Yeah, it’s definitely faster, but I’m not sure it’s going to make too much of a difference for a Minecraft server.
With setting it up being a bit annoying by hand, I’d still rank the router option higher even if it’s a worse VPN. Otherwise you risk ending up in that yak shaving situation where you’re fighting with routing tables and DNS when you wanted a Minecraft server.
Oh for sure. What I meant was “check router for a built in VPN and use it if it has one, otherwise use wireguard because it’s the easiest”.
The specific VPN doesn’t really matter so much. The built-in one would be the easiest, so checking for a solution that took a few clicks is worth it. :)
I would use something like wireguard, or another VPN service you can host yourself if your router supports it natively.
From the looks of it Minecraft servers seem to have dogshit authentication, so using some form of private network setup is going to be your best move.
You occasionally run into some disagreeable but unobjectionable “traditional” conservative opinions, usually around economics and the governments role in it, but trump shit isn’t that. We can be friends if you think a market solution is viable or better than an entitlement program. We can’t be friends if you think a significant portion of your fellow citizens are vermin or that we should just let terrible problems continue or get worse.
The window has just shifted so far that literal objective depictions of reality are described as “left”.
I think concerns about China in specific are overblown.
That being said, what we’ve learned about the topic from US tracking programs (slight chuckle at China having scope or abilities beyond anyone else in that regard) is that all information can be fed into what is essentially a statistical model of interests, behaviors, expressed opinions, and contacts.
From that, you can determine a few things that are specifically “useful”.
The first useful thing is the ability to tell if someone’s behavior has changed in an unexpected way. If someone starts talking to someone new via text message and they “shouldn’t” know each other (no common acquaintances, never at the same place at the same time, no shared interests) you have an anomaly that can be processed further.
The next useful thing is once you have this model of expected behavior you can start modeling stuff like “A talked to B, B to C and then C changed behavior. A talked to D and D talked to E, and E changed behavior”, and more or less direct chains.
This effectively tells you that A is influencing the behaviors of C and D. By tracking how influence (and money and stuff) flows through a network of people, you can extrapolate things like leadership, communication pathways, and material support pipelines. If you’re the US, you can then send a seal team to shoot someone.
If you’re, supposedly, anyone doing this you can more selectively target people for influence based on the reach that it’ll have, use your models to target them better, and generally improve the quality of your attempted influence.
I personally have my doubts it’s being used that way because it’s just as effective and far cheaper to hire a public opinion research group to pay a significant sample of people $5 to figure out how to make better propaganda, and then like 75¢ each to get Facebook to target the right people.
It’s really only valuable if you eventually care about an individual. Most unfortunate privacy violations are aggregates.
Even if it’s not directly actionable or a threat, you should still be wary about letting your browsing habits leak because the information can much more plausibly be used for phishing purposes.
If you just bought some clown outfits and get an email about your clown plants being held at customs you’re a lot more likely to click to figure out what’s going on.
As mentioned in a handful of other comments, it’s all about choices. Rice cakes are usually all carbs, low fiber, but they’re also close to puffed nothing.
So if you know that you’re gonna snack despite doing everything else right, choosing salted rice cakes over chips is a good choice, and if a snack option keeps you from feeling miserable while loosing weight, you’re more likely to stick with it and get to your goals.
Maybe not as fast as if you hadn’t snacked at all, but an attainable goal is better.
It’s calorie in/out in the thermodynamics sense, but humans are far too complicated to meaningfully model as a thermodynamic system.
Just doing calorie in/out dieting really doesn’t work for most people. That’s why you need to combine it with behavioral changes, strategies to change habits and attitudes towards food, which usually also involves changing what you eat and when so the downsides of eating less are less bothersome.
For me it’s all about the list. I’m opposed to spending money in general, but I also enjoy, and am pretty good at, cooking.
If I don’t have a good list, my weakness is to start designing meals based on random ingredients I see at the store, and then I buy the stuff, go home and cook the food, and enjoy too much of it. Beyond eating too much of it, it’s just tricky to design a good dish that’s tasty and also not silly unhealthy while standing in the grocery store.
Took a bit to learn to make a note of the idea in my phone, and then design it at home. Then it can go on the list.
Yup, I would definitely agree more with what you’re saying here than what I understood from above.
It definitely takes willpower to lose weight, and you definitely need to learn to identify why you’re eating and break those habits you don’t want, which also takes willpower.
I would characterize boredom/stress/comfort eating differently than hunger, since there’s the distinction between “want to eat” and “feel hungry”.
Whatever your reason is for wanting to eat, you need to handle it. If it’s boredom, you can use willpower to push through chips being more interesting than the show you’re watching, ideally by doing something else.
