Yeah, you can’t trust Amazon to not mix stock from various sources. Though with any product with verifiable serial numbers, I always verify them as soon as I receive them. Too much counterfeiting which is why they’re verifiable in the first place.

LLMs have uses, some of them are even quite intriguing. But they have to be properly trained. You can’t just throw the whole internet at a baby with very little other training and expect them to not be corrupted by random wrong information. Same goes for LLMs though on a much larger scale. Also, they are often configured to give an answer even when the confidence in it being correct is relatively low. Something an expert would never do, they’d consult only specialized information, not just review the top search results on Google. This is one reason why they “hallucinate”. Commercially trained models just aren’t all that useful as a source of information or to correctly complete tasks. And additionally there are extreme ethical concerns about how it gets the information it’s trained on including using hacking botnets to impersonate a human among other things. A person who’s an expert has to review everything in excruciating detail and so most of the time it’s just more cost effective to just consult an expert in the first place. It’s like going to a proverbial used car car salesman and asking how cars work. Sure they might have picked up a fair amount of information from being around mechanics, but some of it is wrong and what they don’t know they’ll just make something up that sounds mostly plausible.

Yeah, email isn’t private, but for me it’s usually that I don’t like my host reading all of my mail to build an profile on me and selling that data. Individual emails in isolation aren’t a big deal, but seeing every email and what company or agency sent it is as problematic as the content even if you encrypt the mail content itself. Emails that I sends I always assume are not private, but that’s a separate issue, IMHO. There’s a lot of private information like what protected classes I am part of, political leanings, places I shop, etc., that can be gathered simply from who sends mail to you and who you send mail to. This is why I self host for most of my email.

That being said I still use gmail as I need a backup option and I use it for things where I don’t want the junk sender to know my domain and spam all of my accounts.

But Proton is really not much more private than Google in several scenarios given their CEO’s stance on several sensitive subjects and willingness to give data on protected classes, journalists, etc., to hostile governments, as an example. They do say they don’t sell your data to ad companies, at least. I don’t know Fastmail at all. And self-hosting is not something I’d recommend if you don’t want to put a lot of time and effort into it. Lots of issues come up like blacklisted VPS IP addresses in addition to the setup itself.

They think LLMs are more intelligent than people because the LLMs tell them they are. So of course most companies who bought into “AI” have laid off staff, especially the most experienced and thus expensive ones, and have handed responsibilities to untrained contractors armed with “AI”. So yeah, most companies who did that are going to be falling apart over the next few years, including the one I work for. I was only safe, so far, because I’m grossly underpaid already.

Nah, just freely share all of it with all of the other rich people. Let them get angry and jealous and destroy each other when they realize how much they’re purposely screwing each other over.

Yeah I read an article from a few months ago related to putting Bazzite on it (the 2025 version anyway), and the main complaint was the stability as well as minor complaints about the lack of support for some features and having to manually configure some buttons requiring some technical knowledge. It did mention that once it was mostly working it was significantly faster. But not usable as a gaming device quite yet. Not sure how much improvement has happened, but I expect that it will take quite a while to work out the kinks since it’s partly proprietary hardware not really designed for alternate OSes.

I’ve heard that it’s really unstable, even if it runs more efficiently with Linux. Custom hardware like that often needs customized drivers to work right. Maybe one day someone will get it working well, though.

ISP: $75/month for symmetrical 1Gbit fiber and unlimited data. This is the biggest expense. All other options are 1-25 Mbps up with cable or dsl and most are just as expensive.

VPSs: around $40/month, though I’m planning to cut back a bit as I’m moving some stuff local.

2 Domains: < $30/year

The rest is purchased with no future subscription costs. This covers everything except for the security cams that I need to migrate off of corporate services one of these days.

Only if you’re lucky enough to get one… Also, when I tried a friend’s it felt underpowered, especially running stuff outside of Steam. Not sure if they ever fixed the issues running non-Steam games, though, since that was a few years ago.

