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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: February 18th, 2021

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  • Hmmm maybe not, but i guess for me its part of doing my part to stop big tech from using our info.

    The big question here is how does big tech use our info that makes it important to keep them from having it? Here, political orientation has a large impact on importance, for example:

    Ads: Nobody loves ads, but some people tolerate them more than others. Liberals might see them as a necessary evil to provide services at a good cost. Libertarians might say they have the right to use their own hardware as they please and block them out of convenience. Progressives might say that they promote consumerism, and leftists might go further and say that they are one of the ways capitalists keep their control over society. So since data is used for targeted ads, that’s one area that can be argued based on political orientation.

    Product improvement: Overall depends on their view of the company’s impact on society. Conservatives and leftists both see big tech as it exists currently as morally corrupt, others may see them as providing a useful service. If they think that big tech has a positive influence on society, then they are probably okay with their non-security critical data being used to improve the product, otherwise they might be more likely to want to avoid that happening.

    Finances: Data can be used to personalize prices for large expenses, which is something that threatens everyone. The cost of healthcare, housing, education, and transportation is a major concern across all political orientations (and is why the Democrats lost the election by not doing fucking anything while the Republicans kept telling people that they would fix it by cutting government spending). However, people might also think that there’s nothing they can do about their data being used to make things more expensive or that if they try to resist that then it will cost more for them, so that’s an obstacle that needs to be considered as well.

    Law enforcement: If the person is a target of the Trump administration and knows that, then their data being used against them is one clear motivation if they don’t think it’s too late to do anything. Otherwise, it depends on how much the person trusts the government and current law enforcement.

    So overall, I would consider where they fit in this political categorization and use the reasons that align best with this. Challenging their political stances is also an option but requires a lot of other things to consider and probably won’t work well since a lot of it is rooted in fundamental values that are difficult to change.


  • They need to have a reason to care. Are they or people close to them in danger if they don’t put effort into increasing their privacy? What steps do they need to take to switch to alternatives, and does what they gain from taking those steps outweigh what they lose? Is your advice oriented around the context of their own lives, or are you telling them to do things because a bunch of people on the internet told you to?

    These questions themselves are also very contextual, especially with different political orientations. For instance, if someone distrusts the government, then their definition of “danger” may include the government reading their conversations, which in this case it is a lot easier to convince people to switch to FOSS or more secure platforms like Signal (and I’ve convinced nearly everyone I know to use it, both conservative and progressive/leftist, because they distrust the government and large tech corporations). Whereas if someone thinks the government is alright, then they won’t give a shit. So I’d say that considering and discussing their political beliefs and making sure they align with valid reasons to make changes is an important step before telling them how they should do things.


  • 1.Email

    FastMail, IceDove (GNU debranded ThunderBird), FairEmail

    2.Cloud storage / file sync

    Syncthing, Nextcloud for sharing and browsing files, I store my files using TrueNAS and a RAID Z2 configuration with Backblaze B2 for backup

    3.Maps & navigation

    OsmAnd with Brouter (FastBike-VeryLowTraffic profile) for ebike, my local transit app for public transit, Magic Earth the rare occasion I use a car, Uber rarely, I still use Google Maps for searching because everything else sucks

    4.Search engine

    Kagi, nowadays I usually use Deepseek R1 model with either Kagi Assistant or OpenRouter but might self-host LibreChat

    5.Web browser

    LibreWolf for searches, FireFox and FireFox PWAs for sites I regularly visit but planning to switch to Floorp. On Android, Cromite for random sites, Vanadium for sides I stay logged in to, IronFox with extensions for searches.

    6.Calendar

    Etar synced with Nextcloud using DAVx5

    7.Contacts management

    GrapheneOS contacts app synced with Nextcloud, the Fossify app has given me problems

    8.Notes / to-do lists

    Tasks.org synced with Nextcloud, Logseq for random notes, Markdown or comments in Typst documents in certain contexts

    9.Office suite (docs, spreadsheets, etc.)

    Typst or LaTeX for documents I make myself. LibreOffice or Collabora app for MS office documents.

    10.Messaging / chat

    Signal (Molly) and Discord (Vesktop, Revenge) most of the time

    11.Video calling

    Signal or Discord for personal, Teams for business stuff

    12.Social media / microblogging RSS reader / news

    Lemmy, Reddit, Instagram

    13.Music streaming / podcast app

    Tidal for my own playlists, Spotify for playlists from other people, YouTube when I want to randomly listen to something, ListenBrainz and Last.fm for scribbling. I want to set up Navidrome again but last time I did it was a disaster.

