Companies sometimes sell their own first-party data, but not nearly as often as people think. If a company has data that other companies don’t have, a lot of the time they’ll want to keep it for themselves, since it can give them a competitive advantage over other platforms.

If Amazon knows what movies and TV shows you like, they’re going to use that data to improve ad performance on their own platforms - suggested content on Prime Video, product ads on Amazon, etc. They’re not going to give it to some other company to use.

The one major exception to that are data brokers. These are companies that only exist to sell data. These are less well known companies. They often use public data and combine it with things like supermarket loyalty data and purchase history.

For a beginner, I’d probably stick to Github initially, just because there’s so many guides and tutorials on how to use it, and their free plan is still pretty generous.

A lot of the knowledge is transferable though. If you do want to try something else, Codeberg is pretty good for open-source.

To just learn about Git, you don’t even need a host like Github or Codeberg. You can have a Git repo just on your computer, and still get a bunch of the benefits of source control - a full history of everything, separate branches and worktrees so you can have multiple incomplete changes and switch between them, etc.

Or Forgejo, which is a fork of Gitea and is what Codeberg uses. They explain their advantages over Gitea here: https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/

The tl;dr is that Forgejo is maintained by a non-profit whereas Gitea is maintained by a for-profit company, and Forgejo is completely open-source whereas Gitea is open-core with some features only available in their hosted service. Forgejo also has better testing and a bigger focus on security.

Maybe I’ll give that model a go if my current one ever dies.

I got an MX Master 3 as an upgrade, but couldn’t get used to the weird scrolling behaviour (similar to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/logitech/comments/wpp1c6/logitech_mx_master_3s_scrollwheel_is_still/), so ended up returning it and reverting to the $30 one.

Older people do this a lot. Either their full name, or “Lastname residence”

The scary thing these days is that someone needs just a few samples of your voice to be able to clone it using AI. I suspect that scammers will do that, if they’re not already doing it, then use it to scam family members. We’re going to get to a point where we can’t trust people are who they say they are.

Whoever wrote this message definitely knew what they were doing.

WAL mode makes writes a lot faster, which is sufficient for a bunch of use cases. Writers do still need to wait, but they have to wait for a shorter duration. It’s still not the right choice for write-heavy use cases, of course.

I’ve had the same cheap Logitech M705 mouse at work for over 10 years. It takes two AA batteries that last for around two years with daily use. Cost $30 when I first got it.

They do still sell it but have cheaped out a bit over the years - the scrollwheel is now plastic instead of metal and the sensors aren’t as good - but it still has that great battery life.

I don’t understand how these newer, fancier mice can’t achieve the same thing. I really hate that everything is moving towards built-in batteries. AAs are easy to instantly replace and I have a bunch of Eneloop rechargeable ones.

People that reverse engineer complex modern hardware are probably some of the best developers in the world.

Some mobile networks have spam protection that’s enabled automatically.

You could also have a “clean” number, especially if you don’t use your phone number anywhere haven’t answered a spam call before, and nobody used it before you (or the previous user was a long time ago).

Spam callers can’t robodial literally every number, so they rely on lists of phone numbers that are known to be good/active, for example if they’ve answered a spam call before, if the number has been in a data leak, etc.

I felt like a grown up once I got my paperless-ngx setup up and running.

I have a Scansnap ix1600 scanner. Everything is automated once I insert a document and click the button to scan it.

1. Scanned documents are saved to an SMB share on my home server - it’s a built-in feature on the scanner.
2. Paperless-ngx is watching that folder and grabs the files.
3. Paperless-ai uses AI to add metadata to document (title, tags, correspondent).

For documents I need to keep a physical copy of, I give each document a consecutive ASN (archive serial number) using QR code stickers. When importing the document, paperless-ngx sees the barcode and attached the correct archive number to the document.

If I need to find the physical copy, I first find it in Paperless-ngx, look at the archive number, then look in a folder where the documents are arranged by archive number. Easy.

For backups I use Borgbackup with Borgmatic, to two different storage VPSes (hosted by two different providers in two different regions).

I walked around the Stanford Dish once.

I love when old, important pieces of software are open sourced.

Modern PHP isn’t too bad though, especially with modern frameworks like Laravel. A lot of the bad parts of the language have been deprecated or removed over time.

A lot of the “PHP bad” crowd haven’t used it in 20 years.

To get started, I’d say to get a cheap block account from the Reddit Usenet deals wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/providerdeals/. A block account gives you a fixed amount of download (1TB, 2TB, whatever) that lasts indefinitely. If you use it just for music or books (for example), one block could last you a very long time. If you find yourself needing more data, you can get a monthly subscription with unlimited data.

You also need an indexer, which is how you search for content. DrunkenSlug, NZBGeek, and NZBPlanet are popular. These cost money, but sometimes they have a lifetime plan where you just pay once. Sometimes they have open registration, but other times you need to get an invite from an existing user. There’s free indexers like NZBKing, but they’re often full of junk, and lack encrypted content.

SABnzbd is the most popular downloader software. It’s free and open-source.

• Add account to SAB.
• Search for what you want on the indexer.
• Download the nzb file (points to where the files are located on Usenet) and add it to SAB to download the contents.

I think that’s it for the basics. There’s more to it - different backbones have different data so one provider might have data that a different provider is missing , you can fully automate downloads with Lidarr/Radarr/Sonarr/Readarr, you can aggregate results from multiple indexers using NZBHydra/Prowlarr - but you can figure that out as you go :)

• KaZaA, Limewire & Bearshare - P2P for the masses

There’s still a few P2P systems from that era that are still around. Soulseek is still doing very well for music, and some users on there have a bunch of things you can’t easily find anywhere else. DC++ and eMule/eDonkey2000 are still around but with much smaller networks.

One of the OG P2P file sharing methods (dating back to 1990) is still around too - IRC DCC.

Interesting - I didn’t see that. They say “You can add your own copyright as well”, so you don’t have to give up your rights to the code. They do still need to comply with the terms of the Apache license.

Their contribution agreement forces you to give up copyright to them.

The license just looks like the standard Apache license though, which doesn’t require this. With the Apache license, contributors still own the copyright to their code, but they license it to the project. Did you see a document in the repo that says something different?

if you need a POSIX interface

SSHFS isn’t POSIX compliant. It doesn’t support hard links, file locking, atomic renames, full support for changing file permissions, umasks, and probably other things.