OsrsNeedsF2P

In 2021, I moved to Korea. I asked my boss to go remote, and since I had been performing well, he agreed. He even offered me the option to work Korean hours, but I opted to keep Toronto hours (an 11-hour offset) to make it last.

My work hours were 10pm to 6am most of the year, and 11pm to 7am during daylight savings. I’d sleep from 7am to 3pm, living my life from 3pm to 10pm.

The Benefits

Money

The biggest benefit: I earned 110k CAD while living in Korea. While mid-level tech jobs in Korea pay around ₩60,000,000, I had an income nearly double that. My post-tax savings were equivalent to ₩45,000,000, compared to the ₩10,000,000 I would have saved on a local salary. With double the income, I had 4.5x the spending power. I splurged—vacations, fine dining, daily outings—and still saved more than I did in Canada.

Exploiting globalization? That's the real "American Dream".

Life

Anyone who's gone to renew their driver's license at 2pm on a Thursday knows being on a different schedule is amazing. The gym was empty, services had no lines, and the solitude was invaluable. I remember hiking mountains at 10pm or walking the city streets at 4am—it was peaceful and refreshing.

Though I made friends through night school and climbing, the quiet hours allowed me to experience life at a slower pace.

The Bad Things

Social Activities

Weekend trips were brutal; I’d leave in the morning, when I normally slept, and rely on caffeine to get through the first day. More than once, I’d fall asleep at my friends' houses.

Events starting at 10am? A struggle. Corrective naps became essential. If you wanted to hang out for 4+ hours, it had to go until after sunset.

Sleep

Sleep hygiene required intense care - No phones in bed. White noise. Eye mask to block out all light. Strict sleep and wake up times (that got wrecked and had to be rebuilt after trips). I got by and learned how to power nap like a machine, but my immune system took a toll. I got sick more frequently, and took longer to recover. But yolo :P

Now, You

If you want to move to Asia on a remote job:

• It’s doable with the right motivation and discipline.
• Visas and taxes are complicated but manageable—just ask ChatGPT.
• Learn to sleep; I never used to be able to take a nap, I can borderline do it on command now. Like anything else, it's a skill that can be mastered (:

My grandfather Andrei, nicknamed Phoenix for stepping up in hopeless situations, is remembered in poor light. That doesn't do justice for the world he lived through.

Born as a Jew in Nazi Germany in 1939, at only one day old, his mother left the hospital on a boat to Estonia.

That boat would be the last one to leave Germany without being turned around.

They made it to Russia, and the family was split, with Andrei being left with his father. At age five, his mother went to Israel and hired a man to kidnap him; but since Andrei no longer knew his own mother, he didn't cooperate. Clinging onto a pole at a train station screaming for help until others intervened, he was left on his own to make his way back to his father. Whether it was at this point or later, Andrei developed several mental illnesses, including PTSD and bipolar disorder, but kept it together.

He grew up and got a PhD in physics, and his research contributed to some of the earliest flash drives. His wife had a post-doc in physics, and they lived in a research town where their two kids would get the most excellent education. But due to the lack of employment opportunities, they looked elsewhere.

A few years before the USSR collapsed, they immigrated to Italy, then Spain, and finally landing in Canada. My uncle describes my mother as cursing the family out for betraying the USSR during this time. But for Andrei, he was doing anything he could for his family.

Andrei became depressed; years later, they found electric shock therapy worked for him. He would phase in and out of it, attempting to startup various businesses.. Until one day he snapped.

He was put in a mental institution for 6 months, and upon release, my grandmother described him as aging 15 years. His red hair went entirely grey. His face was old.

While my parents worked, Andrei took great care of my siblings. But retiring peacefully was out of the question; Andrei wanted more. He left his wife, sold his assets, and bought a huge truck. He drove it down to my parents place, ripped up their lawn, disappeared for a few months, showed up at my uncle's place in the US, ripped up their lawn, and proceeded to do this on and off sporadically for around a year. Everyone disavowed his actions, but I felt differently.

One day, he called me up to work on his new business in the basement of a house he was renting. Clearly off the rails, and told me to hide under my mother's skirt when I declined. A few months later, he was hit by a car while crossing the highway at night.

My mother said she felt bad for whoever hit him.

But I still feel differently. People didn't appreciate Andrei. He lived a life of pushing forwards, despite his background - footsteps I respect and intend to closely follow. He helped his family. He never gave up. He didn't waste his final years in bed. He drove a truck until his adventures killed him.

Andrei's passion is commendable. He turned bipolar disorder into a pendulum for swinging forwards. He may have gone insane, but there were never excuses. That's what made him great. Let this post be a memory for that.

