I’ve finally decided to make a switch to Fedora, after giving up last time due to almost nothing I needed working.

I still didn’t manage to get Unity working, which I unfortunately really need, and for some reason it’s also not working in a Boxes VM, but I was really surprised with Steam! Not only every game I tried so far is working great (after solving some initial trouble caused by NVIDIA card), I also managed to just run the games I have pirated directly from the Windows drive, without having to reinstall them, by simply adding the .exw to Steam.

The only issue left is to solve missing cutscenes/videos, being replaced by that “TV color test” image. Has anyone managed to solve it? I’ve tried installing various codeks, but it didn’t help.

The only thing I’m missing is Parsec, since I was pretty used to workong remotely through wake on lab and parsec, but I suppose that’s solvable down the line. Oh, and everything being Electron apps, especially since i unfortunately need O365 stack for work. But its not that bad.

So far i love it, and have already set Fedora as my default boot. Only have to switch for Unity, as of now. I’ll see how long it will last.

If anyones looking for a new year resolution, go give your favorite distro a try! And if you have an NVIDIA card and even after following a random guide you get stuttering or lagging text in Electron apps, as i did, try the other repository for the drivers, thats what solved it for me.

The whole article felt like bullshit, and if I went to college and had to sit through listening to something like that - just random doomsaying without any proof, that doesn’t even makes sense (“we won’t need real CS engineers, but we will need prompt engineers to somehow convince the model and discover the correct prompt, since we don’t know why it’s replying as it is” - oor, maybe you can just leave out the AI step and have a real person do it.), and it’s lacking any sensible point.

Oh, right. I get it now. So that’s the point.

It happens partly through the use of platforms like Fixie, his company’s platform for easily creating AI-based applications

I would be so mad if something like this happened on my college.

Thank you! Is the lack of nested virtualization a problem? I mean, if I wanted a Kali VM, I can just run a Kali Qube directly, or not? Or is there some kind of use-case that would require nested virtualisation I’m missing?

You will probably have to get a domain, but some of the ugly TLDs can cost few bucks for a year, so it’s not that bad.

As for being able to access your Nextcloud from outside, if you don’t use it to share large amount of data often, I recommend looking into Cloudflare Tunell. It’s pretty easy to set up, and allows you to not only put a configurable firewall in front of your Nextcloud instance that you can for example geoblock traffic from other countries, but you also don’t have to deal with port forwarding, DDNS, or exposing your home network directly into the internet.

The setup is simple, you just download their cloudflared service, install it with a token generated in their web management (that ties it to a domain and tells it what port it should expose) on your Nextcloud machine, and it will automatically connect to Cloudflare server that will act as a port forward, but without you having to expose anything on your home network directly.

I don’t really access my Nextcloud from the internet that often, don’t use it to stream or share large files with large number of people, so I never had issues with it. But I’ve been told that it’s against Cloudflare ToS to use it for large data sharing, streaming or high-volume data transfers, so keep that in mind.

But it’s perfect for accessing my Home Assistant and Nextcloud when I need it.

That is true, but can’t they (a company that wants to, not the goverment) do that already if they want to, under ChatControl 1.0? And I wouldn’t say that whether a service is E2EE or not makes any difference here - scanning private user messages shouldn’t be allowed, whether they are encrypted or not. IMO if ChatControl 2.0 passed and was made mantadory for everyone, the fact that it is mostly noticable on E2EE apps is only a side-effect of blanket surveilance, and not the main issue with the proposition.

What’s the point of them agreeing that they will let the 1% of users of E2EE services keep their privacy, while they already scan 90% of communication (I mean, just GMail + FB/IG + iCloud, that is already being scanned, makes for most of the worlds communication) for the past year or so?

Now I’m curious whether Facebook/Instagram, who does offer encrypted chats and also scans all your content under ChatControl 1.0 voluntarily, also scans the encrypted chats or not. I’d vager they do, but that’s just a speculation.

But they did briefly mention that they will begin “phasing out” chatcontrol 1.0. I wonder what does that means, and how long will it take.

I think the headline is missleading, if I understand it correctly.

ChatControl is already possible, and implemented for major communication service providers that most of the people use. It’s just not mantadory.

Currently a regulation is in place allowing providers to scan communications voluntarily (so-called “Chat Control 1.0”). So far only some unencrypted US communications services such as GMail, Facebook/Instagram Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, iCloud email and X-Box apply chat control voluntarily (more details here). source

The article states that they decided that they will not blanketly require it, but I don’t think it says anything about rolling back the first version of ChatControl that’s already in effect.

EDIT: I was wrong, the article actually does mention it, even though on pretty vague terms:

The current voluntary chat control of private messages (not social networks) by US internet companies is being phased out. Targeted telecommunication surveillance and searches will only be permitted with a judicial warrant and only limited to persons or groups of persons suspected of being linked to child sexual abuse material."

