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d1lanka

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Including the skin of 'licking-toads' and the pineal gland of human brains.

That's a myth.

You can't lick the skin of toads — more specifically that of the Sonoran Desert Toad aka. Bufo Alvarius as it's toxic.

That's a meme propagated by The Simpsons: https://youtu.be/uFn7VjYksBM?si=OecdfsmXyOTJJAeF.

You can however milk it's venom via glands and smoke it.

There's also insufficient evidence for the pineal gland as that is an unsubstantiated hypothesis proposed by Dr. Rick Strassman.

Plus, the Wikipedia page you linked to literally says:

"...although the physiological significance of this biotransformation is not yet known."

Soo...

Whonix when used via Qubes DispVMs is more effective than Tails in my opinion (better protection against IP leaking), unless your goal is mainly the amnesic aspect.

It's a matter of convenience.

Your setup is far more complicated for a non-technical activist or journalist Vs. Tails.

Those are all excellent points, but fail to address the addictive downsides OP mentioned.

The business model of the internet has always been surveillance and modern smartphones + tech companies have taken that to the extreme.

Brilliant engineers / behavioral scientists using supercomputers to manipulate humans at scale guarantees that the average individual (and teenagers etc) has absolutely no fighting chance.

The thing about addiction at this scale is that... no one things they're addicted because our entire world/society is addicted - so we all justify it and move on.

I went on a silent meditation retreat for 10+ days (with no technology, talking, or smartphones etc) and it was awesome for my mind, but then, turning my phone on after 10+ days of it being off brought back the dread 2x as more.

Similar thing happened to me with Offerup - which is MILITANT about not using VPN's.

They banned me and no recourse/way to appeal.

I even sent them a physical letter without much luck.

Pitty, I loved the app, but stopped using it due to their unnecessary/strict no-VPN rule.

"You asked me how depression felt, and this is all I could come up with. It feels like I’m walking upstream through a current strong enough to pull me under four times over.

There are others with me but they are walking along the banks telling me to “just get out of the water.”

But instead of extending a hand in help, they just move on and leave me behind.

Every once in a while I find a rock that is strong enough for me to lean on, And I can rest for a bit.

But the rocks always get tired of holding me up, and when they let go, I’m left drowning, thrown 50 feet back again.

And nothing is harder than standing up in that current when everything in you is telling you how much easier things would be if you just let yourself get dragged under."

—Unknown

Yeah, get rid of those computer books.

That's what the internet + ebooks are for.

Unless a book has a special meaning to me personally or is considered life changing, I rarely keep any physical books.

Your situation is pretty common actually, unfortunately.

Keep learning new, valuable skills that will never expire and will only compound your value and keep applying for new jobs while you already have your current one.

Reduce consumption, invest as much as possible in indexes/tech stocks.

Is Web3 anything? 5 years ago

Democracy solves the Byzantine agreement problem just fine already.

Democracy is just two wolves and a lamb deciding on what's for dinner.

This is the message to would-be activists anywhere: Stay out of the big boy pool or we'll make you regret it.

Check your expenses before waging war.

Or, you need to band together with an international band of investigative journalists like the ICIJ: https://www.icij.org (who released the Pandora Papers) or do it intelligently like Snowden.

The most Ballsy of people in this category has to be the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny: https://youtu.be/kHgI6um1BMc IMO.

Archive.org is great; especially their archive of abandonware old games (MS-DOS, older console ROMs), some of which can be played online.

See: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

But don't find yourself actually needing to get in touch with a human there. I have a friend that inadvertently doxxed themself on a website they own; they removed the pages, added a robots.txt to disallow crawling and is trying for months to reach someone over there to just get that data removed from The Wayback Machine, to no avail.

That sucks. I've always been able to get a hold of a human the few times I emailed them - but nothing due to something like this.

Perhaps archive.org doesn't have a lot of staff or they simply don't care but I imagine these kinds of things happen often enough that they should at least have an automated process in place (and continuing to crawl a website that specifically forbids it through the standard robots.txt is a bit icky).

Also, FYI they stopped honoring robots.txt directives: https://teleread.org/2017/04/24/the-internet-archive-will-so... — so if you're a webmaster that would like to exclude your website from the internet archive, you'll have to email them directly to make that request.

O.mg Cable 5 years ago

Out of the brands you've mentioned, any particular models of locks?

O.mg Cable 5 years ago

Which locks don't have easy bypasses?

I've been wondering the most sophisticated/effective/secure locks regular consumers have access to.

In other words, which locks does the Lock Picking Lawyer himself use in his house to protect his family?

Neat.

Some UVP / Headlines to split test:

1. Keep your memories yours.

2. Safeguard your memories from prying eyes.

3. Don't let big tech creep on your memories.

4. Keep your memories private.

5. Block creepy algorithms from spying on your life.

I like the dynamic sub headline - perhaps test the following variation on that:

protect your {memories} from creepy algorithms