grandkaiser

The wind howls through the empty parking lot as the dim streetlights flicker above interrupted by the faint screech of an unreturned cart, left abandoned in the cold silence, rolling aimlessly across the asphalt. A masked man steps out of the shadows...

"You think it's nothing. A small act of carelessness, a moment of laziness. But that cart, left adrift, has a price. A price in scraped cars, twisted ankles, in the chaos that spreads like rot in the hearts of men. You see, I don't care about your excuses. I don't care if it's raining, if you're in a hurry. Order is what keeps us human. And you... you spit on it with every cart left behind."

Knuckles crack in the darkness

"I’m the reckoning you never see coming. You think no one’s watching when you shove it into the next spot, but I’m always watching. Every cart out of place, every rule ignored, it leads to something darker, something worse. And that’s where I come in—to stop the small sins before they become something more."

The masked man takes a step forward, his voice low and gravelly.

"I am Cart Noir, the last line of defense between order and chaos. You think it's just a cart? It's never just a cart."

Yeah, I mistyped part of the sentence. Should have been "without some serious effort or illegal methods." Serious effort is well beyond most ISP's. They aren't sniffing wireless AP's then busting down doors to find out if its a 5g AP or an AP using their network. I actually know quite a bit about WiFi signals. I happen to be certified in Meraki (CMSS). If the uni said "no wireless signals" that would be a completely different story.

Robust but complex solution:

1. Set up an encrypted VPN at the router level. Any encryption will work, even weak dumb encryption is fine. Any attempts to decrypt it would be mad illegal.

2. Turn off your SSID.

It is now functionally impossible to detect anything about the traffic or the Wi-Fi router without some serious or illegal methods.

Your brain doesn’t have a single module that knows what an apple is. Instead, different parts work together to form the concept. The occipital lobe in particular, processes how an apple looks, but it doesn't "know" what an apple is—it just handles visual characteristics. When these various modules combine, they produce your idea of an apple, which is then interpreted by another part of the brain.

When you decide to draw an apple, your brain sends signals to the cerebellum to move your hands. The cerebellum doesn’t know what an apple is either. It simply follows instructions to draw shapes based on input from other brain regions that handle motor skills and artistic representation. Even those parts don’t fully understand what an apple is—they just act on synaptic patterns related to it.

AI, by comparison, is missing many of these modules. It doesn’t know the taste or scent of an apple because it lacks sensory input for taste or scent. AI lacks a Cerebral Cortex, Reticular Activating System, Posterior Parietal Cortex, Anterior Cingulate Cortex, and the necessary supporting structures to experience consciousness, so it doesn’t “know” or “sense” anything in the way a human brain does. Instead, AI works through patterns and data, never experiencing the world as we do.

This is why AI often creates dream-like images. It can see and replicate patterns similar to the synaptic patterns created by the occipital lobes in the brain, but without the grounding of consciousness or the other sensory inputs and corrections that come from real-world experience, its creations lack the coherence and depth of human perception. AI doesn't have the lived understanding or context, leading to images that can feel abstract or surreal, much like dreams.

Sure, people might not care, but that doesn't change the facts. Experts aren’t denying the legitimacy of the Panama or Paradise Papers, but they are saying that the idea of megacorporations secretly listening to your microphone and selling you products based on that is false. If they were doing that, it would be pretty easy to find out. Smartphones aren’t some mysterious black box; security engineers and hackers are constantly checking for these kinds of exploits. If corporations were actually spying on us through our phones, it would be the biggest topic at DEFCON. Believing that this could be kept secret would require assuming that all these experts are either paid off or in cahoots with the corporations, which veers into full-blown conspiracy theory territory.

The reverse is just as true:

"People are lazy and life is easier when you just blindly hate things you don't understand."

As a network engineer, it's frustrating to see laymen make outlandish claims about technology with their source being "corpo bad". I hate corporations too, but it would be an absolute bombshell if it were true. There's just no possible way that every single hacker and security engineer are in league with the corporations.

GM dependent, of course,

Prestidigitation RAR can't change your clothes. That's the level 1 spell disguise self. It could change the color, but it should still be fairly obvious that you're the same person. Personally If I did allow it, I would require a very hard bluff check to convince them that you aren't the same person. Not even a disguise check. If you used a disguise kit though, I would probably let it slide depending on how many people the guards have interacted with since.

Are you enjoying cotct? Ive ran it twice and it's one of my favorite campaigns of all time.

I had players nearly end their campaign when they were about to use'fireball' in an active sawmill that a death cult was hiding out in. Luckily one of them realized a moment before what the implications would be.

Yeah, I'm not writing a network policy nor did I say I was an English teacher.

Could I have made everything perfect? Yes

Does it matter? No

If anything about what I said was unclear to you, I can clarify. My job is about network engineering, not pleasing English elitists online.

Tracking is actually incredibly tiny bandwidth-wise. Like, fractions of a fraction of your bandwidth. Adserv is also very tiny due to modern edge server infrastructure. Ads are static content. It's already cached and likely within the same city as you. That's part of why ads tend to play perfectly and fast while the content can be slow. On the other hand, that obscure 200 sub guy ranting about why the square-headed screws inability to catch on is a giant American conspiracy to keep Canada from commercial dominance is almost certainly not locally cached. It has to come from Google's video content servers way out in silicon valley.

Network engineer here. There's a lot of reasons your network might not work well. None malicious.

1. You're watching it in high def on a slow connection. Try going back to the "good old days"of 360p and see if it's fast.

2. Your network may be bottlenecked somewhere. Try using speedtest (search for it) and see if you're getting slow connection quality.

3. You may be getting packet loss. Using the ping command, try running it indefinitely for a little while (windows key+r, cmd, "ping 8.8.8.8 -t") see if there are blips of failures.

Remember! Never ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. Your isp, Google, and yes, even Microsoft, don't want you to have a bad experience using your computer. Lots of people with 0 networking knowledge but a bone to pick with the system will give you unhelpful advice.

Imagine my confusion when all I could buy was a sagum and tunic. Turns out I was shopping at Oshkosh Ostragoth