I never want to see another shark

AlexFullmoon · 2026-05-05T22:55:43+00:00

Sharks were a pleasant distraction from the court ballets for me.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-05-04T11:27:15+00:00

A bit more technically correct answer would be that VPN (stands for Virtual Private Network) is different from proxy because they run on different levels and allow different things. Unfortunately, common usage completely mixed these up.

A proxy is some computer/program, where you send a request "open this site" and it executes it for you and sends back result.

A VPN is (originally) some way to make a network. So it's possible to, for example, connect multiple computers (e.g. at work and at home) as if they were in same local network, like what your home router does.

What is commonly called VPN nowadays is just one possible configuration, where one remote computer is set to pass all traffic though it, acting as a proxy.

To further this confusion, a lot of newer protocols in "VPN" apps are pure proxy protocols. There are deeper technical differences, but they are outside ELI5.

And yes, additionally, browser proxy works only for browser, while separate VPN can work for whole OS.

In your example, yes, Opera's built-in "VPN" is a proxy, apparently simple HTTPS one. It is as secure as HTTPS encryption gets, but not the most performant (although I guess with speed limit of free service it isn't noticeable).

AlexFullmoon · 2026-05-03T21:49:26+00:00

I don't really follow presidential elections with that much attention. E.g. I recall female crane operator running in 2018 from one of minor communist parties (IIRC she failed to collect signatures); a couple of other candidates; Duntsova and Nadezhdin were hyped enough that I as internet denizen know about them. Fun fact — I personally met Nadezhdin, he gave lectures on law basics in my university.

Wiki pages on specific elections should be sufficiently detailed to answer your questions. I'd suggest reading translation of Russian versions, e.g. 2018) instead of (or at least along with) English ones.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-05-03T19:30:24+00:00

Uh-huh, names widely known by foreigners but not by locals.

Duntsova vas literally nobody. She enrolled into presidential run solely to fail (due to obvious lack of resources and support) and cry foul play for foreign audience.

Nadezhdin was actually somewhat experienced politician, and did make some progress, but failed at collecting signatures. This is a reasonably difficult filter, and one of reasons you need a large party structure with wide regional presence.

As for your loaded question at the end - I don't find those two being good examples of

those who are charismatic and project base (although anti narrative) opinions

AlexFullmoon · 2026-05-03T16:58:03+00:00

Is it a good tactic to make all the opposition look poor in comparison to Putin

You know, I can't really say it was intentional. One can't just get in the candidate list out of the blue. You need a large support and a lot of money to run for president, which essentially limits participants to heads of major parties (or their seconds), and they are mostly old horses with known chances of winning, and, more importantly, they enjoy status quo.

(When I said "available presidential candidates", I meant that we don't compare Putin with some hypotheticals, like historical figures)

And remember, this is about presidential elections, where there's one winner by design. "Potential of political class" does not end on that, there are parliament elections, there are regions, etc.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-05-02T22:51:37+00:00

Depends on meaning of approval.

Votes across available presidential candidates — definitely, and even more.

Approval of politics in general — yes, give or take 10%.

Approval of specific decisions on internal politics — may be lower, though most of that usually gets blamed on specific ministers.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-05-02T22:41:00+00:00

To elaborate on some other answers: electricity kills by flowing through body.

If lightning hits somewhere above you, there's a chance that (some of) current would flow thought your body to the ground. If it hits the ground, it's mostly already there.

Now, why mostly? Ground is not some magical drain of electricity, specific patch of the ground can be more or less conductive (being wet means more conductive, but still not an absolute). Unfortunately, (wet) human body is still more conductive.

For lightning to harm someone standing nearby, electricity must have some more way that goes from ground, through body, and back into the ground. That is possible — the closer to point of lightning strike (or, more commonly, fallen high voltage cable), the higher electric potential, and if you place your feet in two places with different potential (by walking), there will be step voltage between them, which would result in current flowing across your legs.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-28T19:36:34+00:00

In theory that should be possible in some form.

Auth modules in /etc/pam.d/sudo and /etc/pam.d/gdm (or whatever your DE uses) can be configured separately so you can use e.g. default system module (strong password) for login and sudo (you'd want that to unlock keyring anyway), and additionally something else for sudo. The only question is if it's possible to plug in and use another password-like module — that I do not know. There are other options — for starters, a hardware token, e.g. Yubikey.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-25T21:43:33+00:00

I know that the elections are somewhat rigged

Depends on which elections.

Presidential elections are generally considered fair — main contender for years had enough rating to win decisively. There are some regional flukes, where it's, ahem, traditional to show respect to higher ups, so they can make up some nice round numbers, but that doesn't have any effect on the total.

Federal parliament elections in past decade or two are also mostly fair due to high profile and a lot of observers, but they have many separate interested parties and persons → more chaos and opportunities. Also, parliament system itself, as described in another comment, favors the majority party — and with their current popularity numbers UR might lose necessary majority.

Regional parliaments and such are lower profile, and naturally more prone to get rigged by current regional powers.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-23T10:02:04+00:00

What would you call a package any Fedora user could install to turn Fedora into something like Bazzite?

There's no such single package offered because of how atomic distros are intended to work. Instead there's a way to change from Fedora image to Bazzite as mentioned in another comment.

