Random Dent

On the one hand, I am opposed to AI slop.

But on the other hand, I am greatly in favour of anything that makes life even slightly more difficult for Adobe.

This is a tricky one.

I think anything that masks your IP address is good for piracy AFAIK, but I’ve had no issues torrenting with it so far. Seems to be about the same as Mullvad, performance-wise.

Ah I hadn’t heard of Picard before, I’ll take a look!

Personally I just use Nicotine+ to grab whatever I want as a .flac, then use beets to organize them.

I switched over to IVPN, they seem pretty right-on and no scandals that I know of so far.

I switched away from Mullvad because of that. I waited a bit for their response before deciding, but I found their eventual response pretty wishy-washy. Their counter-argument was:

It was a private donation from Daniel the individual. Mullvad or its parent and sister companies did not endorse and were not involved in it.

But his personal money still comes from the company, so if I continued to send Mullvad money I’d know it was still indirectly going to the Örebro party, whose leader called immigrants “parasites”, which (as an immigrant myself, albeit not to Sweden) is not acceptable to me.

Canada is like that. IIRC the maximum fine you can get for piracy is $5,000, meaning it’s pretty much not worth it for any company to come after you. If you live in Canada and use a VPN you’re pretty much golden, but I also know people here who don’t even bother. They get a letter once in a while from their ISP and they just ignore it and nothing ever happens. One of my friends called their ISP to complain and told them to stop sending letters, and they said sorry they have to but if you seed a little bit less then they won’t have to send them lol.

Yeah that would be me too. Where I live you can get a pretty nice place for $400k+, so let’s say $500k off the principal, so $4.5 million left over. If you can get, say, 5% interest on that then you’re getting $225k per year for doing absolutely nothing. Even if you can only get, say 2% interest, that’s still about $90k/year which is not extravagant but doable.

That’s always been my position, IMO - it does have some genuinely useful applications, but we’ve blown it up into this huge thing and tried to shoehorn it into everything, and it’s polarized people into these “AI in everything” and “AI in nothing” camps.

Not related in the slightest but this one always gets me: https://youtu.be/L1WAOByxzYA

I use Filen, I don’t know if they still do it but you used to be able to buy a lifetime plan for a one-time fee that was like 50-100GB or something like that, and you could stack them. So I just bought several during a Black Friday sale.

As far as I can tell there aren’t really any rules anymore if you annoy rich people enough. They just sort of come after you regardless.

Last time I checked it seemed like it wasn’t quite there yet in terms of features, but admittedly that was a few years ago so I’ll have to give it another look. Thanks for the reminder!

An open source 2D animation suite that can compete with Toon Boom Harmony. I bought an (expensive) perpetual license for Toon Boom Harmony years ago, and then they moved to a ridiculously overpriced monthly subscription model and deactivated my license, essentially ripping me off for hundreds of dollars. So ever since then I’ve wanted something to come along and put them out of business.

I’m switching for political/ideological reasons TBH. It’s a good service and it works well, but one of the company’s co-founders recently made a huge donation to the Örebro party in Sweden (as in, big enough to account for 72% of the party’s entire income for 2025.) The party’s leader, Marcus Allard, has called for mass forced remigration of immigrants, including people born in Sweden, and has referred to immigrants as “damn parasites.”

In fairness, this isn’t the political position of Mullvad the company, it’s a personal donation made by one of the founders and the CEO and others have expressed discomfort with it. But the fact still remains that if I keep giving the company money, it will keep funding the co-founder, who will (presumably) keep funding the party and I can’t in good conscience send money if I know it’s going towards something I disagree with that profoundly, even in a roundabout sort of way. I only have about 30 days left on my subscription anyway so I’m going to just let it run out and then switch to something else.

Yeah I use QBittorrent, and Mullvad for a VPN (although I’ll probably switch soon once my subscription runs out.)

For this very reason, I have my VPN set up so that if it’s off, the whole internet connection is shut off. And as a backup, my torrent app will only work through the VPN interface, not the general network. I know what I’m like, and would definitely forget this all the time lol.

I think if it was me I wouldn’t worry about it. As you say, it’s his money and you’ll presumably outlive him, so then your options are: a) just leave it and then your eventual funeral stuff is mostly sorted, saving your loved ones a bunch of money and stress one day or b) you can just disregard it and do whatever you want.

What the Lindsey Graham ladybugs thing means. Once known it can never be dis-known.

I try to live by a sort of chill flow chart:

A PROBLEM HAPPENS! CAN I DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT?

        |           |
       YES          NO
        |           |
        |           |
   DO THE THING     |
        |           |
        |           |
        -------------
              |
              |
    DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT