I got a stainless steel one on Amazon, it’s relatively thick steel, I have no idea how you’d be able to break it with only your hands and feet. I agree the plastic ones are shit.

Edit: The brand was apparently “NINEMAX”. (Not a sponsor lol)

I didn’t know they hired Principal Skinner…

I think the hard-right people have mostly self-exiled to their own echo chambers like truth.social and other places that are Donald-used-and-approved. I think he’s also active on Twitter again now that Musk has destroyed all content moderation on the platform. They follow their great leader and unless and until he starts posting his demagoguery on Lemmy they have no interest and no reason to come here.

Smartest users are already using OpenShell and don’t have anything to fear, at least from this change… for now…

Most cheap non-dimmable LEDs have drivers that use resistors to determine the current to drive through the LEDs. As a rule, these are always set too high to overdrive the LEDs (sometimes as much as twice their rated current) for marginal brightness gains and to burn out the bulb prematurely. I’m obviously unable to actually see directly into the operation of the great minds that design LED lightbulbs but logic leaves me with only those two plausible conclusions, I’ll let you decide which motivation you think is a bigger factor for most manufacturers.

Conveniently, most manufacturers carefully fine-tune this value to prematurely destroy the LEDs at just the right time, which requires careful balancing of resistors, and even MORE conveniently (for us) the cheapest way for them to do this is typically to use two resistors. And MOST conveniently (for us), if you were to carelessly break one of the pair of resistors they use, and leave the other one intact, the current would immediately drop to a very reasonable and appropriate level, generating much less heat, drawing much less power, making LED death extremely unlikely, and only modestly reducing brightness in many cases, because LEDs have non-linear brightness and the heavily overdriven ones are typically FAR beyond the point of diminishing returns. In some cases the reduction in power results in basically no visible difference in light output. In some cases it can be argued they’re literally stealing extra power from your electricity bill and using it as an electric heater for no purpose other than to burn out your own light bulbs prematurely so you have to replace them.

The good news is, like I said, removing one of the responsible resistors instantly solves the design flaw and is usually quite easy even without any special tools or electronics knowledge. BigCliveDotCom calls this “Doobying” the bulbs after the Dubai bulbs that were mentioned in other comments. If you watch some of his videos about LED bulbs you should be able to see the pattern of which resistors to remove, if they are on the board they will basically always be right next to each other and relatively small values (typically in the 20 ohms to 200 ohms range). The only modification I make to his procedure is that I prefer to remove the HIGHER value of the two resistors instead of the lower one, which results in perhaps somewhat less lifetime preservation (still much more than the original setting) and less power savings, but more brightness, and is usually adequately good for my purposes. I also use sturdy tweezers to remove the resistor instead of a screwdriver which seems to me that it would have a higher risk of collateral damage.

Is it a lot of work for a single light bulb? Kind of, yes. But once you get it done a bunch of times, you’ll probably rarely have to do it again, as these bulbs last almost forever. In fact, I have yet to have one actually fail, I am mostly just replacing the occasional old unmodified LED bulb from time to time.

This will not work with dimmable bulbs or certain fancy high end bulbs. Also some are much, much easier to modify than others. Clive calls the ones that are relatively easy “hackable” and it’s really a crapshoot to find them. Some have covers/bulbs/diffusers that are nearly impossible to remove without catastrophic damage to the bulb and/or your hands. Others simply use a different circuit design that doesn’t have resistors. Some only have a single resistor, meaning to change the value you need to solder a new one in its place. In my experience, the bargain-basement, junkiest, least reliable bulbs tend to be the easiest to hack this way and often skimp on things like “gluing the lens on” so it’s easy to get off. But you’ll have to experiment to find a brand and style that works well for this.

So it’s not really FOSS at all, it’s just a loss-leader to draw you into the network, trap your data, and then enshittify and monetize as per standard practice.

It is mostly a myth (and scare tactic invented by copyright trolls and encouraged by overzealous virus scanners) that pirated games are always riddled with viruses. They certainly can be, if you download them from untrustworthy sources, but if you’re familiar with the actual piracy scene, you have to understand that trust is and always will be a huge part of it, ways to build trust are built into the community, that’s why trust and reputation are valued higher than even the software itself. Those names embedded into the torrent names, the people and the release groups they come from, the sources where they’re distributed, have meaning to the community, and this is why. Nobody’s going to blow 20 years of reputation to try to sneak a virus into their keygen. All the virus scans that say “Virus detected! ALARM! ALARM!” on every keygen you download? If you look at the actual detection information about what it actually detected, and you dig deep enough through their obfuscated scary-severity-risks-wall-of-text, you’ll find that in almost all cases, it’s actually just a generic, non-specific detection of “tools associated with piracy or hacking” or something along those lines. They all have their own ways of spinning it, but in every case it’s literally detecting the fact that it’s a keygen, and saying “that’s scary! you won’t want pirated illegal software on your computer right?! Don’t worry, I, your noble antivirus program will helpfully delete it for you!”

It’s not as scary as you think, they just want you to think it is, because it helps drive people back to paying for their software. It’s classic FUD tactics and they’re all part of it. Antivirus companies are part of the same racket, they want you paying for their software too.