Let's apply Occam's Razor. Which is more likely? Every person you've ever met and will meet thinks you are terrible, or, you think you are terrible?
I'm not erasing the existence of the many people you've encountered who don't like you. But what if negative experiences in your past have eroded your distress tolerance and you now cannot distinguish normal human conflict from an affront to you, personally? Or, what if you have given up on human contact because, subconsciously, you made a calculation that simulacra of human contact might be unsatisfying but, like methadone, they give you just enough to avoid the real stuff?
I don't think any of the psychological pictures I have painted are necessarily correct. But I do know that what you're telling me is BS.
A couple of years ago, one rainy Saturday morning, I woke up with a devastating hangover and nothing else to do - so I decided to build myself a PC, like in good old days. Turned out it wasn't at all difficult to find a local store; only two-three hours later I was already driving home with all these sexy looking boxes filled with hardware. That was in Sweden.
People are already conditioned to swipe their loyalty cards at the end of the shopping. Requirement to swipe Digital ID for transaction to go through will be a next step.
Low social credit score? Oh you cannot have those ice creams.
You said something bad about the party online? No oranges for you.
Etc.
SoftEther isn't Tor, it's just like modernized client-server L2TP style VPN, same deal as WireGuard. The volunteer public gateway thing is completely optional and voluntary add-on.
The reason it exists is just that it predates WireGuard by ~decade.
The risk surely exists if you decide to run their gate service:
"After you activate the VPN Gate Service, anyone can connect a VPN connection to your computer, and access to any hosts on the Internet via your computer"
"When you are running the VPN Gate Relaying Function on your company's network, then any person's communication to Internet hosts will be relayed via your company's network."
It's no different from a coffee shop providing an open WiFi, or an ISP providing you with a fiber connection. What people do on it is their problem, not yours. Their web traffic is wrapped in another layer of HTTPS, not in plaintext you can read. Most traffic is not criminal traffic, you're not any more likely to be the exit node for a criminal than you are to purchase something from a criminal in real life. That waitress you just tipped at the restaurant? Might've been a murderer. In either case, you don't know that you've dealt with a criminal. You providing the exit node is like a transaction: you're "paying" for the VPN service by helping run the service.
The point of all this is to make it so that governments can't pin down the IP of any client without expending significant resources. It makes mass surveillance, control, and prosecution prohibitively expensive. Law enforcement would still be able to trace suspects through the hops with their rich arsenal of backdoors, exploits, and clues in the physical world, just not without significant effort and therefore expenses. So they will only be able to pursue criminals in a targeted manner, which is how law enforcement in a free society is supposed to work.
The decentralized VPN service can only work if clients are also servers, otherwise there will be too many people who use the service without contributing to it, resulting in a tragedy of the commons.
The regular SoftEther client server software doesn't have that feature. The VPN Gate features are the features of VPN Gate variant that you're trying to intentionally mixing up with. The regular server still comes with free dynamic DNS that does nothing other than letting you and your approved users access your own server from the Internet and nobody else.
The main difference between mise and pixi is an ability to subscribe to conda channels and build (in an extremely fast way) conda environments, bypassing or eliminating most of the conda frustration (regular conda users know what I mean). mise allows to install asdf tools primarily (last I checked).
On the python front, however, I am somehow still an old faithful - poetry works just fine as far as I was every concerned. I do trust the collective wisdom that uv is great, but I just never found a good reason to try it.
> building digital fiefdoms with users as the serfs
I wouldn't call you names, but this does sound rather extreme. It also sounds rather imprecise. Is this a metaphor, or a hyperbole, or do you actually mean this literally? If so, in what way I, an iOS user, going to be an Apple serf?
