I think it’s pretty common, and it’s super annoying. If I’m looking for something and see that it’s the exact same item with a price higher than on Amazon, I suspect that it’s a drop-ship and they’re pocketing the difference. I’ve gone through the effort to return that stuff if I happen to order it inadvertently. I’ve considered straight out asking them if they’re drop shipping before ordering, to be sure.
I don’t know about spambots, but here is one explanation of the Piefed karma mechanisms I’ve read here:
Oh, yes, I only noticed after replying to you that the OP mentioned gaming. I generally wouldn’t recommend most SFF PCs for gaming either.
Though spend a bit more for a solid i7 and avoid SFF.
The SFF’s can be great for just browsing, office use, light photo editing, etc. Obviously nothing too demanding, but they save a lot of power for their intended purpose. I picked up a USFF Lenovo ThinkCentre about the size of a Mac Mini for $100 a couple years back.
Interesting points. Piefed, the software on their instance, does have some form of karma, but supposedly it’s not publicly visible. Unfortunately I don’t know/recall the details of what effect that karma has in practice. Still, it makes me wonder if it might encourage karma farming by some users.
Very cool, thanks again!
Yeah, I wonder that too, especially because I had never heard of it until a couple days ago.
It serves the angry Cuban expat community in Florida. Any politician wanting to be president someday had to appease them if they wanted to win Florida. At least that’s my understanding of the situation.
This reminds me that I think it was on Reddit that at some point I found a Mormon porn community.
I didn’t know that, thanks.
I’m far from an expert on this, but from what I understand, the private chat app that would be hardest to block in a situation like this would be Delta Chat. Since it uses email as the underlying transport, it can’t easily be blocked like others that use their own niche transports which can be more easily identified and blocked. To block Delta Chat completely if you’re not using a well-known Delta Chat server for your email, they would need to block all e-mail in and out of your country. At least that’s an argument I’ve read.
Just fyi, here are some other alternatives (note that I haven’t tried any of them, not even matrix, but I’ve heard of these as open alternatives to Discord):
Someone had made a bypass hack that didn’t even need 3D anything, only generated metadata, but the ID vendor has patched it: https://age-verifier.kibty.town/
Awesome, thanks, looks interesting! I had never heard of it before, and I’ve been researching Spanish courses for a while now.
Not to mention that American citizenship brings with it the burden of having to file and possibly pay US taxes even if you don’t live in the US. The US is one of only half a dozen countries in the world that does this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation
In Germany, where these “balcony solar” devices have been approved for years and seem to be the most popular out of any country, the panels have all kinds of safety mechanisms. One of them is a mechanism that shuts of the power coming from the panel if it detects that line power has been lost. It seems that this is what would prevent it from shocking electricians working on lines that they think are unpowered. This article goes into details about the various safety mechanisms on these: https://balkon.solar/news/2025/03/17/how-does-plug-in-pv-in-germany-work/
Cool, thanks!
Thanks, this is insightful and useful, and I’ll keep it in mind for if there is another opportunity.
Thanks. I was wondering if mbin was still actively being used and developed.
For sure!