It’s got your number.

Pirate keys for sure. Not using one is just asking for a stranger to grab your booty.

Just built my first fully dedicated Linux machine. Still keeping my old Windows desktop around purely because I play League of Legends and they use a kernel level anticheat, so it won’t run on VM.

Fun fact, ever since Riot made it mandatory to install their rootkit if you want to play their games, every time I try to eject a flash drive, it says it can’t eject because it’s in use - even if I just plugged it in. And that’s super comforting.

I went to a small concert while on a road trip a couple months ago and the artists had CDs for sale. I figured cool, I’ll have some music to listen to if I hit no cell service areas. But it turned out that my CD changer in my car hadn’t been used in so long that the motor wasn’t strong enough to ingest the CD. I was sad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hIZfvvQTLo

I used to work for a company that did various kinds of biometric recognition. I unfortunately was paraded past these cameras many times for testing purposes, so my face was compromised many moons ago.

We had two kinds of products we installed in airports. When looking at large crowds most airports wanted cameras that would monitor the flow of traffic, determining if there were any bottlenecks causing people to arrive at their gate (or baggage claim) after their luggage.

The other product was facial recognition for identification purposes. These are the machines you have to stand right next to. There are various legal reasons airports did not want to use any crowd-level cameras for identification. They hadn’t obtained consent, but also, the low resolution per face would lead to many more false positives. It was also too costly.

But we did have high def cameras installed in strategic locations at large music halls. These private companies were less concerned with privacy and more concerned with keeping banned individuals out of their property. In those cases, we registered faces of people who were kicked out for various reasons and ignored all other faces.

My point I guess is twofold: first, you might not be facially tracked in as many places as you think you are. Second, eventually you will be and there’s not a whole lot we can do to stop it. For many years, Target has identified people with their payment card, used facial recognition to detect when they return to the store, and used crowd tracking to see where in the store you go (and sometimes they have even changed ad displays based on the demographics of people standing nearby).

Mostly, you will be identified and tracked when there is financial incentive to do so.

Makes sense. Thanks for the info!

I finally got fed up with my Windows machine and upon seeing symptoms of motherboard failure, I’ve ordered all the parts for a new rig and intend on installing Linux as my primary OS.

Haven’t decided on a distro yet. I’m a DevOps engineer with a few passion projects, so I plan on setting up a couple of kubernetes clusters where I can play. I do all the usual things (word processing, gaming, web browsing, multimedia, etc), plus some AI stuff (stable diffusion, local LLMs, OpenCV). Ideally don’t want to have to fuss with drivers too much, but I don’t mind getting my hands dirty every now and then.

Is Chimera the kind of distro I should be looking at, or should I pick something else for my first go at full-time Linux?

When I first started playing Minecraft, I didn’t even know what the bed did. Every time I died, I came back at spawn. By the time I learned about beds, I was used to playing that way, which gave dying more consequence. Phantoms broke that play style so that’s why I’m sad. I guess I could just make my bed always obstructed.

I’d much rather have to worry about whether I’ve slept/reset spawn recently on the rare occasion that I go to the end than for it to always be on my mind when doing stuff in the overworld. Just personal preference.

I don’t care how long it takes as long as when it happens, they make it so phantoms only spawn in the end (I know it won’t happen please don’t squash my dreams)

Oh whale…

I’ve never been put under, but I just assumed OP meant that they would say something right before they started counting, not after.

“I want my last words to be funny, so try not to laugh.”

Entomologist

I’d call it a success, in that as I was scrolling, before I saw the title, I thought, “Is that meant to be Danny Pudi?”

One thing that they are confirmed to do is when someone you interact with a lot searches for something, that person may be interpreted as a family member and results from their searches may show up in your ads. Devious af.

You are not ready for the credenza rules.

I imagine with inflation causing an increased frequency of relabeling and relabeling costs causing an increased rate of inflation, it’s only a matter of time before I become too lazy to finish this joke.