I don’t game much but I’d try to stay closer to the debian ecosystem, or one of the more well-known distros. There are a lot of cases where there’s a debian and ubuntu installer for something and otherwise you gotta compile or hope for an appimage or flatpak. Ubuntu’s out because snaps are horrible, although you can get rid of those. Personally I install debian on all my boxes. It’s a really minimal distro and things tend to go pretty fast because of that. Debian or I hear Fedora’s great.

4 year old article

“Latinum lasts longer than lust.”

Soulseek is good for downloading albums and discographies, soundiiz, qobuz-dl and deemix-gui are good for that and also playlists of whatever. It’s also a good way to get FLACs. I download genre mixes, pitchfork’s top albums, it’s a good way to get 80gb of music in a night. It’s taken me 3 months to get that much off Soulseek. Sometimes you want to try out artists without downloading their whole discography.

Nicotine+ is OK, I upload about a tb a month on there and occasionally I find a missing track I can’t find on Deezer, Qobuz or Bandcamp. Turns out other people aren’t just imperfect versions of you.

2023 was absolutely the year I dove back into music piracy. I started with downloading youtube playlists but the real game changer was soundiiz, which allowed me to import text, m3u, csv, spotify, xspf playlists into qobuz and deezer so i can download whole playlists of FLAC with qobuz-dl and deemix-gui. My collection went from 20,000 to 100,000, downloading playlists from qobuz and deezer, xspf playlists from my remaining lossy music. I used streamripper on a few web radio stations just to get a list of songs to pull down this way. I only bought music for years and years, but that got me a narrow type of collection.

To bring this back around to the NSA, they’re prevented by law to do data collection on American citizens who fall outside the exceptions like this FISA bill. The one loophole is that private companies have much more leeway in whose private information they can collect, and NSA can use American tax dollars to buy your personal information that’s illegal for them to collect themselves. Now NSA is a military intelligence organization and they’re not supposed to toss their intercepts over to US law enforcement like the FBI, but they do.

The usual. Journalists, democracy, threats to fascism and corporate profits at home and abroad.

Capitalism will bring out the worst in AI, to prevent it we’d need to overthrow capitalism.