I’m your average nerd. You can feed me sci-fi/fantasy book recommendations and I won’t hate you for it.

In return, I can post some music recommendations (mostly synthwave, dreamwave, ambient and some avant-garde type post-everything metal).

Occasionally I’ll write something about music, Linux, gaming or all three.

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2026

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  • I thought the SMS was only on free accounts and only so they can limit to the countries where they offer free services (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, Liechtenstein, maybe Benelux countries, not sure).

    If it’s for every account then yeah, that’s not great. I must have forgotten about this, I use TOTP for 2FA and so never see any SMS from them.

    They are definitely not the do-one-thing kind, they’re more of a bundle of dozens of things done reasonably well, and then a few things done extremely well (e.g. their VPS Lite and hosted Cloudstack infra).

    About the incoming PGP I don’t know either, I believe I’ve only used something like that successfully with mailbox.org but it’s been a decade or so so I might be misremembering; mailbox.org does have some PGP-based incoming encryption but I’m not sure if they generate all the keys there.



  • I don’t trust any e-mail encryption done by the provider (including Protonmail) and there are cryptography nerds who say things like “forget encrypted e-mail, wrong tech, wrong use-case, use something else like Magic Wormhole or Signal” (search for “the PGP problem”, most of the problems have been addressed in at least GnuPG but still, the metadata leakage for example is still an issue).

    Unless I really control my end of the channel including choice of encryption software, algorithms, placement and validity of keys, etc. I don’t think it can ever be trustworthy. Protonmail for example even use web crypto which adds another layer of potential insecurity. And that’s just the tech layer, what if my recipient is an idiot and forwards my message unencrypted (because that’s what their e-mail client is gonna allow)?

    So I don’t pick my e-mail provider based on how they encrypt, I can use any insecure provider because it’s me and my hardware doing the encryption. If Infomaniak ever goes completely nuts, I can be moved off them in a weekend.

    I guess that sidesteps the question but I didn’t follow the controversy back then about Infomaniak because I didn’t care that much, I work with Digitale Gesellschaft and other digital rights organizations to shoot these things down on a political level no matter what a single company thinks. So far DG has been very successful. e.g. they prevented the launch of an electronic ID card that would have been insecure, privacy-invasive and run by private corporations.





  • I might go back to Sekiro but for some reason the first few bosses pissed me off so much more than anything I encountered in DS or Nioh, and I’m not good at parrying. It’s like trying to go back to Mega Man on NES, I just can’t, two bosses in and I’m twisting the controller unil it creaks :)

    I did try Sekiro three times in total so far so it could still work. It took a while for DS to click, too. Demon’s Souls lost me at Flamelurker, though, not doing that again (tried a new playthrough from scratch at least five times over the years).



  • I tried this right after Baby Steps (which I enjoyed a lot), because DS was one of the inspirations for Baby Steps. I did get some of the same vibes from DS and the areas I visited were beautiful. The atmosphere is great and all. But even without 100% it just feels like a slog in every other way. I think I didn’t even hit the 10 hour mark.


  • For a second I wanted to defend myself by saying “that’s just what I was told”, but I think that’s not even necessary, it seems it really is objectively a very odd game then, even for people who know the rules.

    I can understand getting fun out of a bad game, I had fun in Two Worlds and other janky titles. And I see some “famous” streamers like Sseth just enjoy completely breaking all the systems in a bad game. My trouble is that I can’t recognize those systems in enough depth to start abusing them, that’s probably one reason EU4 didn’t click for me. I tried to just play it straight, and then you run into all those problems you mentioned. From what I casually observed in EU4 forums and the like, people really tear apart the systems to find anything that can be abused to their advantage.


  • I’m guilty too and I let (mostly local or hydro/solar-powered) LLMs write utility scripts for me, but I’m fully aware of the illegal way they’ve been put together and I wouldn’t use them to make a product I sell, that would feel unethical.

    I hope one day someone makes a model that is trained on e.g. only GPL, MIT or BSD-licensed code that gives full attribution to the generated output, and one that uses only Creative Commons art that is cleared for remixing, for example. And then there’s the huge corpus of public domain texts you can use for general text analysis. It’s not that these things aren’t available, just that the commercial incentive (those billionaires, eh) is stronger to simply steal everything and ignore any licensing or laws.

    All this can be done ethically and with small environmental impact, the fact that they choose not to do it in order to chase power and profit is the most offensive part.


  • Europa Universalis IV, 244 hours. I don’t think I understood a single thing of what was happening. And with every free update, some of the rules changed, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

    I was told “don’t worry, even the big-brains who plan out their entire campaign with spreadsheets don’t really understand the mechanics”. But that’s no consolation, I felt stressed and confused for every single one of those hours.

    May I just say that it’s so nice and refreshing to see lots of people mention these supposedly amazing 10/10 games in this thread and hate them, I largely feel the same about all those titles. I used to think my taste was just broken.


  • I can’t speak for everyone who downvoted, but maybe allow me to share a viewpoint.

    Some see the use of generative AI as simply stealing other people’s hard-earned craft and talent (for the generated art) and programming skills, without even so much as credit or visibility. Plus setting the planet on fire for it, using up precious non-renewable resources, draining aquifers, endangering jobs etc. while making billionaires richer and more powerful and taking away the means of production from the common folk. Who will have to pay the powerful for compute time because they’ve deskilled so much they can’t put together a gallery shooter game themselves anymore.

    Not trying to troll or flame or anything, but what’s a good tool for some is all those bad things for others. That’s why any use of it gets such a negative reaction, especially in the fediverse.