If you want to eat because you’re hungry, there isn’t a way to handle that beyond eating. So the smart move is to make choices about what and how you eat so that feeling stays away longer, which goes a long way towards helping to break the habit of feeling like you’re “supposed” to eat more often than you need to.
I think you’re initial comment came across much stronger than I see it is now, and we’re actually very close in terms opinion. :)
Like the other commenter said, it’s about the calorie density, not the calories.
An apple makes you satisfied longer than an equivalent number of calories of Oreos, so if you get to snack as much as you want on either, you’ll eat fewer calories of apple than of Oreo over a given timeframe.
You can over eat either of them, it’s just easier with one than the other.
Similarly, something like a steak can fill you up a lot, for a very long time, but has enough calories in it that it’s still better to not eat for every meal.
Except, and this is what I think they were saying, your body is wired to demand food even if it doesn’t strictly need it. You can’t win that battle long term.
Instead you work with your dumb meat sack and eat healthy foods that keep you from feeling hungry for a longer time.
If your diet strategy involves almost everyone who tries it failing, and those who succeed almost always have their progress backslide in a few years, then maybe the problem is with the strategy rather than an intrinsic character flaw in the people trying it.
Precisely. And to be entirely clear: it will always take willpower and motivation to lose weight. Your body is thought to have a sort of target weight that it wants you to be at all else being equal. If it were effortless to maintain a healthy weight, it would be because that’s where your body was pushing you to be.
The key is not to be stronger than your body, but to work with it. Use your finite supply of willpower on things like “making a healthy shopping list and not deviating from it”.
Instead of insisting you need to “not be lazy” and always cook a healthy meal at home, be realistic and accept that sometimes you’ll be tired and have a lazy dinner option that’s a better choice than pizza.
Buy apples instead of Oreos, so that when you feel hungry between meals it isn’t a choice between feeling hungry and eating a sleeve of Oreos, but just eating an apple. You’ll feel more full after the apple than after 20 times more calories in Oreos. If you choose to be hungry, you’ll be aware of being hungry and food in general until you eat, which will likely either make you fail hard, or eat more at the next meal because food is more appealing when you’re hungry.
It can also take a lot of motivation to work through which desires to eat are hunger, which are boredom and which are, of all things, thirst. Eating is a source of dopamine, and so if you’re bored “food” is an easy source of entertainment (your body is so dumb that just chewing is often enough for it, hence “gum” is pleasant). Sometimes your body asks for sugar when what it needs is water.
“You” don’t control what “you” want, you just get to figure out how to get it. A deeper, vastly stupider, part just shouts vague demands you get to act on. “WATER. FOOD. <GENDER> SEX. SLEEP. SCARED. BORED.” it doesn’t stop shouting if you ignore it. So use your willpower to give it what it wants in the healthier but more difficult way, and to make doing so a habit that it won’t veto.
And that’s before you get to things that need a medical intervention in addition to behavioral.
If your pancreas or hypothalamus have decided to be shits, there’s absolutely no amount of willpower that can regulate things.
And people should just “choose to be happy” too, right?
Learn how biology works. Willpower helps you execute a a desire even when it’s uncomfortable. Your hormonal systems control what you desire in the first place. If you’re just trying to ignore your body, it will eventually inform you that you no longer care about weight loss.
Willpower based diets and weigh loss strategies are mostly driven by people who sell them who take advantage of the “intuitive” nature of what boils down to “don’t eat even if you’re hungry”.
If you do lose some weight, which you likely will at first, it’s because the diet works. If you don’t or you fall out of adherence, it’s because you’re not good enough.
That’s why essentially all research on the topic says you should use your willpower to change what you eat and your activity level, and let those drive the weight loss.
It’s easier and more effective to use your willpower to make positive choices than it is to enforce restrictions on yourself.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10015774/
Next time you need to get more done, just try sleeping less and you’ll have a whole six or seven more hours a day to work.
You definitely won’t spend your time being distracted by how tired your are, or spending more time thinking about sleep than if you had spent less effort and willpower on making a schedule that made better time management choices.
That’s a more complicated topic. Not everyone’s endocrine system is wired the same way, and you can’t always just willpower your way through it.
Insistence that willpower is sufficient for weight regulation is a big cause of people going on diet after diet that just doesn’t work. They’re fighting against the system that has a disproportionate influence on what you want in the first place, and if you push it too far you find yourself not giving a shit about your diet, and then being filled with a slew of complex feelings coming from your “lack of self control”.
It’s better to direct that energy towards getting your diet compositionally right than trying to be okay just being hungry.
