I ran into this as my IDE is also constantly touching temporary files to maintain its state. It wasn’t copilot though, it was one drive. So I moved my work files into a local-only location, and then periodically rsync to the synced folder, excluding .git and other folders that have no business on a synced folder.

When I originally switched, I kept an ultra clean windows 2000 VM going for a solid decade. Any time I needed it, I could install stuff, do the work, and then blow away the crud that always builds up with Windows. I would suggest using the oldest version of Windows you can practically use, de-bloating it, and taking vm snapshots.

You could even firewall it using another VM or the host if you wanted. Put windows in jail, erase its memory, and cut it off from the outside world so it behaves, lol.

Being told something and getting it are two completely different things. Most people just don’t understand the difference -we have failed at educating here. One thing I have noticed is that people understand avoiding American companies, even when they don’t understand avoiding closed/walled gardens. It’s a decent hook to get people reconsidering, but it’s a long slow process.

It’s a literal national security threat to become dependent on starling, as demonstrated in Ukraine. We can build our own networks and support other LEO internet projects.

Data scientist here; there simply are not enough murders to model this, so they will need to use proxies for “likely” murderers (like any sort of violent crime). That means the model will very strongly target people who are over-policed (minorities) and those more likely to actually get caught and charged for things, and thus be in the training data set (poor people). It will also fail spectacularly for this purpose because even a highly accurate model will produce almost 100% false positives -again, because actual murders are so vanishingly rare. The math just doesn’t work.

Only a headline because of current events south of the border. Ontario does this every year at this time. Letters home before march break, several more after, likely a phone call from public health, then suspensions. The last part rarely happens because the anti-vaxxers just get an exemption for some bullshit reason. So it’s mostly just a threat so that people aren’t too lazy to get something done.

I see you have a bunch of good answers now, so I’ll ask; if you are comfortable self hosting, why not consider a VPS? Yes it can be a little bit of maintenance, but it’s very minimal and you get far more flexibility and the ability to further develop those selfhosting chops.

You identify with the term fiscal conservative, but in practice, everything you advocate is straight up liberal. It proves the point that the term is meaningless. Everyone wants to spend efficiently, it’s just the priorities that distinguish conservative from liberal.

These politicians need a lesson in civics. You are not building safeguards that stop nazis, you are building the nazi “person finding” infrastructure for them before they even get in power.

I use sendgrid as my outgoing smtp relay to avoid ip reputation issues you mention. You still have to configure your dns settings for spf and dkim pointing at their servers instead of yours. Their free tier is 10x the email I’ll ever send so it doesn’t cost anything. There are a few companies in this space with free tiers. It works, but it isnt Gmail level deliverability. I still get spam binned occasionally.

Looks like a LOWESS curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_regression). They always overfit, but are still useful to show trends. The main danger is that they get wonky near the limits of the data. Note that that increase at the end of the left plot for Democrats looks like it is increasing -but that increase looks to be 100% dependent on that single data point for '25. Obviously, you never want your analysis to be dependent on a single point like that.

Phone number and trust-on-first-use for most people, with out-of-band fingerprint verification for the paranoid. It really depends on the threat model and the security practices/awareness of your colleagues, but a link shared on some social media or lower-security chat network is more vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack than a phone number for your average Joe. There are a lot of ways a person could get a manipulated invite link.

Either he was arrested with no record of the arrest (i.e “disappeared”) which is a new line for the administration to cross, or he disappeared for another reason (by himself, or with help or coercion by a foreign entity like the CCP), and the FBI is investigating.

I hope journalists keep on this because the first option would be a huge problem that everyone needs to know about, but without more information, the second is also a possibility. The CCP is known to have agents in western countries that manipulate and pressure ex-pats to return to China. Keeping an open mind now will also strengthen the argument if evidence for the former comes to light.

Might be easiest to just drill out the mic and camera, and use a usb headset for calls. I also suggest specific threat modelling and learning about opsec as that may help you feel more in control. After that, please look after your mental well-being. We all should.

This is signal detection theory combined with an arms race that keeps the problem hard. You cannot block scrapers without blocking people, and you cannot inconvenience bots without also inconveniencing readers. You might figure something clever out temporarily, but eventually this truism will resurface. Excuse me while I solve a few more captchas.

I’m not sure you are vehemently agreeing with me, or somehow arguing the semantics that “even worse” and “much worse” mean something substantially different.

Indeed, see the context - I’m referring to the fact that Firefox is nearly 100% funded by advertisers, but separated by an arms-reach organization. Chrome is precisely 100% funded by advertisers, and under the complete control of an advertising company. Chrome is clearly worse, but Firefox is long-term problematic because that advertising money is going to whittle away at that separation eventually.

Oh wow, I almost bought into proton with hard-earned dollars just a few days ago. Glad that was on the backburner until now! holy smokes! Task cancelled! Thank you.

They made a shitty change to their TOS regarding sharing user data with advertisers, then backtracked (appropriately, imho). It’s the same issue as always - Firefox costs Mozilla millions of dollars to develop and maintain, and it’s entirely funded by advertising companies. I personally think Mozilla does a pretty good job of balancing interests, but that is a long term problematic relationship for privacy respecting software. I don’t think any of the forks solve that problem, as they are still dependent on all of Mozilla’s development money to keep going, and Chrome based browsers are even worse. Modern browsers are just too damned expensive! Anyway, the drama: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/03/mozilla-rewrites-firefoxs-terms-of-use-after-user-backlash/?guccounter=1

Exactly, never assume silence is because they have changed their minds. They only just discovered it doesn’t play well in polling and are avoiding the topic. Unless they actively say they have changed their mind, they haven’t (and even then be skeptical). Ontario learned this the hard way several times in a row.

Out of band key exchange is great -as long as people can physically meet and exchange QR codes. In reality, they are often sent via less secure means. As always, the humans are the weakest security link.