It always is in the beginning

Don’t be evil

Privacy respecting Operating Systems (and to some extent software/apps) are almost useless if once they’re installed they are used to acess services/apps that aren’t. I see so many posts in self hosting forums about connecting google/apple/amazon cloud services to self hosted HomeAssistant, Nextcloud, etc. If the data is still being sent out to these “clouds” it’s not truly local/self hosted.

Well said. That’s always the bargain. It’s easier to use Google or AWS, there are less hurdles that you need to solve… but solving those hurdles is how you buy your privacy.

No worries, I’m glad to help folks.

The only way you can get your privacy back is to learn how to use the technology that you depend on.

You don’t need Netflix or Spotify if you know how to install a docker container and operate bittorrent. You’re not required a spyware laden OS if you can flash GrapheneOS onto a Pixel and install Linux on your PC. You don’t need to use Discord for voice chat if you can run a Mumble server. You don’t need your ISP’s DNS (which they collect/sell data from) if you can install Pihole and setup DNS over HTTPS .

As others have mentioned there are a spectrum of ways that you are tracked online and offline and you have to be aware of each of them and address them individually. This will require a lot of research and self-education (though the community is, mostly, helpful), it isn’t as simple as using LibreWolf or installing a VPN on your phone.

As to your question. For the average person, a VPN is useful if you’re on a public wifi and want to make sure the other people in the coffee shop can’t see your Facebook posts, or if you want to appear to be in another state/country to access streaming in other areas.

It can help you, to a limited extent but installing a VPN on a carrier-purchased phone that has Facebook, Instagram and Google services is like locking the door after the house has burned down.

It’s a lot of work to take your privacy back. The Faustian bargain that everyone has agreed to is that they give up all of their privacy in order to have easy access to the fruits of technology. Getting your privacy back means giving the convenience back too.

I don’t want to discourage anyone… It isn’t inconvenient forever. Once you learn become comfortable with the technology you can have even better setups than you can buy through any service. For example, my tv/movie streaming still has password sharing, I can even generate a link for a random person that allows them to download the media file (which I only do with non-copyrighted material that I’ve produced myself, of course). Amazon can’t delete the books from my e-reader, my streaming music never plays ads, if I need more cloud storage I don’t need to increase my subscription… I just buy a piece of hardware with storage in it and install it in my home server (which everything connects to via a private VPN) and now I have space forever, with no subscription!

May save you a click:

No price yet, similar products have launched at $699

War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Ignorance is strength.

I’d be wary of importing random unintelligible registry keys from sites purporting to increase system performance for free. Even if they’re posted on social media, the land of rigorous fact checking, rationality and absolutely no malicious actors.

The AI bubble is certainly going to burst at some point. Assuming manufacturers are ramping up production to profit off of the higher prices, the bubble will result in a glut of supply after demand collapses. So we’ll likely see a year or two of depressed electronics prices.

On top of that, DDR5 is worth more than gold until DDR6 comes along and suddenly you have companies who own a significant percentage of the 2025 global production of RAM that want to purchase newer hardware. I doubt all of that RAM is going to be shredded, so we may have a thriving secondary market when that happens.

It’ll suck for the next year or two, so get used to your current PC and pray that you don’t have a RAM failure.

or the trenches. 🫡

Whatever happens, it won’t be that.

You are not on my team if you think the solution is to attack other working class people. There are certainly ones that need to be brought to justice (see: Jan 6ers), but this slide into fascism has been financed and orchestrated by right-wing elites who have the billions of dollars to create effective propaganda.

MAGA voters are primarily driven by ignorance and intentionally misled via propaganda. This doesn’t clear them of all responsibility, I want to be clear.

However, the massive wave of anonymous billionaire funded propaganda following the Citizens United decision is the thing that has moved public opinion and that propaganda wasn’t created by ignorant people who were misled. It was created by very educated people who knew exactly what they were doing (watch The Great Hack documentary about Cambridge Analytica) and those people were funded by the same anonymous billionaires.

It isn’t the local racist that is at fault for orchestrated campaign of propaganda which has twisted public opinion into electing corrupt criminals. It’s the people who have billions of dollars and funded a tsunami of lies in order to buy access to the power of the Presidency.

Take your torches and pitchforks in that direction.

In the span of 5 to 10 years, do you think there will not be a return to consumer production?

