My last expirence with XMPP is very dated, my old groups in EvE online used it and it was perfect for its role as a sort of internet pager to summon the horde of nerds. Im aware there are many new related projects, discounting it seems a bit premature now, if you have any recomendations I would love to read their docs.

My concern is that I would have to pitch what ever project we landed on to a semi-technical group of gamers with a handful of admins to run things. (Trying to avoid a platform that gen-z would complain about, and they already roll their eyes at me when I mention spaceships and spreadsheets).

You would think they could add an induction charger and actually make it “magic”-ly charge.

They used to be contained, every village has their idiot. Now that the internet is the global village, all the formerly isolated idiots have a place to chat.

Alpha Centauri is actually 13.6 feet from me, Ive got an old sid meyrs disk somehwere in the box of old tech stuff. Great game, used the same engine as Civ 2, think its on GOG these days.

My head-cannon from the lawyers going something like this.

“Thank you Mr. Musk for the lawsuit, we had a lot of fun reading it. Especially the parts you drew (I liked the blue dinosauar). Before we begin, we would like to let you know the legal fees for this case are coming directly from the portion of the advertising budget we allocated to the website formerly known as Twitter”

Probably more entertaining than the actual cases.

Its an old meme sir, but it checks out.

For W10 you can still do offline installs with the media creation tool and telling it you dont have an internet connection, for W11 even enterprise users are all tied into autopilot, Intune MDM, and/or a microsoft account. I do not believe there is a method to install W11 without an internet connection and account. If there some some way to get the install tools to do that, I dont know what it is, and I do IT for a job…

Honestly, making the switch to linux full time is not that bad. Every tool, utility and program other than the most niche propriatary applications have a FOSS variant, and it is starting to sound like a bad relationship when people wait for MS to make a policy, change or product that isnt comedicly evil…

Just break up… If you need to talk at the hivemind of the internet for advice, we got ya.

Idiocracy is the most unrealistic sci-fi/apocolyptic film ever made. President Comacho finds the most qualified person to help with a crisis, asks them for advice and then doesnt take credit for it. Noone put in a position of power would ever do that.

Come on over, the water is fine. I switched to Pop_OS a few months back for the gaming rig and Proton+Steam works almost flawlessly. Older titles sometimes have hiccups, but so far ive only been blocked on one title.

Not worried about that, I self-host everything, its that Google domains were cheap, quiet, and handled the routing I needed, now… I dont know what to expect.

MS being sued for packaging something with windows? Haven’t we seen this before?

I dont know how to feel about this…

My domain got transfered to them from Google domains shutting down and now its being brought under a private equity umbrella… Something fucky.

This is my expirence with LLMs, I have gotten it to write me code that can at best be used as a scaffold. I personally do not find much use for them as you functionally have to proofread everything they do. All it does change the work load from a creative process to a review process.

You used the right tool for the job, saved you from hours of work. General AI is still a very long ways off and people expecting the current models to behave like one are foolish.

Are they useless? For writing code, no. Most other tasks yes, or worse as they will be confiently wrong about what you ask them.

12345? Thats amazing, I have the same combination on my luggage!

Thats fair, I was worried about my discontinued corsiar stuff but was suprised to find that the support was even better than the old driver and managment app I had on my old OS.

I made the switch from W10 to Pop_OS for my gaming rig about 2 months ago. Beyond some hiccups with the experimental branch of proton and just getting used to the new UI its been great. Come on in, they water is fine.

Oh, that one was a blast! I need to get my nerd herd to revisit it… Although all we did was play liars dice while the ship was on fire.

If its anything like the private sector its a mostly a liability thing. If something is wrong with the program, you can sue the vendor. With open source… Thats a lot harder to do. Large groups wont use the thing if you cant put the blame on someone else when it breaks.

That is the tricky part. If you run a public VPN and a governement comes to you and says “give us all you have on user X were investigating them” you sorta have to comply and you cant go telling people that you did that either.

A few of these services will have a line on their website along the lines of “we have never provided data to any governemnt” and when they get told to cough it up they remove the line. Protons data canary has been dead for a long time, and Im not sure if other VPNs even bothered to add something like that.

As for the price tag, I’m paying exactly for that privacy (and also their mail service, de-googling yourself is hard). If I needed a less private VPN I would host one myself.