I’ve always found VMs to be awkward to work with, in VMWare. Getting networking to work was never straightforward, even though it should be in theory, any new VPN broke something, and usually even the performance left a lot to be desired. My hope was that there’s a linux distro that has virtualization support more deeply integrated into the OS, but now that I think about it there probably won’t be much of a difference (although, the xen-based QubeOS may help?).

Maybe just switching it around, and have backoffice Windows VM, and tools with work on host OS, since that’s what I spend most of my time working with anyway?

Thank you, that sounds like exactly what I imagined QubeOS would be good for, so I’ll give it a go.

Stop that. :) Your system should be using FDE (which VeraCrypt can do if you’re stuck with Windows).

I’m using Bitlocker for the whole drive, but the main point of separate volume is for it to have adittional password protection, that I auto dismount when not working with it, just in case my laptop got compromised. I’m still mostly figuring out best practices, since I don’t work in the field for that long, and few months ago I was running Snaffler on my PC to test it out for one engagement, and was horrified when I realized how much did it manage to find, so I at least promptly moved it to separate password protected volume, and am now figuring out a better secrets and sensitive data management workflow.

Do you think it would be practical as a daily work driver for this kind of job? From what I’ve hears when briefly searching for user experience with Qubes, I’ve heard that while a lot of people really like the idea, it’s not practical for daily work where you expect to set up and spin new qubes and VMs regularly, because configuration can get pretty cubersome and everything takes a lot longer than it should, and you regularly run into issues.

But you are right, I’ll just get an external drive and spin up the OS there, and see if I like it or not. I’m now in the process of figuring out a best way how to handle various secrets and customer data from WIP engagements that are now mangled together on one encrypted VeraCrypt volume, which feels kind of wrong, and having it separated in a secure Qube sounds like the way to go.

Thanks for the hardware compatibility heads up, knowing myself, that would be one of the things I’d probably gloss over and then spend more time than necessary debugging.

Get GrapheneOS, your mobile phone will be one of the best sources of data about you, and if you’re on Googled Android or IOS, there’s nothing you can do to stop google apps stalking you, which they have already had several lawsuits about doing it even when you disable it. GrapheneOS takes care of it by sandboxing google apps, so they can’t do almost anything, along with really fine-grained permissiion control, i.e giving messenger access to only selected photo you want to upload, and nothing more.

As far as browser goes, I recommend Mullvad, and bundle it with their VPN. Not only can it be payed for by Crypto, it also means that almost every other VPN user will have the same browser fingerprint as you - fingerprint of the Mullvad browser, which is based on Tor browser and designed to be as unfingerprintable as possible, so it will be really hard to distinguish you using secondary fingerpriting, such as extensions or minor browser details.

Don’t use Gmail or GDrive, ideally get your own NAS for file sharing and switch to something like Protonmail, which now also offers Drive. Get a domain that is vaguely company-sounding. Something like @techcorplimited.com, and create a catch-all email address, so any email sent to that domain will end up in your inbox. You can now use randomname.randomsurename@techcorplimited.com as your throwaway email address, and just randomly generate them for all services you use, while also making it believable to confuse even AIs.

Even when using VPN, don’t sign into your accounts. You don’t need to sign in to Youtube to tell it that it was you all the time, just remember your favorite youtubers and look for them by hand every time.

If you’re really serious, look into https://www.qubes-os.org/

I was working on a pretty well known game, porting it to consoles.

On PS4 we started getting OOM crashes after you’ve played a few levels, because PS4 doesn’t have that much memory. I was mostly new on the project and didn’t know it very well, so I started profiling.

It turned out that all the levels are saved in a pretty descriptive JSON files. And all of them are in Unity’s Scriptable Objects, so even if you are not playing that level, they all get loaded into memory, since once something references a SO, it gets loaded immediately. It was 1.7Gb of JSON strings loaded into memory once the game started, that stays there for the whole gameplay.

I wrote a build script that compresses the JSON strings using gzip, and then uncompresses it when loading the actual level.

It reduced the memory of all the levels to 46Mb down from 1.7Gb, while also reduced the game load by around 5 seconds.

This is my experience as well. I’ve always tried to be privacy-conscious, and stick to self-hosted alternatives or FOSS, but I was also lazy and didn’t really tried too hard. With the recent enshittification problems for almost every product that has a corporation behind it, it’s a lot more in my face that it’s shit and I should be dealing with it.

It made me finally get a VPN and switch to Mullvad browser. Get rid of Reddit completely. I finally got a Pixel with GrapheneOS and got a NAS running.

It’s also doing wonders for my digital addiction. The companies are grossly mistaken in assuming that my addiction to their service is greater than my immense hatred for forced monetization, fingerpriting and dark patterns. It’s turning out it’s not, and I’ve dropped so many services in the last few months I never was able to really stop using, most of them thanks to popups like “You have to log in to view this content” or “This content is available only in app”, or “You are using an adblocker…”. Well, fuck you. I didn’t want to be here anyway.