Manufacturing will expand and the higher consumer prices will ensure some manufacturers still service that market. Price will be higher, but it’s not going to get to the point where you can’t buy a personal PC.

ICE has got to go. They filled the ranks with Jan 6ers and other white nationalists who can now live out their violent racist fantasies under the color of law.

An organization should not be able to write its own warrants. Everyone should go through the public justice system without exception. This would probably require a constitutional amendment.

I mean or we can slip into a fascist autocracy, in which case I’ll see you guys in the Patriotic Detention Centers for the Woke.

I think that people are too enthralled with the current situation that’s centered around LLMs, the massive capital bubble and the secondary effects from the expansion of datacenter space (power, water, etc).

You’re right that they do allow for the disruption of labor markets in fields that were not expecting computers to be able to do their job (to be fair to them, humanity has spent hundreds of millions of dollars designing various language processing software and been unable to engineer the software to do it effectively).

I think that usually when people say ‘AI’ they mean ChatGPT or LLMs in general. The reason that LLMs are big is because neural networks require a huge amount of data to train and the largest data repository that we have (the Internet) is text, images and video… so it makes sense that the first impressive models were trained on text and images/video.

The field of robotics hasn’t had access to a large public dataset to train large models on, so we don’t see large robotics models but they’re coming. You can already see it, compare robotic motion 4 years ago using a human engineered feedback control loop… the motions are accurate but they’re jerky and mechanical. Now look at the same company making a robot that uses a neural network trained on human kinematic data, that motion looks so natural that it breaks through the uncanny valley to me.

This is just one company generating data using human models (which is very expensive) but this is the kind of thing that will be ubiquitous and cheap given enough time.

This isn’t to mention the AlphaFold AI which learned how to fold proteins better than anything human engineered. Then, using a diffusion model (the same kind used in making pictures of shrimp jesus) another group was able to generate the RNA which would manufacture new novel proteins that fit a specific receptor. Proteins are important because essentially every kind of medication that we use has to interact with a protein-based receptor and the ability to create, visualize and test custom proteins in addition to the ability to write arbitrary mRNA (see, the mRNA COVID vaccine) is huge for computational protein design (responsible for the AIDS vaccines).

LLMs and the capitalist bubble surrounding them is certainly an important topic, framing it as being ‘against AI’ creates an impression that AI technology has nothing positive to offer. This reduces the amount of people who study the topic or major in it in college. So in 10 years, we’ll have less machine learning specialists than other countries who are not drowning in this ‘AI bad’ meme.

Removed by mod

(Fuck AI though. Planet burning trash)

It’s humans burning the planet, not the spicy Linear Algebra.

Blaming AI for burning the planet is like blaming crack for robbing your house.

I know a Nigerian prince who can help you with that

One of the first videos I watched about LLMs, was a journalist who didn’t know anything about programming used ChatGPT to build a javascript game in the browser. He’d just copy paste code and then paste the errors and ask for help debugging. It even had to walk him through setting of VS Code and a git repo.

He said it took him about 4 hours to get a playable platformer.

I think that’s an example of a unique capability of AI. It can let a non-programmer kinda program, it can let a non-Chinese speaker speak kinda Chinese, it’ll let a non-artist kinda produce art.

I don’t doubt that it’ll get better, but even now it’s very useful in some cases (nowhere near enough to justify the trillions of dollars being spent though).

Cheaters have been using object detection AI to cheat for quite some time

That’s only a tiny, tiny piece of it. If you want to know more: https://grapheneos.org/features

All phones have a BFU (before first unlock) state, and GrapheneOS doesn’t require a passphrase unless you’ve set one, otherwise it’s your PIN. Fingerprint unlock is disabled until after BFU though, so it requires essentially using a backup PIN even if you always use your fingerprint, at least for first unlock.

To add to the security of the PIN and to prevent reading screen smudges you can enable an option so that the digits on the PIN pad are randomized each time it loads.

Graphene also supports fully isolated user accounts. Applications running in one profile can not even discover the existence of the other profiles*. There is a way to forward notifications from user containers but is disabled by default. Each account, when inactive, is encrypted independently of the system drives and the key is generated at user login with the entry of a password and overwritten in memory upon logout.

*If you enable the notification forwarding, a hostile application running on the primary account could deduce that there is at least one other user profile on the phone by analyzing the notifications.