I use 1.1.1.1 so I don’t think it’s easily ignored by changing DNS. But interestingly while using Revanced and NewPipe on my phone I don’t have any of the same problems. Maybe my computer is ignoring my router’s DNS? Maybe mobile YouTube is delivered from a different server? I wish I knew but ultimately using a VPN still works for me and is a very low effort fix.

What I don’t get is why it’s only YouTube they choose to throttle. I’ve never noticed any issues on other streaming websites and fast.com which literally uses Netflix servers is also full speed.

They’re 5g based, so I suspect it’s within the terms of service somewhere that they can limit the streaming quality? Historically I’d only ever noticed deprioritization, never a hard bandwidth limit.

My ISP has started throttling YouTube to ~2mbps when viewed from desktop. Using a VPN gets around this and lets me watch in HD. Luckily I’ve not encountered this error yet, but if I do I guess it’s no more YouTube for me, 480p is just way too blurry to put up with.

Although they use milk, they consider egg a meat. They treat their cows like gods, so if you’re vegan only for the reasons of animal suffering then I’d argue being vegetarian in India is philosophically identical

An old PC is the best NAS, even if you choose a dedicated NAS box it’s likely that you’ll want to “upgrade” to an old PC in a year or two. Unlike premade NAS boxes you have full control over the software and can modify the hardware as needed. You can undervolt/underclock to save power too, so the main difference is only the physical space it takes. Having the ability to run docker containers and VMs on the same device is incredibly useful, and you’ll get significantly faster transfers despite the drastically lower cost.

I mostly seed stuff that’s on the verge of being lost media and my ratio is often insane because there just aren’t other seeds. Ironically for many old/unpopular films the Internet Archive is a lot better than any torrents.

The comment on this internet archive review in particular had me laughing.

Indeed that’s the intention, but in practice gerrymandering often leads to the opposite outcome where urban cores are divided up with large rural areas to suppress one side’s votes.

See Utah’s districts for the most obvious example of this. It would be logical to group Salt Lake City in one district, Provo + some suburbs in another, then the rural areas in the remaining districts. But instead the city is divided evenly such that each part of the city is in a different district, with every district dominated by large rural areas.

What options are there for pirating music? I felt Lidarr was not particularly useful due to the lack of indexers. Unless you like mainstream music it’s quite difficult to find many tracks online (and I’m too picky to be okay with YouTube rips).

Considering music streaming isn’t fragmented in the same way video streaming is, it’s still well worth paying for a music streaming service as part of a family plan imo. There’s no other hassle free solution to instantly listen to anything I want and be recommended new tracks based on my listening preferences.

I don’t think there’s any particularly “ethical” option, until now I’ve just used Spotify knowing that they’re losing money anyway. But it turns out they posted their first profitable year last year so who knows what the move is now. Qobuz claims to be ethical and high quality, but I don’t know how good the library is and like with any company they can become evil later.

It’s definitely a minority, but easy to fix if you encounter such a site even a single time. There are also some sites which refuse to load on Firefox but work fine if you change the user-agent to Chrome.

I’ve always been able to decline overdraft when opening a bank account in person. Banks argue the fee is preferable to the embarassment of having the transaction declined, but with how often credit cards flag fraud the embarrassment when it happens is practically zero.

What’s wrong with IONOS? Their VPS prices are some of the best out there and reliability has never been an issue for me.

Containers are often simple enough you don’t even need a guide. I don’t trust myself to configure anything on the host system correctly, and using Docker containers completely solves concerns of conflicting dependencies during updates. I personally avoid hosting anything that isn’t available with Docker anymore. It’s just too much work for a worse result.

It’s definitely a bandwidth usage thing, given their reputation for being informal in communications they could have been a lot nicer about that.

It’s really disappointing to see this from them, they were one the best priced VPNs out there claiming to respect privacy. Their support was also super helpful with my questions about their datacenter static IPs.

Starting yesterday unfortunately Chrome and not Firefox. I just need a working web browser and haven’t had the time to figure out what is wrong with my Firefox installation. I have no clue why but after updating to firefox 135 it eats up all my RAM (20GB+) and uses a significant amount of CPU while idle with only the process monitor tab open. Attempting to browse is unreasonably slow. Refreshing Firefox did nothing, despite now having a Firefox installation which isn’t logged into anything and has no extensions. So I figured that if I’m going to deal with a browser not logged into anything it might as well be Chrome for a bit until I can figure out what the problem is since that’s what all of the internet is designed to work with lately.

This. I have a mobile workstation with a 12th gen i7, 32gb RAM, and NVME SSD but it’s not uncommon to be waiting multiple minutes for boot due to all the pre-installed spyware from IT. It takes up half the RAM at all times and severely limits the performance for many non-whitelisted apps to the point I can’t even run Firefox smoothly on it anymore.

Amap doesn’t support English unfortunately. Neither does Baidu. So it’s about as useful in the US as Google Maps is in China.

Edit: Apparently as of late January 2025 it supports English. This is SO USEFUL for foreigners visiting China, it was so annoying to navigate before without being able to read Chinese characters.

This also is under the assumption you’ve met your deductable for the year already which for many HDHP can sometimes be hard.

Their access to news is controlled and for some topics all available news is what we’d call propaganda. Particularly anything about Japan or the Taiwan issue. Most people I know there realize this to an extent but without any other information do still believe the core idea even if skeptical of details.

But at the same time I’d argue there’s no such thing as a population that’s not propagandized. In the US the big news corporations only will present views favorable to their profitability and continued growth. Sure they disagree with eachother, but it’s still always a pro-business view. State news from Russia is (I’d argue rightly) not available on many US platforms to discourage it’s influence for example.

As a portion of median income it’s still far far better than the out of pocket costs in the US (just like pretty much every other country on earth)

There does come a point where the inconvenience slowly moves the masses to other platforms. It’s not that difficult to access the full internet in China with any data-only esim being unrestricted by default and many VPNs working just fine. But it’s just difficult enough to do this that the masses don’t. Piracy functions the same way, if piracy were truly broad in scale then it would be taken much more seriously.