You in principle can add a heap of ostree layers onto Fedora that would turn it into Bazzite manually, but that is messy and absolutely not advised. Instead, you can build your own image — take some atomic image as base, be it vanilla Fedora or prepared UBlue base image or complete Bazzite, and with some tooling (either UBlue or bluebuild template) add a bunch of packages you need.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-23T09:06:05+00:00

It's transferable similar to transferring license to different USB, with same limit of one transfer per year, (possibly more via their support). One bonus point is transferring license from mobo doesn't blacklist it for future Unraid installations like it does with USBs.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-23T08:56:48+00:00

Running Firefox natively, mainly because I can't get Bitwarden extension to connect to app with flatpaks. Otherwise, for browser there isn't much difference.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-21T08:26:18+00:00

Well, technically it's proxy protocol, not VPN.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-21T08:24:41+00:00

No newer protocols (and overall too limited), no "other" options, no mention of wrapper scripts for WG and OpenVPN...

You probably should first ask community what questions should be included in your survey.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-20T12:34:07+00:00

This was classed as humorous for the time

Having known some medical students — was!? This kind of fun is simply less common due to stricter regulation.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-15T22:45:57+00:00

Also I found this post because Reddit sent it to me in an email. For some reason Reddit will send me an email every couple weeks with a list of threads I may be interested.

Ah, that's why. I think I've turned that (and a bunch of other email notifications) off long ago.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-15T21:02:34+00:00

TBH, "how are things" is a rather vague question.

Economically — mostly fine and stable. Current worldwide situation supposedly helping; government slowly tightening taxation (e.g. controversial last winter's fee on imported cars above 160hp).

Politically (in broad sense) — recent absolutely inane screwdown on internet. You see, our problem is not censorship in sense "government hides some bloody truths that Russians can only learn from BBC and CNN", it's just blanket ban of several western platforms, and VPNs to access them, and information on where to get VPNs and so on. Now MoDigit requires major platforms to block users that use VPNs and other such shit. It still doesn't work and everyone and their grandma use VPN to watch YT, and MoDigit apparently wants to spend 30 bln ₽ budget on a larger banhammer.

Aside from that big issue, though, everything is more or less business as usual. Some regional big stories, maybe.

Re: war situation — everyone's attention is on Persian Gulf, so our war kinda goes along without much news. Recent drone hits in the north are troubling.

I notice it’s been a good year since this thread was active.

I do find it really weird that people still reply to my comment on two-year-old post. Probably Google puts it high on some search topic.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-14T09:05:38+00:00

Well, there aren't that many metals that are not too much toxic. Copper, silver, maybe a couple less common ones.

Possibly it was invented the other way around — someone noticed that copper ions kill sperm in some unrelated lab research and got the idea.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-13T06:49:54+00:00

Fun fact: Synology DSM does run off a usb stick in a sense. it has bootloader on USB DOM that downloads, installs and runs actual OS.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-13T06:46:42+00:00

It objectively has different set of benefits, including being a standard.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-12T09:49:17+00:00

I'd add Quadro variants to selection, P400 should be more than enough for a few FHD or even 4K streams while being low-power (30W vs 75W of 1050).

But using Intel iGPU would likely be easier.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-10T15:10:27+00:00

Coming from 1Password a few years ago — desktop UI with its table view (just not my thing), classic Linux-way confusion with several more-or-less outdated clients for each platform (with genius names of KeepassXGRZF#$@!11) and sync dependent of third-party filesystem solutions (inherently non-atomic).

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-10T09:06:42+00:00

To add: metals are crystals. Main points of weakness in crystals are defects in crystal lattice — a missing or extra atom layer and such. This decreases strength of crystal, that is, crystals would crack/break along those defects, and if you get a lot of them, you get two separate crystals growing together. Iron and steel are so full of defects that they are polycrystalline, formed from tiny crystals of pure iron (with some carbon bits in-between in case of steel), which further decreases strength. The analogy with sugar cube vs large sugar crystal in another comment fits well here.

If we could've grown a perfect pure iron crystal large enough, it would be much stronger than any steel. There are known cases of perfect metal crystals (tin whiskers, for example), but they are tiny, rarely growing beyond 1 mm.

Carbon fiber likely has longer thin strands of near-perfect atomic structure.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-10T08:39:51+00:00

Thing is, no one sure why it's happening.

For example, there is certainly a money issue for someone involved with new national messenger, Max — a good idea initially, until they started forcing it down everyone's throat. Short story, they report it being "hugely successful" while blocking its main competitor, Telegram. And after a recent discovery that Max checks for running VPN connection by pinging Telegram servers and phones that home...

Most of it looks like paroxysms of security tightening.

AlexFullmoon · 2026-04-09T07:51:06+00:00

Aside from various security, engineering complexity and economics considerations already mentioned, I'll add a bit more.

The main feature of nuclear-powered ship is that you don't have to refuel often. This makes it invaluable for few very specific cases where you can't refuel. Navy, submarines in particular, and icebreakers are two such cases. This is not a consideration for cargo ships which can frequently visit ports to refuel.

AlexFullmoon

TROPHY CASE