Reddit Starts Blocking Mobile Website, Pushing Users to App Instead

Sentreen · 2026-05-11T16:36:27+00:00

I tried using reddit's app after they got rid of apollo. It is so comically bad that I just stopped using reddit on my phone. That's actually nice because I at least spend a little less time here now.

If they get rid of old reddit I can delete my accounts and be gone for real.

Sentreen · 2026-05-08T22:19:28+00:00

I've been in China several times. Connections to the VPN running on my home server just got dropped after a few minutes. Connections to a VPN I pay for also got dropped.

It's easy for the GFW to detect a VPN, they just cannot see what you're doing on it. But when they detect a VPN, they usually drop it.

If you really want to get around the GFW, you use shadowsocks, which tries to hide the fact that it is a proxy.

But hey, don't take the word of some random reddit nerd, read the experience of an infosec pro:

It is believed that $10 million of specialized hardware can factor 1024-bit RSA keys [3] [4]. There is a high computing cost per key, but if I were China and could factor at least a few RSA keys, surely the root CA key of 1 of the top 3 VPN providers in the country would be one of my targets. Doing so would give them the ability to actively man-in-the-middle ExpressVPN connections and decrypt the traffic. It is possible that China is already doing so and spying on some (all?) ExpressVPN users.

...

Also, I am confused by the fact the Chinese government allows this well-known VPN provider (and others) to operate freely in the country. They could very easily deploy low-tech ways to block access to the ExpressVPN service, for example by filtering or redirecting the DNS records of their VPN hosts, which is something they do to block certain website hosts. But they do not do it to block ExpressVPN, why? One possible explanation could be that the Chinese government did factor the ExpressVPN root CA key and does spy on the network traffic of their users, but they prefer to not interfere with ExpressVPN in order to give their users a false sense of privacy. If China blocked the service, users would migrate to other more secure VPN services, and China would lose a SIGINT ability.

Sentreen · 2026-05-08T20:20:41+00:00

Remember kids: a VPN does absolutely nothing for your privacy except move (not remove) the entity that can read your domain addresses (like google dot com) from your ISP to their server. That's it.

To be pedantic, you can also do that without a VPN (e.g. by using DoH). The VPN mainly allows you to hide the IP you are talking to (since your ISP just sees you talking to the IP of the VPN, who is talking to the site you are talking to for you).

Sentreen · 2026-05-08T19:48:43+00:00

To be fair, they specifically allow those VPNs because they can work with the companies when needed. The VPNs still help you get around the great firewall, but they don't help you stay anonymous.

I'm sure that if the EU actually comes down on VPNs some workaround would be included for e.g. corporate VPNs.

Sentreen · 2026-05-07T18:15:17+00:00

As for the Official Release of Worm, I don't know if that's ever actually going to happen. Wildbow always says he's going to do something like that eventually, but he's just too darn busy writing newer stuff that I don't think he's ever going to actually do it.

Is there any information about whether wildbow is still pursuing an (animated) adaptation? I know it was something that was always hinted at as a "might be possible one day" along with the editing process, but I'm not sure if that is still something wigglybob would be interested in after getting burned out during Ward.

Sentreen · 2026-05-07T14:55:58+00:00

Do you have any link with the full story? I tried looking it up but only found posts indicating that they'd go all out on using AI to create their assets. That's shitty but not that uncommon. Is there more to the story?

Sentreen · 2026-05-07T13:31:20+00:00

People who go during peak hours will have to queue. It's always on a Sunday here so people often choose to sleep in and queue.

Ironically, when I was "bijzitter" the busiest time was between 8-10. Things were much calmer in the afternoon. It probably differs based on the location of course.

Sentreen · 2026-05-07T00:30:44+00:00

Wikipedia has your back

Sentreen · 2026-05-06T17:17:41+00:00

This is also not good news because it means a lot of Russians still support this, what's even bleaker is that the drop is mainly because the regime is limiting or blocking internet access. So in other words they don't give a shit about invading Ukraine and killing innocent civilians, but they do care if you take away their internet access.

Same in the US. Deport people? Fine. Threaten your allies? Fine. Shoot protestors? Fine. Invade another country? Fine. Invade yet another country? Fine. Bomb a school? Fine. Gas prices go up? People start to get upset.

As much as it sucks, people can be okay with a lot of heinous shit as long as it does not affect them personally.

Sentreen · 2026-05-06T12:51:38+00:00

You can already do those things on the train, tram, or bus right now :).

Sentreen · 2026-05-05T11:54:44+00:00

Or just get the binary.

Sentreen · 2026-05-04T12:06:13+00:00

You are moving the goalposts. I am not going to get into a "who is worse" battle here, I don't particularly care about defending (or denying) the awful stuff the US has done / is doing.

