Exactly, this isn’t even a new problem… it just keeps happening.

As someone who has been advocating for the use of the federated Matrix protocol for a long, long time now, the proliferation of new, competing options actually is frustrating to me. Technically Matrix is actually already fleshed out very well, has several different clients, and even has Thunderbird support so if you’re already using Thunderbird you don’t even need a separate client.

The beginnings of Matrix go back as far as 2014 so it honest has at this point 12 years of development behind it. I know Matrix has it’s issues, but it’s by far the most secure combined with being able to communicate with large groups of people via federation. There’s definitely slightly more secure options, because they lack federation (and thus don’t leak metadata), but I personally am ambivalent about them because some of them have a kind of crypto-bro feel to the companies behind them and I’m skeptical they won’t go down a path similar to Discord while Matrix on the other hand has been slowly but surely leveraging itself into a position of secure government communications all over Europe. So, to me, Matrix already has a game plan for staying relevant and staying solvent, while things like SimpleX or Stoat I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the enshittification to begin

Open source bona-fides are great and all, but for a lot of these messengers, I absolutely think not enough discussion is made regarding their financial plans to stay afloat whereas the reality is that while Matrix doesn’t exactly have money coming out their ears, they have a slow, steady gameplan that is working out so far.

The whole reason everyone moved to Discord was because it was a centralized place and since Discord needed to pay for it’s servers, it had to find a way to finance that, and enshittification naturally happened. I think it would be foolish to pretend that can’t happen again with several of the current alternatives.

(see: A/C adapters, character encoding, instant messaging, etc.)

Nice.

I mean, I have a bed, it’s just a hand-me-down that’s 25 years old and crappy and sags in the middle, but… it’s technically a bed.

Anyway, I appreciate the thought, but it’s whatever. Life in the USA sucks, oh well.

I have cancer and am living with family and this is where I am at. My needs are incredibly low because I’m just doing without a lot of stuff. I really need a bed, for example, but oh well, I am just doing without.

…which evens out to about £666 a year per worker. Do we need more proof corporate bosses are the devil’s work?

I’d actually love a reason to try Ansible and get used to it. So if it’s well documented, maybe a good starter project.

I have actually looked at this one before but the main reason I hadn’t done it is no experience with Ansible. Would you say Ansible is easy enough to pick up just for rolling this out? I have a lot of networking experience, building docker compose files from scratch for projects, and am used to editing json and yml files. I have only set up a reverse proxy with caddy once and have never tried nginx although it seems more fully featured. Any thoughts would be appreciated. I also knoe of some good Ansible security hardening playbooks but once again just haven’t used Ansible so never rolled them out

I used to roll on the main matrix server, but I’ve been toying with the idea of rolling out a server for just myself here at home for a while now, since I can federate with other servers. Just disable making new accounts after I set up my own account and roll out.

Most underrated Coen Brothers film.

I don’t know if Verizon of AT&T offer these but T-Mobile used to have small cellular sites you could basically rent them to plug into your wired internet and it would piggyback off your internet to make a small cellular hotspot to give you good cell signal. I had one when I lived out in the boonies for a while.

EDIT: Looks like the ones T-Mobile used to offer are all End-of-Life and they don’t even want them back from customers because they were for 3G/4G and they’re moving all services to 5G.

https://tmo.report/2025/04/t-mobiles-infamous-cellspot-coverage-devices-are-now-end-of-life/

EDIT II: Looks like AT&T may offer some still though:

https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1452148/

I’ve seen this meme so many times and it fucking never gets old because it really does encapsulate how absurd your standard X-Files episode is.

Also, depending on where you live its a pointless exercise. I ended up throwing mine away not because I didn’t want access to OTA television, but because I lived in a valley on the other side of mountains where all the broadcast antennae in Seattle are. So even being on the top floor of a building with my antenna as high as I could possibly mount it I still got exactly one channel total that came through and it was still glitchy a lot of the time. God the digital changeover ruined OTA broadcasts, because at least when you used to have weak signal you could tweak the antenna until the picture looked halfway decent, but no amount of tweaking fixes the digital glitching that happens from dropped packets.

