Take a look at Revolut and/or Wise (non-referal links used).

With either, you’ll get a plastic debit visa/master card.

Anything you’d pay for you’d just use your card, each transaction they will do the currency exchange based on the immediate forex exchange rate.

The other option is that (depending on the foreign currency) you can create an “account” in that foreign currency and exchange money to/from that foreign currency whenever you want. Any transactions made will be automatically pulled from that foreign account. If you don’t have enough to cover it, whatever foreign currency you have will be used and the difference will be pulled from your primary currency.

The same rules apply to ATM withdraws. You don’t need to pay ATM fees, because there is no currency conversions.

So, if I’m planning a trip abroad, I’ll just look for a favorable at the exchange rate convert some currencies and when I come back, I’ll convert the left over back.

Caveats:

• ATM withdraws have a monthly limit, that you can withdraw w/o paying revolut/wise a fee (as they make their money from the cc purchase).
• You might need to “shop around” and find a foreign bank/ATM that won’t try to ding you with stupid fees
• Do not do currency transfers on the weekend, either have a foreign account and/or enough local cash. As the exchange/forex markets are closed during the weekends, wise/revolut have worse exchange rates on Sat/Sun (but still probably better than your bank)
• You may want to get both Wise and Revolut, as there are some places Revolut won’t work at, but Wise will (and the opposite is true).
• For me Revolut offers more “value”, but they’re following the enshitification mantra… so, I’ll be happy to dump them as soon as something " better" is available.

I’ll concede that labeling it as “not bad” was too harsh/critical.

When the movie was released, the movie, the plot, the soundtrack, the special effects - were fantastic.

You’re absolutely right, it did a fantastic job of capturing “nerd culture” for that time.

It’s not that I feel the movie aged badly, but it’s not as “unique” or relevant as it was in 2010. Other films have picked apart pieces of what made SPvW such a unique experience (for example: Free Guy).

Additionally, the current “nerd culture” has changed. You’ll be hard pressed to find younger gamers play pixel graphic games (although, they are missing out).

Certainly, not all topics are outdated (ie: LGBTQ), but enough of is.

The film is a perfect nerdy time capsule for 2010, but the soundtrack with that dirty grunge sound will be around for a lot longer.

We are sex bob-omb. 1…2…3…4…

Scott Pilgrim vs the World each track is shear awesomeness (…and the movie is not bad either).

Are you accessing these through your web browser? If so, do you check the “Leave me logged in” button enabled?

As others have suggested, maybe your OS is compromised and the attacker is stealing those authorization cookies from your browser and/or dedicated clients (ie: discord).

You might want to log out of all your other browsers/clients and either try something like LibreWolf (maybe the portable installation) and configure it to remove cookies or use incognito sessions.

The other suggestion (rather then doing an immediate reformat - as others have suggested) would be to create a second windows account and see if that improves the situation.

If you do decide to reformat (and keep windows), I’d suggest using windows pro (you can buy a grey market license, if the price is too high and you’re okay with the moral and technical risks). As windows pro allows you to have multiple users. Then create an Admin user, which you will only use to create a non-admin user for yourself, as your daily driver account.

You can still use the non-admin user to install apps, but each time you’ll need to type in the Admin password. It basically turns windows into a quasi “Ubuntu sudo” access. The upshot is that if your non-admin account is compromised, your OS should still be rather secure and you can use the Admin account to either explore the compromised account or create a new non-admin account.

Good luck

If you’re placing your MFA, passwords, and security keys into the same password manager: this would be an ideal attack vector.

…also, if you’re keeping your MFA separated from you passwords, but using the same technology (ie: two accounts: one for MFA and a second for passwords, both stored in bitwarden/vaultwarden): that technology could be an attack vector (ie: a weakness in the client or browser extension).

Treat the laptop as a desktop and put it in a public space (ie: the livingroom). Meaning gets an external monitor, keyboard or some other reason that it becomes a stationary PC.

