I would love for us to not be America’s bitch one day.

Yessongs if you like that kind of thing.

I run a pivpn setup so that nothing is exposed to the internet at all. It’s just too dangerous now. It was bad back in the day, but now I literally have bots trying to join any public facing Minecraft server. It’s so many times worse now than it was a decade ago.

Most TLDs basically mean nothing because there’s nobody who enforces what they mean. .tv domains, for example, is the TLD for the country Tuvalu, but I dare you to find me a website for the Tuvalu people ending in it.

Holy shit, this is actually a pretty bad list. A lot of classics and actually good modern manga here. Unfortunate - mangadex was great while it lasted. Pirate sites are hydra, if course, but mangadex was actually usable unlike a lit of other sites.

Yep. You have to at least vaguely be engaged in the politics of the internet (not to be confused with politics on the internet) to use these smaller platforms at all.

The average social media user just doesn’t care. They want things to work from their perspective, and it doesn’t matter how much data they give up, or privacy they lose, or any other thing that might be a negative to us that engage in the internet outside of “apps”.

IMO, this is a pro and not a con of federated social media, and means that your discussions will be smarter on average. Sometimes, I feel sad that the days of free (as in freedom) internet is seemingly gone, before I remember that you just have to look a little deeper, and it’s definitely still there.

…Then stop posting on Reddit? I thought the whole point of us moving here was to get out of the control of Reddit and their shareholders/corporate overlords

Everything’s computer.

Hahaha, we’re doing this one again? Alrighty. Nintendo is really banking on a charitability for US DMCA law that hosting services in other countries may no longer have. This is going to get harder for them very quickly I think.

Nobody elected Elon little bro

Maybe you’re missing some context. This comic is about DRM. Back in the day there was a big fight between the companies and consumer advocate groups like the EFF over DRM because it’s awful for the people paying for DRM’d content.

It’s pretty easy to buy DRM-free content now for certain forms of media, esp. books and music, not so much for others. But my whole point here is that if you’re on the side of the EFF and FSF, you’re anti-DRM, which means that you’ll probably support piracy as long as DRM continues to fuck over consumers.

Then they shouldn’t be called lifetime subscriptions. This seems like a really smarmy justification of a shitty business practice.

I actually prefer the Jellyfin client to the Kodi client by a lot. Using Kodi on top just adds more unneeded complexity and reloading libraries in my experience.

Don’t do this. You will lose quality every time you re-transcode an audio file. AAC is supported by basically everything now.

Also MP3 is a pretty bad format all things considered. The most efficient format is Opus, it’s open source and transparent at 160kbps.

Bandcamp only works if the band originated there. Most labels don’t sell anything through bandcamp. If a label doesn’t release digital lossless for me to buy it’s getting downloaded on Soulseek.

Of course it’s real. This is maybe one of the least shocking beliefs from a webcomic like xkcd ever. Like 1/5 of all the comics are about hacker culture or Linux.

It’s trivial to reorganize your collection (see Strawberry Music Player if you think it’s not) but when it comes to slsk you see the files, filenames, directory structure, bitrate, and bit depth without downloading. I check all the FLAC albums I download and I haven’t seen a fake one yet. I never download lossy files because I can create a perfect transcode from lossless anyways, and I’m probably transcoding to opus which seemingly nobody else does.

You have to realize that in 2025 we’re all ripping them from Deezer or something where you always get basic tags and proper lossless. I’ve never used a private tracker and never will because slsk gives just as high quality and has less condescending pricks.

Seriously, don’t bother with torrents for music. Soulseek is way more reliable and at least someone has had any thing I’ve ever looked for in FLAC.

Are we really still the crazy ones when Microsoft wants to keep a log of screenshots of your desktop?

Use ublock origin if you aren’t already.