From https://kde.org/community/donations/previousdonations/

It's hard to imagine that breaking up Google would allow for innovation; they brought us Google Search, Gmail, and surely nobody can afford to host Youtube. They gave us Android, Chrome, and so much more.

But good grief - If it weren't for knowing how simple things can be, you wouldn't realize how poorly they're running these clown shows.

Take Android for example. If you want to upload an app to F-Droid, you make a Merge Request like shown here. 10 - 20 minute job. Let's check in on what it's like at Google Play...

The Frustration

So you want to upload something on Google Play. Register on the Google Console. Fill out a 9 page form talking about your past Android experience. Pay 25$. Account verification! We'll get back to you in 3 days. Ah, we need more info. Please upload your ID. We'll get back to you later. Oh you want to publish an app? First select the countries, and your category, and agree to 6 different terms and conditions, as well as the laws for every country you selected your app to be available in. Ah wait, you need more screenshots. Those dimensions are invalid. You're missing tablet screenshots. Your app icon doesn't have the background and foreground as different images. Wait, your app looks too similar to another app, denied. Hold on, are you trying to go to production without running an internal test first? Denied. Got all your ducks in a row? Good luck in the Review Gauntlet.

Ahh, so I see you want to integrate Google Play Games services. Follow this 7 step guide, go to Google Cloud, register for 3 different services, follow more UI steps that don't align with the tutorial, and get the SHA-1 of the key you're using in Google Play. Oh, you haven't released your app yet? LOL. Anyways, you need to have a privacy policy page on a website you own. You own a website, right? Also we're going to make your email public, to everyone, permanently, and you'll get a lot of spam for that. Oh sorry, we couldn't verify you owned the domain for the website you linked your privacy policy on. Denied.

How We Got Here

Google, as a monopoly, can continue to make horrendous decisions that force the ecosystem users (in this case app developers) to spend hours on workarounds and debugging the broken system; and app developers have no other choice. Smaller companies would collapse under the weight of these issues, but Google stands proud and tall, since you have no where else to go.

The Result

This stops app developers from making work out of passion. The tools Google leverages stops third party app stores from taking off. Take a step back for a moment: apps do not need to go through this for verification. It's nonsense. It's a result of Google becoming too large, and the Play Store becoming too centralized.

What Should Be Done

If you're an Android user, consider using third party app stores like F-Droid. If you're the DOJ, force Google to sell off Android. And if you're a citizen of the EU passionate about this area, submit a petition to break Google up yourself: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/petitions/en/home

This has gone on for too long.

Direct link to the PDF report: https://x41-dsec.de/static/reports/X41-Mullvad-Audit-Public-Report-2024-12-10.pdf

Titles of issues they found:

• 4.1.1 MLLVD-CR-24-01: Signal Handler’s Alternate Stack Too Small
• 4.1.2 MLLVD-CR-24-02: Signal Handler Uses Non-Async-Safe Functions
• 4.1.3 MLLVD-CR-24-03: Virtual IP Address of Tunnel Device Leaks to Net- work Adjacent Participant
• 4.1.4 MLLVD-CR-24-04: Deanonymization Through NAT
• 4.1.5 MLLVD-CR-24-05: Deanonymization Through MTU
• 4.1.6 MLLVD-CR-24-06: Sideloading Into Setup Process

Mullvad's blog post: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/the-report-for-the-2024-security-audit-of-the-app-is-now-available

"Odysee is a bunch of neonazi crap!"

For the last two weeks, I've been trying to kill a boss on Oldschool Runescape Leagues - The Inferno. Some of my online friends knew of this goal, so I wanted to make a video of the final challenge.

Most people, when making a video, immediately upload it to Youtube (or TikTok.. until next January Oo). Myself included - Many years ago, I had an active Youtube channel. But for the past couple years, anytime I made a video, it went up on Odysee instead.

There are three things I want in regards to videos:

1. The people I care about can see them
2. The videos can be archived and found in the future
3. The content helps communities I care about

Youtube ticks off the first two boxes.. But uploading to Youtube doesn't "help the communities I care about". Youtube is actively hostile to users through ads and tracking, and Google's monopoly over so many areas makes so many systems suck - Email, App development, Search, and more.

Furthermore, none of my goals are about "making it big". I'm not trying to get a bunch of subscribers (I have far too many other hobbies already). So for me, uploading on anything that's "Not Youtube" is already enough.

But going one step further is better. Remember at the start, how I said "Odysee is a bunch of neonazi crap!"? The truth is all alternative tech starts up from people leaving mainstream platforms. Fun fact, the first federated Lemmy instances were Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad.ml; this entire corner of the fediverse was a mashup of Marxists and North Korean sympathizers. But more people came, shared normal content, and now we have a great alternative to Reddit.

Long story short - Support alternative tech. This is how we get tools For The People. Also go like my Infero Cape video on Odysee :)