Everyone I need to talk to is in my contacts. If you’re not in my contacts, my phone doesn’t even ring. You go straight to voicemail.

I was fine with phone calls when I was younger. Now it’s mostly spam robocalls or scammers or both. Nobody seems interested in solving those problems.

The Dead Internet conspiracy theory was written with total crackpot paranoid thinking about ruling elites, likely antisemitic undertones, and general tinfoil hat reasoning about AI. Plus generative language models were nowhere near advanced or skilled enough at the time the conspiracy was purported to be happening.

But it was accidentally prophetic in at least two ways by 2024:

1. Corporations have completely strangled online social spaces to the point that most people only visit about 1 to 3 of them, and
2. Online discourse in those social spaces has been absolutely captured and manipulated by multiple governments trying to manipulate other countries and stir them into pointless ragebait frenzies.

It wasn’t due to the illuminati, the Jews, or anything weird and bigoted conspiracies of old have traditionally blamed. It was thanks to billionaires, corporate and government espionage, AI grifters, and unregulated scammer networks (digital currency counts too) jumping onto the same technology at the same time and ruining everything on the Internet in similar ways.

I’m reusing a blade server I managed to snag from a company I worked for in 2008. It’s perfect as a media server for friends and family. It is only recently degrading slightly but hey, it lasted a long time!

Point is you can use almost anything. Do your homework on compatible parts and make what you can afford

This is exactly right. Taking obviously thoughtless statements/insults seriously is a stupid move. It gives a bit more life to lies and accepts completely baseless criticisms as debatable. In debate club you might earn a lot of points. In front of a bully, you’re reacting exactly how they want you to react. You’re giving them the attention they want. Hitting the bully back is common sense. And that’s why they’re whining. The bully always cries when you fight back. Don’t dish out shit if you can’t take it.

There are lots of parasitic bugs in this story, including Elon Musk

I don’t know how seriously to take this kind of discussion sometimes. I can rationalize that a person can do awful things to people in a fictional setting and it’s not a commentary of who they are as a person. On the other hand I cannot escape the feeling that I am replying to a genuine sadistic monster, based on everything you just said in this post. Forget all of that. Unnecessary commentary when there’s a point I want to make.

There’s a crucial difference in video games vs more free-form varieties like TTRPGs: You’re on The Rails. Video game RPGs are almost always on the rails. There’s no real sandbox game anywhere. Like there are good attempts, but at the end of the day, any game has programmed expectations for your inputs and what it can output. Video games can’t possibly fathom how deeply evil you could actually get. It would be a developmental and technological nightmare to try programming in all of your awful choices and how they could spiral the narrative. They have to do their best within the limitations of how much could possibly fit in a game. And I’m assuming the game companies also have to take into account the ratings system, and PR. Even if you could play the game any way you want, good AND bad choices, you’re going to get odd looks from people if they know the game allows you to sexually abuse NPCs, or enslave people through extortion. You know what I’m getting at? The real limitation isn’t the technology, even though that’s already a big one. Even in virtual, completely fictional settings, being allowed to play that shit out is wholly monstrous. And I can’t imagine the toll it would take on designers who would be tasked to write it.

So if you really want all of that and accept the risks, make your own CRPG where you can go all out on Evil. Being critical of developers and designers for not being willing to go as far as your twisted mind can go in a video game is a wild take. Go play in an evil TTRPG campaign if you want to get those kicks. It’s way easier.

I’d say for myself it’s a tit for tat situation.

If the company I hypothetically pirate from is a total prick, mistreats their employees, donates a part of the money they earned from my purchase to lobby to my government to reduce the rights of minorities, I won’t give a single fuck. I may even just never touch their product out of spite.

Are they inoffensive and fairly neutral? I likely won’t pirate if I have the means to buy it.

Are they basically ConcernedApe? I will follow them to the ends of the earth showering them with praise and riches. Never pirate and would actively shame those who do

I approve of this expanded answer. I may have been too ELI5 in my post.

If the OP has read this far, I’m not telling you to use docker, but you could consider it if you want to store all of your services and their configurations in a backup somewhere on your network so if you have to set up a new raspberry pi for any reason, now it’s a simple sequence of docker commands (or one docker-compose command) to get back up and running. You won’t need to remember how to reinstall all of the dependencies.

It’s virtual machines but faster, more configurable with a considerably larger set of automation, and it consumes less computer resources than a traditional VM. Additionally, in software development it helps solve a problem summarized as “works on my machine.” A lot of traditional server creation and management relied on systems that need to be set up perfectly identical every deployment to prevent dumb defects based on whose machine was used to write it on. With Docker, it’s stupid easy to copy the automated configuration from “my machine” to “your machine.” Now everyone, including the production systems, are running from “my machine.” That’s kind of a big deal, even if it could be done in other ways naturally on Linux operating systems. They don’t have the ease of use or the same shareability.

What you’re doing is perfectly expected. That’s a great way of getting around using Docker. You aren’t forced into using it. It’s just easier for most people

Complaining about AI in all the wrong ways to complain about AI. AI is definitely a poor substitute for actually well thought out feature implementations. But it has nothing to do with why your iPhone sucks to navigate on.

Oh you installed Windows 11? That’s your problem right there. Go back to Windows 10

I think I would simply comply, maliciously.

What’s my reason? I’m going on a journey in alignment with my religion. Try telling me I can’t follow my religious beliefs on the record.