Use knockd and iptables, gone are the fucking bots.

And does it get easier to manage as you start to get used to it and make a routine?

European here. I worked many years for 40h/week and I never got used to it, really. There was not enough spare time in my life to enjoy it (especially, since commuting to work took off even more useful time). I neglected cleaning my room, postponed important appointments as much as possible and I was often too tired to do the things I love.

Since 2024, I now work 30h/week, completely from home. I have every Friday off and Thursday is a short day. My life has improved drastically. I am no longer tired all the time, I’m more motivated at work and I am actually capable of going to concerts, parties, cinema. It’s amazing.

Every human is built different. I realized I absolutely cannot function having a 9to5 job from Monday to Friday.

Only as long as Gabe Newell runs it. After that it will enshittify like any other company that needs to make profits.

I tried that Replika app before AI was trendy

Same here, it was unbelievably shallow. Everything I liked it just mimiced, without even trying to do a simulation of a real conversation. “Oh you like cucumbers? Me too! I also like electronic music, of course. Do you want some nudes?”

Even when I’m at my loneliest, I still prefer to be lonely than have a “conversation” with something like this. I really don’t understand how some people can have relationships with an AI.

I regularly visit https://vogons.org/ to talk about retro computers.

I’d say its mostly convenience. Discord is easier to use on mobile devices and provides voice chat.

Thank you! :) It’s definitely a passion project for me, because I love the game so much.

I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago. Although the activity has drastically gone down during recent years, people still occasionally come by. I’m very happy I kept it up, even though a lot of people switched over to a Discord server.

Recently we had an incident where the sole admin of the Discord server was banned and the whole Discord had to be abandoned and created from scratch. People still keep using this trash! I’m not arguing with them, I’ll just keep an alternative up. One day, when Discord really enshittifies itself to a point where it becomes unuseable, people will be happy for my stubborness. I hope.

(It’s a forum for an obscure space pirate game for the PC - I-War 2. Its first post is here.)

Rewatched that recently. I was really surprised how dark it sometimes gets for a kids’ show. It still holds up really well!

I’m a webdev and I mainly work with Vanilla JS, React and PHP - I use phpStorm now. Everything mostly works out of the box, it auto-detects my PHP environment, composer install (which is basically just npm for PHP), nice-to-have features like Stylelint and ESLint are also integrated and enable themselves by default if specific config files are found inside a project folder…it’s just nice. Open a project, see it do all of its magic, start to code.

Previously I’ve worked with VSCode and I needed a plugin for every single feature and every plugin had its own settings that you needed to be aware of. It was horrible. I was configuring my own IDE more than I was actually writing code. I get that it’s probably more flexible than phpStorm, but I just don’t have time do dig into plugin settings all of the time - and god forbid I work with a project from another developer and he uses a different extension than me for Stylelint or formatting .md files…

Derezzed by the Master Control Program