I don't think I quite agree about governments being predatory by nature.

Well, if you look at the history you might change your mind. If you look at the Top 10 Most Politically Influential Countries, by US News, you will notice that out of the 10, at least half cannot be considered "beneficial".

• I hope we can agree that Russia (1) and China (3) are predatory. But in case you don't believe so:

  • Russia: I guess you can look at the recent invasion of Ukraine, or the arrest of Navalny for "extremism", or the arrest of Maria Ponomarenko for speaking against the war in Ukraine.
  • China: I shouldn't need to link anything, but at least I'll point to Chen Pinlin arrested for the crime of making a documentary.

• We have the UAE (9) and Saudi Arabia (7), who will literally kill you for the crime of being a journalist [SA], being gay [SA], and arrest you for speaking against them [UAE]

• Israel (5): I guess it depends on where you stand with the current Israel-Hamas situation. But I wouldn't say Israel has an utopian government.

• Iran (10): From numerous results from a quick Google search, I can point to Pakhshan Azizi being sentenced to death for her humanitarian work.

That's 6/10 of the most influential governments being provably predatory against their own citizens.

I mean, they often can’t even jail executives for criminal decisions or negligence.

That's one of the unfortunate advantages of creating companies, but I believe such protections are needed for the average citizen who wants to start their own business. Maybe you disagree.

In Elon’s case, I do believe governments around the world are going to have to adapt to protect their citizens from popular, but provably false and dangerous propaganda, as well as protect their privacy in the EU’s case.

If you must "protect" your citizens at all cost from misinformation being spread on X, then you can do what Brazil did, and just force all ISPs to block traffic to it, then fine thousands of dollars to those who get caught using a VPN to access it. This is also extremely predatory (against X and Brazil citizens), but nobody cared for some reason.

Also, I agree, we both aren’t lawmakers. So for now I will just have to cheer any attempt at adaptation, and hope that their solution is functional and passes scrutiny.

Hopefully it can be solved in a way that doesn't harm small businesses.

Everyone thanks you for your helpful insight into this topic.

Gotta ask, what would you propose that would curb Elon from willfully committing crimes as he is?

I’m not a lawmaker so I don’t know. And it hasn’t been dealt with by those who are because it’s not an easy decision. But the solution can’t possibly be allowing governments to damage the owner’s personal finances for choices at the company level. Truth is you can’t open this road for Elon Musk and never use it again, because that’s never how it goes down. If this is allowed to happen, more people will be unwilling to open businesses because the only protection that they’re supposed to have can be completely ignored by the government. Governments are as predatory as mega corporations, and neither can be given too much power. This takes away power from the companies and gives it to the government, not the average citizen.

Do you think that there's a way to systematically even the playing field?

I don’t know, and nobody else knows.

I agree. They can try to change the laws, and if the majority of those with voting powers agree on a way to handle these cases while doing more good than harm, I’m sure few would complain.

There’s no need to give a company a “way out”. The government can be as harsh as it wants to be within the limits of the law. But as soon as you start targeting the owner when he is supposed to be financially protected by the law, there are worse consequences in the long term. No matter how much they personally fine Elon, he has infinite money, this doesn’t really hurt him and I doubt he cares since he seems more focused in helping Trump win than helping X (or himself) succeed.

From the repo:

A random DNS and HTTPS internet traffic noise generator provides enhanced privacy and security by obfuscating users' online activities. It generates random, non-user-initiated queries to DNS servers and encrypted HTTPS connections, making it difficult for third parties such as ISPs, surveillance systems, or malicious actors to analyze and track actual browsing patterns. This added layer of traffic noise reduces the effectiveness of traffic analysis and profiling techniques, making it harder to identify specific behaviors, websites, or services accessed by the user.

Technically, even if your data is encrypted, the amount of data you send (and the time between packets) can be analyzed to at the very least figure out what website you're on, and who knows what else (i.e. Youtube's HTML, CSS, and JS files will be different than Facebook's, so the amount of data sent will be different, and you can train an AI to recognize these patterns). This app pretty much it protects you against packet analysis from your ISP or anyone else who could monitor your network. I guess this assumes that you're using a VPN or some sort of proxy since it's not very useful otherwise.

Yes. Like every system, there are those who abuse it. But you must be careful so that while trying to punish those abusers, you don't end up creating avenues to also punish those who don't abuse the system, but simply make a mistake. This sets a precedent so that the government can target the assets of the owner of the company if they're not satisfied the company punishment, which doesn't sound as cool when the company in question is your family's bakery or your neighbor's paralegal office.

Sounds good in principle, but isn't the one of the main purposes of creating an LLC or Corporation to shield your personal assets from the company's finances? Everyone cheers for these policies until you're the one they're coming for. I hope you're as cheerful when the government wipes your personal bank account as consequence of your company's affairs.

Funny enough, it does. Here's the full list of supported formats. Line 54:

const char FileView::kFileFilter = ".wav *.flac *.wv *.ogg *.oga *.opus *.spx *.ape .mpc " ".mp2 *.mp3 *.m4a *.mp4 *.aac *.asf *.asx .wma " ".aif *.aiff *.mka *.tta *.dsf .dsd " ".cue *.m3u *.m3u8 *.pls *.xspf .asxini " ".ac3 .dts " ".mod *.s3m *.xm .it" ".spc *.vgm";

Although like .spc, it doesn't support seeking, you have to listen to the whole file in order or restart for the beginning.

Pipewire has some mixing functionality through tools like pwvucontrol, and graph connections through Helvum.

Technically it has been a thing since like 2015, but Pipewire 1.0 was only released 10 months ago , even though many distributions were already using it by default since 2021 (Fedora) and 2022 (Ubuntu, Pop! OS), given how much of an improvement it was over pulseaudio.

Yeah it is interesting how they don’t advertise it. Who knows what else they have lol

Also, it might be worth noting that Strawberry does support SPC AND VGM files since 2022.

Makes sense. Thanks!

Not trying to blame you or anything, just stating the facts. It does sound like you don’t want to hear the other side though, and are completely convinced that these issues you’re having are normal to the average Linux system.

Installing a recent version of a normal Linux distribution (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint) will come by default with the following: Pipewire server (most likely wireplumber), Wayland, network drivers (except Debian) for most adapters, stable graphics drivers (unless you’re an NVIDIA victim), a DE of your choice (KDE, GNOME, Cosmic, etc). This setup will not have any audio cracking or popping, no flickering at certain resolutions, working USB ports. However, if you’re the type who refuses to update from the unmaintainable Xorg, old pulseaudio/alsa drivers, uses some obscure distribution, uses an NVIDIA GPU, or uses hardware from 2 decades ago, then you’ll have a horrible experience and it will only get worse with time, not better (unless you have an NVIDIA GPU, which will get not-garbage drivers eventually).

Can you name the format you’re using to store 1:54:48 of music in 4.72 MB?

You get your music from GIMP?

You are saving your music in a format more efficient than opus or aac? What format is that?

What’s the “plenty of stuff that doesn’t work”? And what audio/video issues are you having? Pipewire is miles better than anything Windows can conjure up in latency, quality, and customization. Video is literally just rendering pixels, which works with web browsers, and local video players (mpv and vlc). The only valid complaint is [Windows] software availability.

Where do you even get an audio file with a .xcf format?