    15.Password manager

    Bitwarden/Vaultwarden

    16.VPN / DNS / Firewall

    InviZible Pro and Privoxy (uses Tor and I2P). I should probably get Mullvad or AirVPN.

    17.Launcher / Android OS (if you use custom ROMs)

    Kvaesitso

    18.App store / APKs

    Obtainium for FOSS, Google Play for proprietary

    19.Photo backup / gallery

    Syncthing-Fork, Aves Libre

    20.Weather

    Weather.gov, Windy which tends to be more accurate for more specific locations


  • I used to never close tabs and they would accumulate as I kept doing more web searches and other activities. Now when I need to do stuff I usually open a new window instead for different tasks and if I need to free up RAM then I start closing other windows for tasks I’m not doing anymore so it closes all of the related tabs at the same time



  • sudoer777@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlAI sucks
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    9 months ago

    While AI offers transformative potential, significant criticisms highlight its drawbacks. Current systems often perpetuate biases embedded in training data, leading to discriminatory outcomes in hiring, law enforcement, and lending. The environmental cost of training large models—like massive energy consumption and carbon emissions—raises sustainability concerns. Automation driven by AI threatens job displacement, exacerbating economic inequality, while opaque “black-box” algorithms undermine accountability in critical domains like healthcare or criminal justice. Privacy erosion, through pervasive surveillance and data exploitation, further fuels distrust. Though AI’s capabilities are impressive, its unchecked deployment risks deepening societal inequities and prioritizing efficiency over ethical considerations.



  • The most important part is balancing your own safety with limited time and resources. Perfection is not achievable, getting as close as you can is not practical in most cases, and prioritizing safety a lot of times limits what you’re able to do. So you need to do a cost/benefit analysis on these sort of solutions and decide whether they’re worth doing, which is very contextual (and in the end, you’re going to need to trust something somewhere unless you reinvent everything on your own).

    For instance, in the US if you’re a middle class cishet white male citizen who ignores politics, you’re biggest problem is probably ads, companies knowing your financial info, and tools being more locked down, so the reasonable response would be to use an ad blocker and switch to open source/self-hosted software when it’s convenient, but not to the point where you have to program all sorts of things yourself unless you really enjoy that. If you’re working class, time and finances is more limited so the extent to which self-hosting, paid services, and CLI tooling becomes impractical might be sooner. If you’re a minority, there’s not really much that can be done that doesn’t severely affect quality of life (like living in the middle of the woods with no technology if you know you’re being hunted by the government, which sounds fucking terrible but probably better than being sent to a concentration camp in a remote country). If you’re an activist or an immigrant or doing something illegal, compartmentalizing data that would probably get you in trouble onto devices (that you can afford) with a strong security setup that doesn’t touch anything else you own and doesn’t cross borders while verifying that the people you communicate with are also on a similar setup and doing other “paranoid” security/privacy measures (while being careful not to draw suspicions) is probably a good idea. If you’re trying to be private for the sake of advocating for privacy, then do what you want to do.





  • sudoer777@lemmy.mltoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldThinkpad for the win
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    10 months ago

    Fedora Asahi Remix. Considering how the M1 has no official Linux support, it’s impressive that it runs as well as it does, and they have compatibility hacks to run Steam games and get Widevine to work. There’s still a lot of rough edges however, like no microphone (should be coming out soon though) or fingerprint, aarch64 software support is second class and tends to have more frequent bugs (cough Electron cough) that get ignored by package maintainers and some (even FOSS) software isn’t supported, I don’t think high refresh rate is supported yet, full disk encryption isn’t supported (but there’s blog articles from people who figured out how to set it up), limited distro options, worse power efficiency so gets hot faster (just got a cooling pad to deal with this, get a Pro if you can so you have a fan) and battery life is barely different than what I’ve heard from Framework users so there’s not really much to gain atm. Currently only supports M1 and to a lesser extent M2, and also the fact that you’re dual booting makes the soldered overpriced SSD space even more limiting.

    As far as distro support goes, Fedora Workstation is the only distro that has official support. There’s other options with community support but there’s a higher likelihood of stuff being outdated or not packaged (i.e. Arch Linux ARM doesn’t have the same level of community support as normal Arch Linux). I haven’t tried NixOS or Guix System on M1, but I use Nix/Guix on the Fedora install. aarch64 Guix packages keep breaking making it annoying to update and issues tend to be ignored (also certain core packages don’t like the tmpfs 16k page size so you need to make it use /var/tmp instead), aarch64 Nix is a lot better but support is still slow to where Signal is several versions behind and has been broken for weeks despite there being multiple pull requests with fixes, and both Nix/Guix prioritize x86 over aarch64 for builds so it will need to compile a lot of things from source.