I’ve been mostly working in C# for the past few years (and most of my life), and the only C++ experience I have is from college, so it’s getting some using to. And that’s what I was getting at - thanks to college, where I was forced to really learn (or at least, understand and be able to use) a wide range of drastically different languages, from Lisp through Bash, Pharo, Prolog, to Java and C#, that when I have to write something in a language I don’t know, it’s usually similar to at least one of them and I always could figure it out intuitively.

With Rust, even though it has an amazing compiler, I’m struggling - probably because of the borrowing and overly careful error handling being concepts I’ve never had to deal with to get a MVP code working. Sure, that probably means that the code wasn’t error-proof, which is exactly what Rust forces you to do and which is amazing, but it makes it a lot harder to just write a single script without prior knowledge when you have to.

I hope they are teaching Rust at universities now, we definitely didn’t have it 8 years ago, which is a shame.

I was just thinking about something similar in regards to gamedev.

For the past few years since college, we’ve been working on a 2D game in our spare time, running on Unity. And for the past few months I’ve been mostly working on performace, and it’s still mind-boggling to me how is it possible that we’re having troubles with performance. It’s a 2D game, and we’re not even doing that much with it. That said, I know it’s mostly my fault, being the lead programmer, and since most of the core system were written when I wasn’t really an experienced programmer, it shows, but still. It shouldn’t be that hard.

Is the engine overkill for what we need? Probably. Especially since it’s 2D, writing our own would probably be better - we don’t use most of the features anyway. The only problem would be tooling for scene building, but that’s also something that shouldn’t be that hard.

The blog post is inspiring, just yesterday I was looking into what would I need to get a basic rendering done in Rust, I may actually give it a try and see if I can make a basic 2D engine from scratch, it would definitely be an amazing learning experience. And I don’t really need that many features, right? Rendering, audio, sprite animation, collisions and scene editor should be sufficient, and I have a vague idea about how would I write each of those features in 2D.

Hmm. I wonder what would be the performance difference if I got an MVP working.

Nigel Stanford has some amazing videoclips. I love Robots vs. Music the most (especially since the tune and the whole Automatica album is amazing), but Science vs. Music is also great.

And he also did a few making of videos. While I’m sure most of the final result is CGI anyway, it’s still a nice touch.

I’ve just started learning Rust, mostly by experimenting with winapi since that what’s I’m mostly going to use it for anyway, but this finally explains why I had so much trouble with trying to intuitively winging it. I’ve skimmed through the Rust book once, but judging by this article it’s no wonder I was mostly wrestling the compiler.

Looks like I have to go back to the drawing board. I understand why is Rust doing it, and I’m sure that once I finally get used to it, it’s going to be a way smoother experience, but maan, this is the first language I couldn’t just figure out in an hour. It’s a frustrating learning experience, but I also see why it’s neccessary and love it for that.

I work part-time as a game developer, and part time as a pentester, so I do search for technical questions quite a lot.

Hmm, now I wonder whether I’m just used to it. I haven’t used any other search engine in more than a year. I’ll have to compare the results more, but as far as I remember every time I couldn’t find what I needed on DDG and resorted to !g, the Google results were even worse.

I’ve just switched to it literally yesterday, and while you will probably not avoid Play Services, being able to install it into a different profile that’s only limited to the few apps that need it is nice.

Also, just the fact that on Graphene Play Services do not have the special privileges as on any android phone, and are subjected to the same limitations as any other app (which are even stricter on Graphene) helps a lot. It also means that even if you end up just running the play services at all times, they can’t do as much as they can on other android phones, and the data they can access without your explicit permission is really limited. So, even that helps by a lot.

While I don’t believe you can degoogle that quickly, because some of their services take quite some time to properly switch, such as email, in the end it’s not too hard, but just takes time and some work.

Changing email is easy, if you don’t mind it being a slow process. Just forward your google email, and start slowly replacing any service you notice in the following months/years to your new address.

Google Drive is harder to replace, I went for just running a NAS with Nextcloud, which takes care of most of Google Drive/Docs/Calendar stuff. If self-hosting isn’t your cup of tea, Proton is slowly setting up usable google alternatives - they have Drive and Calendar IIRC.

Now for phone, that’s the hardest task. You wouldn’t help yourself by getting an IPhone. While it would de-google you, there’s basically no point in switching google for apple. Getting android to be usable for stuff like banking, MFA and other bullshit you need your phone for while being degoogled is hard, due to the bullshit Google Services. The only solution I found is to either just go with dumb phone with an obscure OS, or just get a Google Pixel and run GrapheneOS.

Maps are another issue, but thankfully we have a local https://mapy.cz/ , which is a pretty OK alternative to Google maps for our country, and I guess they even work worldwide. I don’t drive a car, so I don’t really need it that often.

The only remaining Google service I use is GCloud VPS, because I have some websites running there on the free instances that I’m too lazy to move. But I’m slowly migrating it to Amazon. Not that it would help much, anyway. And also Youtube, but I’m trying to go through the alternative front-ends as much as possible.

And for browser, I’m using https://mullvad.net/en/browser. Fuck chromium.

If you have a Pixel, why not go all in with https://grapheneos.org/?