Anyway, yeah, if you live in an unfortunately placed area, you need a 30 foot tall antennae pole on top of your building to even maybe have the opportunity to catch some broadcast channels. Stupid.

Let’s just cut the shit and admit that over-the-air broadcast television is effectively dead.

This is why Net Neutrality mattered, because the future isn’t in old tech (radio broadcast) being consumed by DRM in desperate plays to stay relevant and/or profitable.

The future was always in things like YouTube, Netflix, and other online content delivery services. Which is why strict regulation of Net Neutrality and strict regulation of such services was and continues to be so important.

No, the infrastructure isn’t “open” like broadcast airwaves, which technically anyone with a license and equipment can jump into using, whereas internet infrastructure is all privately owned wired networking. The fact that it is different isn’t an excuse for any and all governments to have just effectively given up on regulation of those spaces when they’re where the media-consuming public happen to be. That’s why we needed legislation of these things instead of a back and forth wankery of the FCC changing how the internet is classified over and over again in between warring political factions.

I can almost guarantee you that nobody under the age of 30 gives a singly flying fuck about having an antenna on a television. They’re probably watching more than half their media on their phone or tablet anyway.

The real reason that this kind of change is happening to over-the-air broadcasting is because it doesn’t have enough viewers, and by extension, enough advertising, to sustain it as a model anymore.

I think the loss of over-the-air programming isn’t the best thing, but I also think it’s stupid to keep holding on to this idea like it matters very much in 2026 where if you asked a kid in their twenties if they even knew what an antenna for a television was they’d probably go “what the fuck are you even talking about?”

But I mean we can’t even regulate shit like paid political speech online needing to say that it is paid political speech, so fat chance of any useful legislation coming anytime soon. US government in particular has been broken as fuck for three decades.

I mean some people liked rubbing it out to Fern Gully too

This is by far the dumbest fucking analogy I have ever had the misfortune to read.

You will, never, ever, understand what I am saying because you obviously do not even want to try. You are not a bucket, you are a human fucking being, and it’s a choice to hate others because you have had misfortune.

As I said in a previous post, I blame no one for the pain and agony my ex put me through except myself and her, and I would not want to make anyone else suffer such things ever because it doesn’t matter how hurt I am because of it, I know being a decent person that making others suffer will not fix what has been done to me. The only thing that can fix it is me trying to be better. You want to cook up every excuse in the book for why it’s not on you to ever be kind to others or consider others feelings like you want people to consider yours.

Like, think about that for a minute, you want others to consider your feelings, but you consistently have made clear you’re actually content to not think about theirs, going back to the very beginning of this thread where you callously said that my ex “married the wrong man” and waxed poetic about how you think women are coddled for such choices. Why should anyone give a fuck about your feelings when you consistently have made clear this whole thread you have no consideration for anyone else’s? That despite all you’ve been through, you haven’t learned “gosh I never want to make anyone feel the way I have felt, it’s so awful!” you instead learned “FUCKING EVERYONE DESERVES TO FEEL EVEN WORSE THAN I HAVE FELT BECAUSE I AM THE SPECIALIST LITTLE SNOWFLAKE BITCH ALIVE! BLEARGH!”

It really says a lot about how fucked in the head you are, how you don’t actually understand how empathy works, how you never actually worked on yourself like you keep claiming you did (I promise you, people who have worked on themselves don’t think like you do), and are possibly one the most selfish and petulant people I have had the displeasure to interact with on this site. You have no intentions of actually hearing what anyone else has said, continuing to repeat your “woe is me” horseshit that everyone is tired of hearing because to everyone else it is painfully clearly and obviously nothing but selfish horseshit.

