Andy yen praising trump is one thing and I kind of don’t care about that so much. What I do care about is how proton practices predatory sales to cash in on FOMO. Or if you subscribe for one month it’s an auto renewing subscription. Or that the best rates are if you sign up for a year. It’s weird for a not-for-profit structure to do billing like this

Mullvad doesn’t play games. A flat price and you get what you pay for.

10-20 requests per second

That’s not a DDOS

The VM is Debian Linux with a basic XFCE UI (for a system tray + notification widget) via QEMU/KVM which I run through virt-manager. Most unnecessary packages are removed or not installed in the first place. This is so that I can browse the sites, again, in a fool-proof manner. I share a directory from my host OS to the VM, which mounts it on boot in the fstab. This prevents me from downloading into the guest VM’s disk image and having to keep dealing with that file getting overly big. In the past I’ve done a Samba share but recently I’ve just been using direct shared memory/filesystem and that seems to work OK, too.

As a bonus to this setup, I can use Microsocks in the VM to also proxy a profile in Firefox to get VPN coverage in a specific Firefox profile. I use this when watching on streaming sites instead of trying to watch within the VM, since there is considerable overhead to doing that.

And that’s it, really. My VPN killswitches the VM if it ever experiences a connection interruption. And Qbittorrent is set up to use the VPN interface, as well. I use the aforementioned automatic torrents management feature to sort things when they’re done downloading.

I should state that there are some obvious downsides to this setup. The first is now I have to overcommit disk space and RAM to keep and run a guest VM. You want enough to be able to run updates and the software in the VM without running into a wall. The second is that there does seem to be a CPU penalty when downloading files (maybe it’s because of the way I’m sharing the downloads directory into the VM with virtiofs?)

I have some beginner questions, for example: if I have the arr stack running in docker with a vpn, can I browse the internet non-anonymously on that same machine without compromising identifying details, assuming qbittorrent is configured to only move traffic through a VPN? (I’m wondering if I need a dedicated piece of hardware to run everything safely)

The answer to this question is you can setup a docker system (or podman) so that all the traffic in that pod (don’t know the docker term for this) will route through the vpn. A good image to accomplish this easily and successfully is gluetun – and it will only affect the traffic in the containers, not the rest of your computer.

Personally, my setup is much more like yours and it works fine for me, except I use a VM. So all the activity gets confined to the VM and that makes a bit idiot-proof. Using automatic management in the torrent client, completed torrents get put in the correct directory. You could combine this with Jellyfin if you desired.

My own problem with Jellyfin is if I ever use it for anything I want direct playback on all relevant devices, because my computer is not good enough for transcoding (and why waste the energy and time on on-demand transcoding, anyway?) so it requires some massaging of the data to get everything right. I only use it infrequently, practically on-demand. I don’t use Jellyfin for myself.

The YT-DLP team by refusing to support DRM videos

If they did this they could be sued for the exact same reason Yuzu got sued: circumvention of DRM. That’s a crime in the USA. Apparently.

whoa…

Literally this afternoon I jumped as high as I could to see if I could touch the ceiling. I could not.

The only agreeable thing here is that sautéed garlic and onions are yummy. The rest is some serious 😬

• but if it’s
• exclusively bullets
• who can truly say?

From the top levels it’s because they want all their business friends to be able to make money hand-over-fist. If you didn’t go to the same ivy leagues or country clubs as this group, you are basically not a person to them.

And for everyone else toward the ground who vote for these people, it’s because they’re incredibly stupid and don’t understand things. You will never, ever persuade them with arguments, facts, reason, or logic. It’s pure gut-check layered on from decades of pure propaganda that tells them if their lives are worse off now, it’s because of those <fill in the minority> taking their jobs, or <fill in the foreigner> who hates their ‘freedom,’ or <fill in the grassroots activist> who is coming in to try and push for laws that only make the cost of their goods rise.

In carrot vs stick terms, this is the most unfortunate fellow: he who can’t avoid the stick.

I enjoyed a lot of the discussion in the comments

my heart melted at the simplicity of this truth!

Private health insurance is the biggest fucking scam ever. The private insurance companies benefit by getting the aggregate healthiest population into their plans (working adults). The most likely to be expensive people, i.e. old people (on medicare) or poor people (on medicaid, or not even on an insurance plan) are on government, tax payer insurance plans. There is literally no reason except for corporate profiteering that Medicare should not be expanded to cover all people.

Also all those conversations, especially in the 2020 election period, were totally bullshit. You say something like M4A will cost 44 trillion dollars or whatever, which sounds like an insane amount of money. What is often left out of the discussion is that estimated cost was 1) over 10 years and 2) has to be weighed against the current costs we already pay for insurance. So the deal was very simple: the overall costs would go down because the overall spending would be less, and at the same time millions of people without coverage would be covered, and at the same time you don’t have to contemplate stupid bullshit like in network, out of network providers. Or ever again talk to your insurance about why something is or isn’t covered. Boils my blood when I think too much about this.

Not even gonna weigh in on things like how medicare can’t negotiate prescription drug prices (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/us/politics/medicare-drug-price-negotiations-lawsuits.html), or how dental, vision, and hearing are treated separately from general healthcare, or how med school is prohibitively expensive, or how the residents after med school are overworked because the guy who institutionalize that practice was literally a cokehead. Those are all just bonus topics. The point is we are getting fleeced.

There are archives of all the rarbg magnet links. I still use them to successfully find stuff. As long as those links are out there it is still possible to help people out.

When rarbg went down I immediately went and for any torrent I still had loaded in my client I quadrupled my normal ratio (3.5 -> 12.00). Then I also just increased my ratio generally.

I wish I had more disk space to keep things going even longer, but I really gotta cycle stuff out unfortunately.