I’ll inevitably get some angry comments. And those comments are being left by functionally illiterate people, who have lost (or never had) the ability to determine an intended audience.