I am a bit of a worrier I guess, & overthink things too much. It’s definitely not a crime to send requests to people just after playing online together, actually I think I should probably do it more.

I also like to get friend requests from randos, it helps you get more involved in the game, especially co-op games like DRG. Plus it’s not like there’s a limit to how many friends you can add.

Before writing this post, I realised I’d given away my DOB - first by saying my age, and then when they correctly guessed my star-sign (!), I told them the day & month. That made me worry that maybe I need to be more careful and so posted this here.

If I’m getting it right, they’re basically questioning the quantities mentioned and how Ecosia is presenting this whole thing.

The blog post says they saved 4000 tonnes, or 800 elephants, of potatoes from going to waste.

However the 4000-tonnen.de website - which seems to be a site that Ecosia have set up just for this problem of surplus potatoes - says that only 174 tonnes will have been delivered to Berlin:

Kommende Woche werden vorr. 132 Tonnen verteilt (nach 42 Tonnen in der ersten Woche). Dann wird es allerdings kalt - was für die Kartoffeln nicht gut ist - und mehr können wir auch nicht finanzieren.

The last sentence says it’s going to be cold which is bad news for spuds and in any case they are not able to finance any more.

So are they really just saving 174 out of 4000 tonnes, and yet somehow presenting it as a victory against food waste?

TBH it seems like a marketing stunt - not necessarily a bad thing, if they can draw attention to the difficulties of avoiding food waste. But still, they need to be honest and not deceitful or it can easily backfire.

The big unanswered question seems to be what’s going to happen to the remaining 3826 tonnes?

I do already have a discord account & if that’s all they want to use, it wouldn’t be an issue at all. Only if it’s something weird they want me to install, like Team Viewer or some shit 😅

I hadn’t heard of that one, a kind of social engineering attack. Definitely something to keep in mind!

as a result I don’t add randos

This is generally my attitude, and it sucks really that ignoring random friend requests is usually the sensible thing to do. Anyway so far this person does seem to be genuine and hasn’t tried to get me to add a load of their friends or anything like that.

conceal your IP in non peer to peer games based on the settings under “Steam / Settings / In-Game / Steam Networking”

Good tip thanks! Here’s the Steam page about it. The upshot seems to be that Steam itself won’t reveal your IP to others, but games might depending on how multiplayer is implemented.

“Steam doesn’t share your IP address with other players. Whenever peer-to-peer networking is needed, for example in a voice chat, that communication is always relayed. However, we don’t control what games using peer-to-peer connectivity do.”

“If a game uses our newest networking APIs (ISteamNetworkingSockets and ISteamNetworkingMessages), the traffic can be relayed using Steam Datagram Relay (SDR), Valve’s worldwide backbone and network of relays, and you can decide when to allow an app to share your IP address. Under Steam / Settings / In-Game / Steam Networking, there is an option that controls when your IP address is revealed”

and crucially regarding the default setting, “Default. This will not share your IP address, unless it appears necessary to avoid excessive ping times.”

They do appear to be an actual human yes, and one who does enjoy playing online games (because we play together and they are getting on with the game just like every other player). I’ve just looked at their account - thanks for the tip - and while they don’t have loads of games, all appear pretty normal paid-for things, and all are kinda similar in appeal - e.g. The Forest, 7 Days to Die. Actually there are a couple of what could have been giveaways/freebies - but all those have zero hours on.

So that does look very normal lol

Yeah I am talking with them, they do seem legit so hopefully I’m just being paranoid/overly cautious.

The reason I thought I’d post here is to make sure I’ve not missed something obvious and to understand what the risks are. I guess “something shady” would be asking me to do something weird like install unknown software, or asking lots of personal questions out of the blue.

is it pretty much a way to do bank transfers without having to give away your IBAN? I don’t think IBANs need to be kept secret but they’re a bit unwieldy to say the least - and transfers are not always instant.

well yes exactly … in that realm of the unknown, our imaginations can run riot

it wasn’t that long ago that there were still dark corners of the earth - well, more like vast tracts of unexplored terrain - in the Amazon, deep in mountain ranges, or in icy tundra.

There dragons did roam, whilst flying demons did dart overhead, their ungodly shrieks turning the hearts of the bravest men to jello.

There are no secrets on the earth any more, so we have to look elsewhere to satisfy our lust for meaning and importance.

And the “World Wide Web” mostly means HTML - “hypertext” documents which can be published on the internet, and which are regular documents but with embedded links to other documents (hyperlinks), and a vision to ultimately create the “semantic web” - human-readable text which can also be processed by computers.

anything we don’t understand yet, that can be god… it used to be thunder, earthquakes, now it’s vast sheets of lifeless matter flooping around our intergalactic neighbourhood - progress I guess? 😁

It’s a fascinating window into a time/place we know little about. Wikipedia has a short article:

the bulk of the mounds were clean shell deposits, almost entirely made up of small oyster shells, which had been placed on submerged mud flats. Based on dating of potsherds found at the site, Sears concluded that the residents of the site had lived on the edge of the river, moving the village towards the water as the mounds built up behind them. All of the potsherds collected at the site were assigned to the Glades I and II periods, placing occupation of the site in the period from about 200 or 100 BCE to 800 or 900 CE.

if the number you registered with eventually gets recycled to someone who then uses it for Signal, will that affect your account?

deleted by creator

I saw a really good rundown of this the other day on YouTube: “Presented by Joe Botting, independent palaeontologist and Honorary Research Fellow at the National Museum Wales”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqT8Q8plKJ8

Apparently Russia has been using (or still is using?) drones to kill/maim civilians in Kherson. That’s what I’m really on about - using drones & drone swarms to target normal people going about their day-to-day lives. It’s just really hard to defend against, and is only going to get worse as the tech progresses.

a machine capable of running Wasteland 2

Is there even such a machine on God’s good earth? It’s definitely a good game, but absolutely blighted by instability & CTDs last time I tried it a few years ago.

think what absolute chaos could be wrought if a terrorist group were to release a swarm like this in a large city

I remember reading about the world’s oldest person at the time some years ago - French woman of 120 - she said her secret was eating 200 grams of chocolate a day. She also said she smoked for 30 years, starting when she was in her 60s and quitting when she hit 100.

Where do I purchase whatever this guy was smoking?