You can’t get your body to stop insisting it needs food, but you can get it to insist less often. You can teach it that it doesn’t need “SUGAR”, it needs water and maybe an apple or banana. You can give it a little solid protein between meals to keep it from asking for a continuous stream of carbs.
You can learn to identify the difference between eating because you’re bored or want a little dopamine, and eating because you’re hungry. The first one is your brain and you can willpower through it to eventually unlearn the habit.
You can choose to make good choices at the store instead of failing to make them in the kitchen.
Willpower is critical, but it’s important to know what you can or cannot actually solve with it and work within that framework.
You’re in control of your body, but that doesn’t mean that you need to pick the harder path.
And, for some people, their endocrine system is a lot more forgiving. Those usually aren’t the people who have a lot of trouble loosing or keeping off weight because they try to just “eat less” and it works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiety_value
It’s not just fruits and vegetables, but getting the right components.
A high sugar low fiber fruit won’t do as much as a higher fiber fruit, so apple > blackberry, for example.
You can also take advantage of your bodies insatiable love for protein and make that a key part of the meal as well, and it’ll signal that it’s full sooner and for longer.
Food that physically takes longer to eat also help because you can eat faster than you can “realize” you’re full.
A trick of mine, that I don’t know if there’s any general basis for it but it helps me, is to not take a plate with as much food as I think I want, but to instead take a plate with about half that. That way I get to feel like I’m having two servings, and the gap between finishing the first and starting the second usually means that the second is less than the first.
Well, federal law prevents it period. It’s only an executive policy of making that avenue of enforcement a lower priority that keeps it from being a “thing”.
Under presidents who have had more of an interest in curtailing it, it’s been upheld that regardless of state law the federal prohibition takes precedence.
So if the feds wanted to mess with it, they wouldn’t be waiting for it to cross state lines, they’d just enforce the law as written.
Not sure about Ohio, but I believe they often don’t let medical marijuana and recreational switch due to requirements that boil down to a need to limit and document the number of medical plants cultivated.
It’s not explicitly forbidden, just not able to be transferred in that way between inventory systems due to regulatory requirements.
Kinda like how hand sanitizer is just vodka with a gelling agent in it, but during the hand sanitizer shortage there needed to be emergency orders to let distilleries make hand sanitizer. Same substance, same or higher standards, but different licensing and regulatory frameworks and different licensing and regulatory agencies.
In a few years once the various agencies have gotten in the swing of things they’ll probably make some updates to simplify the laws.
Until then, you’ll probably see occasional supply issues with recreational while there’s plenty of medical.
Yup, that would indicate that likely a bot is trying to guess it’s way in.
You are still safe.
The only weird thing here is that Microsoft lets such things bother you instead of guessing that you didn’t teleport to Brazil and instead putting a little extra burden on the Brazil end before sending you an email.
If you’re still feeling worried, the biggest thing you can do is enable two-factor auth (which you should do anyway), or even better: enable something like passkeys which are very secure and also easier than username/password.
Two-factor/password manager is the “remember to brush and floss” of the security industry, so… Please do those things. :)
It is actually safe to ignore them. It means either someone has an email address similar to yours, or a bot of some sort has you email address and only your email address.
Essentially, someone or something goes to the login screen, enters your login, and says “I don’t have the password, let me in!”.
Sending a code to your email like this is the first step in letting someone in without the password, or more specifically to having them reset it.
Since the email is to check “did you ask for this?”, doing nothing tells them that you did not.
If you want some extra peace of mind: https://account.live.com/Activity should show you any recent login activity which you can use to confirm that no one has gotten in.
Also, use two factor, a password manager, and keep your recovery codes somewhere safe. The usual security person mantra. :)
I have never felt so old.
Name, address, and phone number of the account holder used to be published in books that got sent to everyone in the city and also just left lying in boxes that had phones in them if you needed to make a call while you weren’t home, because your phone used to be tied to a physical location.
You also used to have to pay extra to make calls to places far away because it used more phone circuits. And by “far away” I mean roughly 50 miles.
It’s not the biggest thing in the world, privacy wise, since a surprising amount of information is considered public.
If you know an address, it’s pretty much trivial to find the owners name, basic layout of the house, home value, previous owners, utility bill information, tax payments, and so on. I looked up my information and was able to pretty easily get the records for my house, showing I pay my bills on time, when I got my air conditioner replaced and who the contractor who did it was.
As an example, here’s the property record for a parking structure owned by the state of Michigan. I chose a public building accessible by anyone and owned by a government to avoid randomly doxing someone, but it’s really as easy as searching for public records for some county or city and you’ll find something pretty fast.