You will never have the amount of self reflection needed to understand what I and others have bothered trying to posit to you today, and yet you persist in trying to convince us that no you’re just a sad sad widdle boy who needs to be fucking coddled like you apparently think everyone else is. Bitch, you have no idea what that woman I was speaking of in the beginning of this thread had gone through when you decided to slander her for no fucking good reason and whine about how bad you had it in comparison. You are the one who came in and slandered a person who I have compassion for because you’re a whiny little fucking bitch who can’t handle seeing people who are emotionally mature without deciding you need to shit all over it.

I’m done trying to explain it to you. You have no intention to hear it, you have every intention to repeat your selfish bullshit in desperate attempts to manipulate people into feeling sorry for you. Fucking suck it, loser. Eat shit. Nobody with a compassionate and empathetic bone in their body has time to waste on people like you and I regret spending the latter half of my day wasting my time trying to get you to see your own fucked up priorities, because you clearly want to be a victim so god damned badly you’ll Donald Trump it to the end of your life.

I mean seriously dude in your second message to me you said “Don’t be a cuck.” Like what kind of clueless and fucking dickless wonder who admits he never gets laid says that to a fat fucking loser like me who has had endless pussy simply because he’s a nice person? I’m being a cuck because I fucked a bunch of women and some of them moved on in their lives? And you’re not an incel? Fuck me, you’re an incel, a moron and a liar because if you had cared about anyone’s feelings at any point that wouldn’t have been one of the first things you said to me. Yet despite that, for a while, I tried to give your stupid worthless victimhood desiring ass the benefit of the doubt. You took my kindness even after you had already attempted to insult me and went “WAHH NOT GOOD ENOUGH BECAUSE I’M A LITTLE BITCH!” Well, fine, go be a little bitch, then.

I love this one specifically because I have always wondered: Is the guy with the hook hand into amputee porn because he is an amputee, or is his interest in it independent of that?

I’m sorry but you clearly didn’t care about me or anyone else’s feelings in this conversation long before I resorted to rightfully insulting you.

The world has never taken responsibility for its role in making me what I am. I had potential, but they’d rather see me fail and suffer than live in a world where I had the satisfaction of making the world a better place. They wouldn’t tolerate me being compassionate. They chose suffering, and then they complain when the suffering envelops them too. They thought I would be the only one who suffered, a convenient and well-behaved scapegoat. Well, I’m not so docile, and I don’t have sympathy for a world that had no sympathy for me.

If you really believe this about the world, let me repeat myself as I have over and over again and you clearly still don’t get it: if you really believe this, you never actually experienced any real growth at all nor do you have real empathy for others. You can lie to yourself and say you “gave up” on it all you want, but the reality is anyone who actually had experienced real growth would have never, ever come to these conclusions to begin with, ergo, you have not actually grown or used any of the skills you claim to have. You never did. It’s a convenient lie you tell yourself to justify being a shiftless piece of shit who loves being hated because it fulfills your victimhood complex.

You’ve clearly misinterpreted what I said.

No, no, you’ve just not been aware of how much of yourself you’ve really revealed with all you’ve said here today, and it isn’t anywhere near a misinterpretation, it’s a lunatic who will never have enough self reflection to really see themselves and understand their own failings instead of blaming the entire world for every single little slight they have ever experienced. Like I said, you’re a fucking loser like Donald Trump, a fucking whinger and whiner who takes no responsibility for themselves, their actions, or what they’ve said. You’ve made that exceedingly clear, even if you’re too oblivious to realize how you’ve done so. You are what you hate so much about the world, wrapped up in a neat little bow. No wonder you want others to hate you so badly, because deep down you must hate yourself something awful because somewhere inside you recognize this in yourself and hate yourself for it. Yet, like Trump, you want to make others suffer for your own personal failings more than you want to do better an atone for any of it. And that is what makes you worthy of derisive words.

My browser saves PDFs fine?