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Cake day: March 17th, 2025

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  • Unsure why you’re getting downvoted (this is “No Stupid Questions”, after all), but I’ll give my 5 cents:

    Reason 1:
    The people is essentially the reason why a government has power. Without the people (and their support), the government governs a whole lot of nothing, and they will be forced to do labour themselves.

    Reason 2:
    Poisoning the water is not very accurate, and may lead to both the death of many whom already are supportive of the government (which will create distrust), and people only getting sick depending on the amount they drink (the dose makes the poison).

    Reason 3:
    Despite a population having a lot of dissidents, these people still work and contribute to society in some ways. It has to get pretty bad before it will be “worth it” to remove them from society.

    Reason 4:
    Even if it’s so bad that you’re looking at an open revolt against the government, poisoning the water will only really yield MAD, which is usually undesirable.

    Ultimately, it’s unlikely desirable for any government to do this, as there are better ways (for the government). However, there have been some attempts at genocide through water supplies before, so it’s not completely unheard of. Check out Project Coast.


  • Yeah, a bit of an xy problem, I’ll admit. My ultimate goal would be invisible blocking/hiding from certain expected behaviors like the ones anti-adblockers employ. I’m not sure if what I have in mind specifically exists or not, but I find it fun to tweak and experiment with these kind of things. So I don’t necessarily have a problem I’d like to solve, it’s more an ask for directions/experiences.

    I have tried Fiddler before, and it almost has the capabilities I’m looking for (it replaces an entire file; nothing granular), but it was a bit of a hassle to get working well last time I tried it, with the CA certificate, decrypting the TLS and stuff.




  • I most likely am going a bit to the obscure/convoluted solution, yes.

    My goal is to do something to the effect of uBlock Origin, but instead of just blocking/hiding, either replace with local files, or intercept req/res in order to manipulate them favorably, without being detected. I don’t know what uBlock does under the hood though, apart from its resource blocking and CSS-derived hiding.

    Example:
    Watching a video on youtube, an ad is about to get loaded, but instead of the hiding/blocking strategy uBlock uses, intercept the GET/POST, save the important flags that are uniquely served to your device that would indicate that you have successfully been served the ad, drop the rest, and then answer with what would be a valid response for “I have watched the ad in its entirety”.
    So the server basically saying “Here, I give you this page and this script with both vital and ad contents. I now expect you to provide the corresponding hash that these two files will create through a series of functions. If you don’t, I will assume you’re blocking me, and I won’t provide further contents.”, and I’ll simply respond with “Here’s your hash! *wink*”.

    Essentially, I wish to experiment with trying to be completely invisible in the blocking, by providing responses as if I have loaded and watched the ad, with all anti-adblock implementations through scripts and dynamic loading “intact” and unaware.


    You’re quite right, I should include my goal in the post - editing it in now.



  • Depends on the conditions, I’d say. If you have an area that has low oxygen and high saline concentration, one could potentially preserve large parts of the carcass. A big challenge though is the substances brought by the carcass itself, like enzymes and bacteria that are not directly exposed to the oxygen-deficient saline-abundant water, which can thrive and remain active for a long period of time. However, if this carcass sinks to incredible depths, where the pressure is really high, temperature is a constant 4 degrees, very low concentration of scavengers or thriving organisms, and potentially sinks a bit into the sediment for a long time, you’ll essentially get pickle juice fossil fuel.




  • The big one for me is grep/ripgrep. I’m a dev, so there are often times I need to search the contents of files to figure out where something obscure is mentioned. This is also possible on Windows, but as with most things on Windows, it’s slow.

    The second mention-worthy thing is, oftentimes in conjunction with grep, is piping! It’s so enjoyable for me to find the files/content, pipe it to anything (sometimes through xargs and/or tee), so that I can replace the text en-masse with sed, remove all junk files that match a certain parameter with rm, and generally automatically act upon something that I don’t have to manually look for.

    Although I’m a dev mainly on Windows, I’ve installed WSL as a compromise, and quite often find myself using its bash to perform tasks like the ones mentioned above.





  • I love the blunt title of “… for Windows 10 Exiles”, though I wonder if it will rub people the right or wrong way when reading it.

    Now, don’t get me wrong, but all the hype around the so-called “apocalyptic” October 14 feels a little overblown.

    I agree somewhat - the date itself is not that big of a deal, as it’s just a date that Microsoft has set in order to have a spesific time to keep as a reference for when they have their last support push for Windows 10:

    Windows 10 will reach the end of support on October 14, 2025. At this point technical assistance, feature updates and security updates will no longer be provided.

    This doesn’t mean that it will immediately be defunct or a serious security risk. But from this point on, the more time that passes, the higher is the likelyhood of security holes being found (and used), that will not be patched.

    Windows 11 has proven itself to have - a - lot - of - anti-features. Being forced to choose between having to deal with those, or change the entire system which you’ve grown so very used to, can be a rather difficult decision for many. KDE trying to ease the transition I think is appreciated by many who find themselves stuck in this choice. Or at least to give Linux a try.