I’ve got news for you, mate. You might be a bot. Have you visited your neighbourhood robotologist to get a diagnosis?

I am an active World of Tanks player and Russia did not seize the World of Tanks publisher which is Wargaming. World of Tanks has a bunch of servers: EU, NA, ASIA, and RU. Each server is independent of the other, so if you play on EU, you don’t meet accounts made on NA, for example.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Wargaming decided to leave Russia, giving players who were on that server a chance to migrate their accounts to European servers. Lesta took over the Russian servers, and for all practical purposes, develop the Russian version of World of Tanks independently. Wargaming still is the developer of the other servers. Neither have anything to do with each other anymore.

But I do agree with the overall point of your post. Please look up who owns and has stakes in the publishers of the games you are interested in, folks.

I have to agree.

Dunno mate, seems like a dragon to me.

How do you play a different game every day? Don’t you have a campaign in one game that extends over multiple days? I could never juggle games the way you do.

But kudos to you, and congratulations on 400 days! I always upvote your posts whenever I see them in my feed.

TIL Jazz Jackrabbit was made by Epic! I thought the only game by Epic I had played was Unreal Tournament. I have fond memories of spending hours in both those games. Didn’t play Jazz Jackrabbit 2 as much, but I remember I liked the soundtrack.

I use Codeberg.

Edit: fixed the link.

Assimil is a great way to throw yourself into the language. Each lesson is in the form of a conversation with audio and the pdf has the text along with the translation.

Listen to the lesson without reading the text first. This gets you used to the sound of the language. Then read the text, then text with audio, and finally read the translation along with whatever notes on grammar (don’t focus too much on the grammar aspects when you are first starting out), neither on spellings. Later on you’ll be asked to go back to earlier lessons and reproduce the text. The first phase is to internalise the language. You can read the recommended Assimil way of learning and adapt the steps to something that suits you.

Assimil works well along with Language Transfer for me. Assimil is more immersive while Language Transfer is more explanatory.

I find that music is also a great way for me to learn new words. Once I listen enough times to a song I like, I start humming along, maybe repeat a word or two. The important thing is to not stress yourself out trying to sing along to everything. Maybe there is a catchy chorus or bridge section that is memorable. That is good enough to form associations with words. In this, I find pop songs are a better genre because they are catchy.

Something else I do is have a notebook where the only rule I have for myself is: no using my native language. I try to explain new words to myself using a sketch or whatever basic words I have already learnt. Don’t worry if you can’t draw well, neither can I. But I can draw something that looks like a spoon or a hill. Then I label them, and bam I’ve already learnt two new words. To build on that, I can draw a stick figure on the hill - this has taught me the verb climbing. You get the general idea. Just don’t stress yourself out trying to journal every new word you come across. Be creative and you’ll have fun.

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DivestOS has ceased maintaining Mull if I remember correctly. I use Ironfox on Android now.

I’d pay for Youtube if Google would guarantee to not track me. I donate to open source projects that I use, rotating every month whom I choose to donate to. I even donated to Manjaro recently even though I don’t use it any more, but it was something I had used in the past and I was poor and couldn’t donate them then. But I refuse to feel any guilt for watching Youtube for free.

I decided to use my phone to read after my Kindle broke. I use KOReader. I would like to not support proprietary products as much as I can, just my personal philosophy since the last 7-8 years. So far I can’t complain about my setup, and there is one less device to lug around. I do miss an e-ink display sometimes though.

I do this too. I do not like anything on my Desktop, but I download files to there, which forces me to deal with them. Interestingly enough, my Downloads directory is a barren wasteland.

I’ve been using KOReader on my phone now, ever since my Kindle one day decided to be unrecognisable on my computer. Couldn’t find a solution to fix it so it became a glorified paperweight.

The screen real estate is slightly degraded, but fuck if I give Amazon any more of my money. Besides, I get to store epubs as epubs instead of converting to that god awful mobi format.

I switched to Pipepipe from Newpipe because I wasn’t sure Newpipe was being maintained. Pipepipe has SponsorBlock.

The reason they are blackboxes is because they are function approximators with billions of parameters. Theory has not caught up with practical results. This is why you tune hyperparameters (learning rate, number of layers, number of neurons ina layer, etc.) and have multiple iterations of training to get an approximation of the distribution of the inputs. Training is also sensitive to the order of inputs to the network. A network trained on the same training set but in a different order might converge to an entirely different function. This is why you train on the same inputs in random order over multiple episodes to hopefully average out such variations. They are blackboxes simply because you can’t yet prove theoretically the function it has approximated or converged to given the input.

Most of the Paradox games support Linux natively. I play Europa Universalis 4, Stellaris, Crusader Kings 2 (haven’t bought 3 yet but it has native support), Hearts of Iron 4. Victoria 2 doesn’t have native support and I didn’t get Vic 3 but it is supported. Rimworld is native, so is Factorio.

Have a look at what you want to play on protondb.com and figure out if gaming on Linux works for you. Baldur’s Gate 3 has a gold rating (gold being one level lower than platinum - the best rating for non-native games) which for all practical purposes should work.

EDIT: I recommend installing Proton Glorious Eggroll in addition to the native Proton on Steam if you can’t get a game running with the native Proton despite protondb reports saying the game works. The installation is fairly straightforward, just read and follow the installation instructions on the page.

That is the fundamental problem with email as a protocol, yes?

Zero knowledge inbox, externally audited code, a company actually caring for user privacy definitely is a win for me when the alternative is Google hoovering up your data. Is this what you meant by saying it is the next best thing?

How much more private than end to end encryption do you want? Unless you mean something else by private.

I play World of Tanks which has frequent battle passes. I used to try and grind earlier but then came a moment where I said fuck it, this feels like work and not fun. So now I just treat the base game as what I get. Any other reward is just a bonus. This change in mindset has worked quite well for me.