They do give away lots of freeleech tokens to get your ratio going, tho

I2P traffic isn’t that difficult to detect or block, mainly because bootstrapping a node requires connecting to known reseed servers. They can block those reseed servers and your node would never be able to connect to the network.

GiB weren’t invented by drive manufacturers (although they definitely benefit from it, and are incredibly scummy about it). It was invented by the SI people. GiB make sense, because the prefix “Giga” means 10⁶, while in binary it meant 2²⁰. It was a mess before, and GiB just standardized it in a way that is easy to understand and consistent with other units.

I do think we should force drive manufacturers to express their drive capacity in binary format, tho.

All software has always interpreted it in binary as far as I know. There never was a good standard, and the most common way to differentiate in my experience was using KB as metric (decimal, SI) and K as binary. It’s easy to confuse with the already convoluted standard of KB being a kilobyte and Kb being a kilobit.

The reason for the added “i” is that in every other system, kilo means 1000. Someone at the SI realized that it didn’t make any sense to have it mean something different in software so they invented the Ki prefix (instead of K) to mean 1024. That is now the standard, and it’s part of the SI (coloquially metric). As a consequence of this, you can technically use the Ki prefix with any other SI unit, so you can also use the KiM (kibimeter), which is 1024 meters. Idk why you’d use it, but it’s funny that the option exists.

It will work fine, the issue is drive degradation. Especially if you don’t have a lot of ram, swap will be used a lot. SSDs degrade with writes, so swapping on them reduces their life. This is especially noticeable on old or cheap SSDs, which tend to degrade faster. One example is those 8GB RAM macs with soldered 256GB SSDs, which due to cheap and small SSDs and low RAM were breaking really quickly.

If your SSDs have a lot if space, they are relatively new and you have a lot of RAM (32 GB is perfectly fine), you won’t have much issue. If you’re worried about it, you can always check drive health with smartctl

There are (mainly) 3 reasons for that:

• TB vs TiB: Computers don’t count drive space in metric units, they count it in powers of 2. This means that, for you, 1 TB is 1000 GB, while for a computer, 1 TiB is 1024 GiB. Drive manufactirers take advantage of this, and only count space in metric (TB). So when you plug the drive into your computer, and it converts to GiB, you end up with 1 TB = 931.3 GiB. Windows hasn’t helped this confusion, I remember it doing something weird like counting in GiB and displaying it as GB.

• Reserved space: Many OSes reserve some space on their drives for special stuff. This is especially the case with Linux and ext4, where it by default reserves a percentage of the drive to root. This is to optimize distribution of files around the disk, which limits fragmentation. The system slowly frees more of this space as you fill up the disk, and at the end it should leave you with 100% of the space.

• Formatting: Empty drive space isn’t the same as usable drive space. In order to use a drive you need to format it, which doesn’t just blank it. Formatting a drive adds a filesystem to it, which is what allows you to write files and folders to it. This filesystem takes up some space, and reserves more space for inodes and, in some cases, a filesystem journal. Some filesystems have even more features that also take up some space.

Afaik qbittorrent also has a feature to torrent over i2p

If you want a way to torrent without a VPN, while using anonymous networks, look into I2P. It’s not a mesh network, and it will be slow, but it’s suitable for torrenting.

All of the energy that does calculations gets turned into heat. The only energy that doesn’t get directly turned into heat is the mechanical energy produced by the fans (which ends up turning into heat), and the electromagnetic radiation (which also ends up turning into heat).

If the calculations didn’t convert energy into heat, a computer would essentially use no power. You can think of a computer like a really complex wire. The power consumption you see is actually the heat loss of that wire. The less heat you lose, the more efficient the wire is.

Not so forever now

High Dairy Milk Ingestion

I’m very sensitive to high frequency coil whine from electronics, but I’ve never heard a stove do that. I don’t know when you heard one make coil whine, or how cheap it was, but I can tell you I’ve never owned a stove with coil whine. I don’t even buy the most expensive ones (just midrange). Definitely give them another go.

Oh, have I got news for you

If you want a decently hidden VPN, I recommend setting up an OpenVPN instance, with a TCP tunnel, encapsulated within Stunnel. It manages to stay hidden even with DPI.

The setup is a bit convoluted, especially if you want everything to use certificates for maximum security. It’s also not the fastest VPN, and TCP isn’t the most efficient for a VPN. But it’s decent enough for a normal user.

You can set it up on both Linux and Windows, even having both ends of the tunnel on Windows, but it’s easier and better to set it up on Linux.

I know we have !boneappletea@lemmy.world It’s not about names, though

What’s wrong with the logo? They already simplified it a lot, and they’re not the only serious app with an animal as their logo. It’s distinctive and tbh I prefer it to a bland single color silicon valley logo.

The issue with “tech-leaning” people who believe AI is the future is that they’re in the “peak of mount stupid” part of the Dunning-Kruger curve. Once you get past that, you realize AI was never good at anything and it’s harmful to everyone in a million different ways. Most of lemmy’s tech-leaning people have already realized that, and are actively trying to avoid AI.

If it is a productivity boost for you, it is at the cost of someone else who will have to proofread and test everything you do. LLMs (and genAI) are useless.

I got a 16TB HDD for 300€, yesterday I looked at it and it was 800€ (apparently discounted from 1000€ lol)

Keep in mind that:

• Anonymous mode doesn’t really do anything, but it also doesn’t hurt having it on.
• Disabling DHT and PeX will make you unable to download torrents from certain platforms, like TPB, unless they are also registered in other trackers.

In addition, I’d also set it to only allow encrypted connections, which for some reason they don’t say there.

Either way, Mullvad is not a good VPN for torrenting, because it can’t do port forwarding anymore. You already know this, but you’ll have a lot of issues with low torrent availability, low speeds and a difficulty to seed.

If you already don’t mind paying for a VPN, why not look into seedboxes? They also hide your IP when torrenting, they can have port forwarding and better speeds than your VPN or home internet, they’re online 24/7 so you can seed a lot, and you can connect to them with a VPN to get the torrented files if you really want.

Additionally, you can also buy a VPN with port forwarding and bind only your torrent client to it, so that no other traffic or information is flowing through it. This works if you don’t trust any VPN offering port forwarding.

If you want an explanation on the private tracker logic: Private trackers usually have requirements to join. That way, companies can’t plant fake seeds that identify you and snitch to the ISP. They’re also relatively small, so not closely monitored. When you get a torrent from a private tracker, DHT, PeX and local peer discovery are disabled on that torrent. As long as you have encryption enabled, you’ll be relatively safe from ISP letters. However, this only applies if you’re getting your torrents only from private trackers.