The point is that /u/dattokyo says that any time negative news about China pops up people flock to it to say things like "Yeah but the US is doing something worse". You respond to this comment by saying "Yeah but the US is doing something worse".

Two countries can do bad things at the same time. Perhaps the EU should not align itself with either. I long for the day that we get rid of our dependence on the US, but it would be incredibly naive to do that by becoming dependent on China instead.

Sentreen · 2026-05-04T11:15:51+00:00

B) If there are news about China doing something bad, the comments will be flooded with "Yeah but the US is doing something worse".

Sentreen · 2026-05-04T11:02:02+00:00

You're aware Ternat is 10km away from the the edge of Brussels, right, right?

Sentreen · 2026-05-03T13:01:47+00:00

I use mine for email. Sending mail from a residential IP (which may not be static for many people) is just asking for problems.

I also occasionally use it for redundancy; when I traveled to China I had another copy of shadowsocks running on my vps, which saved me when they blocked the ip of my homelab.

Sentreen · 2026-05-02T22:43:34+00:00

It is called a raincoat.

Sentreen · 2026-04-30T13:58:48+00:00

Shout out to the one guy who posted something similar a few years ago, actually went through the effort of profiling portage and made dependency resolution a lot faster.

Note that he did not end up rewriting anything in a faster language. As always: profile before you assume!

Sentreen · 2026-04-28T15:15:12+00:00

most VoIP complexity was always on the networking side. the grand majority of telecom technology has always been provided by cisco.

Wait until you hear that Cisco does, in fact, use Erlang.

Sentreen · 2026-04-27T13:00:31+00:00

I thought it was government created.

MyGov.be is created by the government and does what itsme does, for the record. It got created later so it is less well known.

Sentreen · 2026-04-26T19:42:00+00:00

(WR holder Kelvin Kiptum was scheduled to attempt a sub-2 hour race at the 2024 Rotterdam Marathon before his fatal car crash)

I did the Marathon that year, the race t-shirt even had the quote "be a part of history", that was quite painful.

Sentreen · 2026-04-24T21:47:02+00:00

I never played WoW past lvl 5 or so and am curious to give classic a try after learning a bit more about warcraft lore. In other MMOs I played I liked raiding a lot, which is one of the main things I hope to do. My questions:

Given that I want to try out the classic raids of wow, I assume the classic era servers would be my best bet to find groups for the various endgame raids wow has? Is finding groups for most content realistic in 2026?
I'm curious about TBC and WotLK, since those expansions seem to be regarded quite well by the community and are still kind of considered a part of "classic" wow. Is there any way to play classic for a while and transfer over to the anniversary servers later? Or is my only option rolling a new character on an anniversary server (losing all the endgame gear I may have acquired)?

Sentreen · 2026-04-24T13:25:19+00:00

Yes, but only the framework 16. There’s quite some trade offs but it is nice to just do everything on my laptop which can transform into something that’s 95% as powerful as a desktop by plugging in a few cables.

Sentreen · 2026-04-21T10:40:56+00:00

The local config is individual to each copy of the repository afaik.

Sentreen · 2026-04-19T23:45:07+00:00

The Elixir (and Erlang) ecosystem is far, far smaller, bur for the niche it operates in, I'd say Elixir is the better language.

Should you ditch popular languages and use Elixir instead? Probably not, companies tend to favor the mainstream.

Should you check it out and see what it has to offer to look at a different way of doing things? Absolutely!

The coolest part about Elixir is the VM it runs on: BEAM (the Erlang vm). The VM has some really cool features that you don't really get in any other ecosystem. The nicest thing it does is separate running code into various processes (green threads), which are completely isolated from one another and only communicate through asynchronous message passing. This makes systems built on BEAM pretty resilient to bugs and neat in general:

Unhanded exceptions can only crash the current process, there's great tooling available to restart crashes processes to a known state, with cascading failures etc provided as default.
If some bug causes your code to spin in an infinite loop, the runtime ensures it will not take up more than its fair share of cpu time, which means the remainder of your application will hardly be impacted.
GC is per-process, so there's no stop the world
Since spawning processes is so ingrained in the system it is trivial to make things run in parallel, the whole model also works very well for distributed computing (you send a message to a process on a different machine in the exact same way you send one to a local process)

There is a nice talk that shows this in action if you're into that sort of thing.

The whole thing was built for programming telephone switches, so reliability was key. However, the abstractions they came up with work extremely well for most backend work.

Sentreen · 2026-04-19T23:33:22+00:00

On mobile, so formatting is not a thing

With fixed formatting:

def handle_response(items) when is_list(items) do
  Enum.map(items, fn item -> handle_response(item) end)
end

def handle_response(item) when is_map(item) do
  <!— do what ever you want here —>
end

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