Damn it! I set it up wrong! ;-)

There are two issues. One is I tried. I looked up a therapist in my area for the type of issue I had. Then followed the prompts. Got a message back from someone claiming to be the therapists's scheduling assistant to go to a website to enter my insurance details etc to get prepared for it. And then... got the message they lied, the therapist wasn't available (and probably doesn't exist) and would I like to use one of three therapists they picked at random from their own company (so unrelated to the tool I'd used to pick one, therefore unlikely to be helpful.) Why the fuck would I go to a therapist from a company that lied to be in order to get my personal details from day #1?

Path Mental Health is the company to avoid here. Especially as I asked them to delete my personal data, and they sent me spam six months later unwittingly revealing they hadn't deleted it.

So second issue: there are multiple things going on, and while some might be talked through, others the "cures" are just impractical for me. I would be placed in an even worse position than where I started.

But the Internet is shit thing? That's probably the easiest thing to fix - just avoid the bulk of the Internet. Most people don't have this issue, because normal people don't visit Reddit or Slashdot or whatever to begin with. To put it another way, without even doing therapy I can take out of my life things that are toxic and that bring out the toxicity in me.

And that will help.

Therapists? Maybe one day if I can find a reliable way of getting a therapist I can trust. But I'm not aware of any.

Everyone said it from the start, no one wants 16 streaming platforms with different content on them. We all want all the content in one monthly subscription.

First point:

To be fair, what we said was "We all want to pay $10 a month and see all movies ever made", which was never really going to fly, was it. If it currently costs $50-100 a month to supply the "basic cable" tier (the original one, that includes things like USA and Discovery in their original forms, not the Comcastic "Locals and shopping channels" definition), how is the industry going to supply the same thing - more than the same thing - over the Internet where bandwidth costs money - for a fifth of that? Hollywood is making money, but it's not making 400% profits.

And if we change our demand to "We don't mind how much you charge, we want all the content in one monthly subscription", then things get ugly. And, in fact, if it's a choice between a single $60-100 a month service with "everything", and a collection of different services charging $5-15 a month each, I think most of us would prefer the latter, as it's easier to fit how we stream to our own budgets.

Second: Did you read the article, or even the summary? Because the summary actually says the opposite of what you're claiming. It's arguing content providers are having problems because people are - despite your contention - switching to streaming. You've gotten it exactly backwards.

Hopefully the above was not too preachy, and does not distract from my main point

No, and I definitely appreciated it! Thank you.

Take care of yourself, and hang in there!

You too!

It's not a lie, you've literally linked to two articles explaining specific complex workarounds that are not guaranteed to work and only work for specific use cases. The Wikipedia article is so expansive in what it terms "NAT transversal" it even lists SOCKS as a method.

You know, I hadn't thought about it for a while, but I suspect NAT (or rather the refusal to make IPv6 default for long enough that it killed it) is a sizable portion of the reason why centralization and the resultant enshittification has happened. The Internet was meant to be peer-to-peer, and in the mid-1990s, when us Gen X kids looked wide eyed at what we were promoting to anyone who'd listen, the Internet was still peer-to-peer and we were looking forward to always-on and the ability as a result to be able to avoid the few centralized services that existed at that time.

Instead IPv4 didn't scale, NAT was a cheap hack that everyone added that didn't have the ability to accept incoming connections without a layer of port forwarding (inconsistent hacks that relied upon specific implementations and the allowance of packet spoofing aside), and we delayed and delayed (and often ridiculed the few users of) solutions to it because, ultimately, ISPs didn't want to provide users with the ability to be anything other than "clients" for the corporate Internet.

Urgh. Should this be my last post outside of my journal before I delete my account? Seems appropriate.

It is simple, .deb files don't work on RPM-based distros

Ubuntu is a .deb based distro. The article isn't about replacing Snaps on RPM based distros with Flatpaks, and the GP isn't talking about replacing Snaps with .debs on other platforms.

Show me a feminist who has said they only want risks to women removed and want risks for men to stay, and I'll toss a match at her as she'll burn up in seconds, being made of straw and everything.

You know this, but you spread these lies anyway because it's not that you want to protect men, it's that you hate women.

And so Reddit's CEO won

...the battle perhaps, but not the war.

People are leaving Reddit en-mass. Moderators are, for the most part, determining if they want to continue, or just reduce what they've done to the bear essentials. r/iama's moderators, for example, made the announcement today that they're not planning to try to find interesting people to do AMAs from this point forth, or spent much effort verifying people who do put themselves up for AMAs.

r/blind's blind moderators today announced they literally can't moderate any more because none of the tools they can use passed Reddit review and the ones Reddit supplied just cannot be used by sight-deficient people.

Meanwhile for subs whose mods were fired Reddit is having a hard time finding anyone willing to take over, especially for larger subs like r/interestingasfuck.

It's basically a shitshow that's going to get worse. People who want to mod for the "wrong" reasons will vie for a spot taking over from mods who built successful communities. More people will leave. There'll be less content to attract new people.

Spez can spin this as a victory, but it's a victory like Elon Musk refusing to pay Google backdated hosting bills after the past-due date is a victory (today's Twitter outage brought to you by all their Google hosted services going down. But hey Musk was able to not pay Google, so victory!)

I'm not implying we should tell anyone what to do. But we are the experts. We can steer the technology. We can make available the tools and the websites we want to happen.

And we didn't do it. We didn't appreciate the dangers. We - as a group - even ignored and distanced ourselves from the good alternatives. There are still people on Slashdot who lie and pretend it's hard to sign up to Mastodon. I actually went off on one recently, and I'm still not sure whether my rude, insulting, fuck you, response was appropriate or not (probably not, if you still liked me before, you won't after reading that), but I'm tired, I'm tired man, of steering people to the right things, and being told to fuck off because someone's too lazy to do exactly the same thing that they did 100 times before with the wrong thing. Somehow they found Facebook and signed up! Somehow they found Twitter and signed up! Tell the average Slashdotter to write a bubblesort in Java and they'll write a quicksort and call you a moron. But signing up to Mastodon? "Too hard! I am suddenly a moron who can't type! What is this mouse thing? Do I move it with my foot?!"

Urgh.

Hey, if you're at the 'don too, send me an email to squiggleslash at yahoo.com with your id and I'll send you a follow. Love to stay in touch. Be aware my content is very depressing right now but, who knows, with a few years out of this, maybe some therapy, or even some happy pills, it might get better!

(That goes for anyone else posting here obviously!)

The Palemoon UI is decent (it could do with modernizing in the sense of changing the colour scheme a little, but not in the sense of actually removing any buttons or moving anything around), but the underlying engine is, alas, unmaintained, which means as time goes on it's going to get less and less compatible with the modern web.

So much as I want to recommend Palemoon right now, I just can't. Ironically one way to save it might be to rebuild it on Blink...

TFA does actually mention it applies to"England and Wales" at one point. So... this is likely to be another specious bill the government will be fully behind but will find an excuse to drop at the last minute because it's clearly bullshit and because Facebook has a lot of money and the party in government are the Conservatives.

Which is fine I guess.

No more YouTube videos! How ever will I function!

I predict this won't do anything beyond reduce YouTube's viewership - and probably, in doing so, help create audiences for other video hosting solutions which in the long run will give them the network effects they need to succeed.

There's a reason most websites that block adblockers rapidly reverse course after a few months.