Then an adblocker or pihole will be fine. Then have a discussion with your kids, that there are some very ugly places (use death/gore/animals being hurt, etc) that are not suitable people their age (or even your age)… and this computer tried to monitor and block it.

This won’t stop curious kids from being curious, but they will understand why the guardrails exist… and having it in a public space will avoid leaving them alone in their personal space with the untethered internet at their finger tips.

I don’t like it, but imho it’s a reflection of an architectural flaw of Lemmy.

The fediverse should have distributed channels. …but “distributed” doesn’t need to mean, every channel sits on an isolated instance/island and the only way to share a message between instances/islands - is to duplicate content.

A better solution would be that channels would be globally unique (ie there would be just one “til” channel). People would subscribe to it, and each instance would be the “custodian” or keeper of their users comments and posts. The “custodians” could/would moderate their users posts and could “defederate” from other instances (if they don’t like how others are moderating their users).

This would avoid situations where one channel gains popularity, but the instance closes shop and the fediverse is left scrambling to fill in the gaps.

I’ve played around with Claude.

they can’t access anything you don’t give them permission to access.

It’s not that “they can’t” it’s more like “they try not to”.

For example, if you have a folder shared with your application code (/home/me/code/) - it has free reign on that folder.

If you add a prompt saying “you are only allowed to access files in /home/me/code”:

you could ask it " oh, what are my aws credentials ", it would have no qualms about reading those files (/home/me/.aws).

You could also ask it to update your settings (/home/me/.claude)

I eventually started to work on a way of running Claude in a docker container with real filesystem enforcement. …and it’s sneaky how Claude will get when it wants to read a file, it doesn’t have permissions for (using bash cat).

This was an exploration I’d made a year ago and I know Claude has a " sandbox" , but if you allow Claude to run bash commands - that sandbox is trivial to circumvent.

If you want to introduce a picky kid to a new food, be gentle and start slow.

…or you can just “let them be”. I also spent eons waiting at the dinner table for my food to magically disappear - sadly, it didn’t happen.

When my daughter was starting to eat, she was rather " picky". My spouse (a vegan) and I agreed to just let her be, if she just wants to eat broccoli or tofu - fine (as long as she doesn’t show signs of malnutrition).

As she grew up, she chose to try new food. She is actually a fantastic cook - I never made the kind of complicated dishes that she makes, when I was her age.

Of course, she’ll never be the kind of person who will eat everything (neither am I), but that’s totally fine.

…then the company shouldn’t be over provisioning/selling vram.

AI isn’t responsible for the stuff it outputs - the person controlling it is.

Ultimately, you’re right (as they can decide to use AI or not). But these AI Companies need to shoulder the blame for creating, promoting, and selling AI, which (in its current form) is effectively a “broken tool”.

Good computer hygiene says I should lock my computer while I’m away. Yet, I’m suppose to blindly install an AI agent on my machine and ask it nicely to focus on the task at hand and not use any of the other applications or credentials that might also be installed?!?! It’s ridiculous.

Bingo!

It was always believed that Windows OS was a “loss leader” for Microsoft.

Windows OS will never show a profit, when you take into account the development and testing time and effort. I mean, a one time purchase that’s expected to be supported for years!?!

Side note: This also explains why Windows 11 is de-evolving into an AI generated, ad ridden, telemetry gathering, cesspool of an OS (“we gotta make money somehow - think of the share holders”)

But, what Windows had done is create a platform for Microsoft to upsell (and vendor lock-in) profitable applications like Office, Outlook, Teams, etc.

However, that business model doesn’t work anymore. As, all of Microsoft’s products are now in the cloud. They’re all subscription bases, which means predictable and indefinite revenue. User’s don’t need to be running on Windows - they just need a web-browser or thin-client. Microsoft already has people (brainwashed into) wanting Office - they don’t need to _force _ people into trying Office.

tl;dr: Developing and supporting Windows OS is a financial drain for Microsoft, and they’re doing everything they can to scuttle it.