So most dorms don't want you using your own routers because a bunch of student routers causes A LOT of inference.

You should probably reach out not to the dorm folks but the university networking folks as they're the ones that will ultimately make the decision on whether or not to turn things off/disconnect you.

A cheap networking switch would probably be okay by them to get some more wired connections in your dorm room (routers aren't really a great way to do that).

https://www.amazon.com/Linksys-Business-LGS105-Unmanaged-Enclosure/dp/B00FV12VSW/ref=mp_s_a_1_1_sspa?crid=3PUXDK6TFLZIT&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.zm2b2eGNCSReGFJuUskv6-s3cUVDK12lfqOmf729Jjx1nw8mI07xRjx4RZCcnWDhplIUW-7IOfSn6R7TMu0yVy_k9hGXtOs0SNS7RO8sN4RI5aa_8-iwSOXz6biaUH5pE27eM8eYyBzJl9tkYxX4erfrbMwkWwhSrqIKQGOSqx1DQ1z5ZiDGCyQ_u0k8IhaN1Ra-Zpsr07cg-ZjJnDz6lA.iHHYMOhPc6OW0LmOOPkf8taxFxWnD5Sbwy_NxZwTQbU&dib_tag=se&keywords=network+switch&qid=1725717407&sprefix=network+%2Caps%2C186&sr=8-1-spons&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9waG9uZV9zZWFyY2hfYXRm&psc=1

As a secondary concern, using a router will cause a double NAT for all your connected devices (universities don't operate in the way ISPs do). That could cause some weird networking shenanigans, particularly for anything peer-to-peer like online games.

Sure, there's a cost to breaking things up, all multiprocessing and multithreading comes at a cost. That said, in my evaluation, single for "unity builds" are garbage; sometimes a few files are used to get some multiprocessing back (... as the GitHub you mentioned references).

They're mostly a way to just minimize the amount of translation units so that you don't have the "I changed a central header that all my files include and now I need to rebuild the world" (with a world that includes many many small translation units) problem (this is arguably worse on Windows because process spawning is more expensive).

Unity builds as a whole are very very niche and you're almost always better off doing a more targeted analysis of where your build (or often more importantly, incremental build) is expensive and making appropriate changes. Note that large C++ projects like llvm, chromium, etc do NOT use unity builds (almost certainly, because they are not more efficient in any sense).

I'm not even sure how they got started, presumably they were mostly a way to get LTO without LTO. They're absolutely awful for incremental builds.

Slow compared to what exactly...?

The worst part about headers is needing to reprocess the whole header from scratch ... but precompiled headers largely solve that (or just using smaller more targeted header files).

Even in those cases there's something to be said for the extreme parallelism in a C++ build. You give some of that up with modules for better code organization and in some cases it does help build times, but I've heard in others it hurts build times (a fair bit of that might just be inexperience with the feature/best practices and immature implementations, but alas).

There's no precompiler in C++. There's a preprocessor but that's something entirely different. It's also not a slow portion of the compile process typically.

C++ is getting to the point where modules might work well enough to do something useful with them, but they remove the need for #include preprocessor directives to share code.

Have you ever seen a vacuum chamber? Science does suck ... and it's fucking awesome at it. 🥁

Basically TikTok has been proven to serve the Chinese Communist Party (via influence over what users see and data collection). Additionally, the Atlantic article goes on to explain how the United States has a long history of protecting its citizens from foreign influence campaigns going back to the early radio days (and trying to ban TikTok is not a divergence from the status quo or an attack of free speech, rather the continuing of policies that have largely worked and served the public good).

Here's the big difference. Automated assembly lines do a job better than the average human can. LLMs do the job consistently worse than the average human would.

A fact I struggle with on an almost daily basis...

EILIF: TikTok is like that "friend" that says they're your buddy, but you have a lot of reasons to doubt they actually have your best interest at heart.

From my notes:

• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/28/tiktok-data-collection-inquiry-australia-privacy-watchdog-marketing-pixels
• https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/briefing/tiktok-ban-bill-congress.html
• https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing-Timebomb_12.21.23.pdf
• https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-israel-gaza-hamas-war-a5dfa0ee
• https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/tiktok-bill-foreign-influence/677806/
• https://protonvpn.com/blog/is-tiktok-safe/
• https://www.engadget.com/doj-says-tiktok-collected-users-views-on-issues-like-abortion-gun-control-and-religion-201617503.html

A co-op infamous game for PC I would drop full price on, no questions.

Full disclosure: I never played the sequels (I play co-op almost exclusively now), but I absolutely loved the original game. It would be great to be able to go back to that dystopian world and rediscover my powers (or maybe other variants of them that appeared from disasters) in say ... London, DC, or LA (instead of NYC) with a friend.

True, though presumably users in those places would be stuck with the "less trustworthy" instances (and ideally, would be able to get their local laws changed to make themselves more trust worthy).

It's definitely not perfectly moral... but little in the world is and maybe it's sufficient pragmatic.

Yeah, BlueSky has this concept of user moderation lists. It's effectively like subscribing to a adblock filter. There might be some things blocked by patterns (e.g., you could have one that blocks anything that involves spiders) and there might be others that block specific accounts (e.g., you could have one that blocks users that are known to cause problems, are prone to vulgar language, etc).

I think the problem with credibility scores in general though, is it's sort of like a "social score" from black mirror. Real people can get caught in the net of "you look like a bot" and similarly different algorithms could be designed to game the system by gaming the metrics to look like they're not a bot (possibly even more so than some of the real people).

This is kind of what lead me down the route of bringing things back into the physical world. Like, once you have things going back through the normal systems ... you arguably do lose some level of anonymity but you also gain back some guarantees of humanity.

It doesn't need to be the level of "you've got a government ID and you're verified to be exactly you with no other accounts" ... just "hey, some number of people in the real world, that are subject to the respective nation's laws, had to have come into contact with a real piece of mail."

Maybe that just turns into the world's slowest UDP network in existence. However, I think it has a real chance of making it easier to detect real people (i.e., folks that have a small number of overlapping addresses). The virtual mailbox the other person gave has 3,000 addresses... if you assume 5 people per mailing address is normal that's 15,000 bots total before things start getting fishy if you've evenly distributed all of those addresses. If you've got 3,000 accounts at the same address, that's very fishy. Addresses also change a lot less frequently than IP addresses, so a physical address ban is a much more strict deterrent.