I had hoped a new version would come out to improve it and maybe even make enough of them to be available this time 😂. But sounds like it’s still several years out, if ever. I’ve lost my trust in Valve actually delivering things they promise. Burned too many times.

If only there were portable devices it could run on. Even if they were way more expensive than the Switch since not being subsidized by the games. The existing options for portable gaming all suck. I like having the Switch in bed and on planes.

Usually because the thing I’m editing was originally made with them…

Yeah, unfortunately the By Manufacturer list is limited and doesn’t for example include the Meta glasses 0x0D53. So, still isn’t a feasible alternative unless more prefixes are added or the ability to add your own is added.

Thanks, but I couldn’t find a way to set alerts for a set of addresses like the OP app scans for, only for a specific MAC address. Wouldn’t be feasible to enter all possible addresses since that would be many millions of addresses for each manufacturer prefix.

Feel free to suggest similar apps that are privacy friendly (no spying ads, telemetry, or other unwanted “features”) and quick overview of where to enable realtime alerts for specific mac prefixes in the app to mimic this functionality. I’d be interested.

Yeah fdroid would be preferred over precompiled apks actually, since fdroid does the compiling to verify the compiled version doesn’t contain anything not in the code repo and reports stuff that may be unwanted that is in the repo.

Mostly interacting with other people in-person. I left most corporate social media and lost access to Meta explicitly due to a conflict around my viewpoints on what constitutes hate speech against trans people (hint: saying it’s a sickness that needs curing and that justifies cure by torture, eg. conversion therapy, is hate speech). But I lost access to a really active Buy Nothing group in my neighborhood that’s on Facebook as well as several groups that only post their in-person events on Facebook. Really sucks that Meta locked us out not for violating a rule, and thus with no possible appeal, but assumedly because they were surveiling their platform and excluding people who argued against their stance. Or at least that’s the best guess that those who were blocked have for why.

Also, I have been losing a lot of home automation from Nest devices because Alphabet bought them and has decided to force allowing access to data for “AI” training and “law enforcement”/government surveillance. If I could keep the data local, I would still be able to use the devices with Home Assistant, but they only allow using their servers.

Reverse proxy with fail2ban or crowdsec. It’s possible to set up things like Pangolin which ultimately use a VPN between external and internal access points but not at the client, though it takes more setup if you want to use apps over pangolin instead of just the browser.

My experience is more late 80s, early 90s as a kid/teen. We recorded tons of stuff on VHS from cable TV and shared with friends and it was extremely common. It’s similar to how people use DVRs only you end up with a more portable copy if you want to share it. DVRs took away that sharing capability on purpose to increase cable and streaming revenue. Sure VHS was lower quality, but at that time cable wasn’t great either and HD TV’s and content weren’t common. Cams from movie theaters just wasn’t realistic and theater was still about the experience way more than it is now with everything just extra loud and flashy if you go to one.

I also copied stuff on cassette to share or to make it more portable since I had a cassette walkman. Sometimes that was from radio, but that was harder since you didn’t have a guide to what was coming up. Either you had to sit there and hope a song played that you wanted and then rewind if it wasn’t one. Or you had to copy from one cassette to another and further lose quality with analog copying. More common was making mix tapes either from original purchase cassettes or CDs once I had a CD player. Then BMG and copycats came along and everyone cheated the free trials to get a ton of free music before torrenting came along later.

I have a lifetime pass from many years ago when it was cheap. So I’m not in a huge rush to convert and want to do it right. But I am on the path to converting. I decided to make a major change to my home server infrastructure and it’s still in an experimental stage. Moving from a really old standalone computer I’ve used for. HTPC purposes over the years, currently dedicated to Plex combined with a few raspberry pi’s of various generations for the little stuff, and a single, good NUC for my router, to adding two additional NUCs and eventually upgrading the Plex computer with a more modern processor and video card for ML stuff for Immich and a few other systems that I plan to start using. I’m not just moving from Plex, but also a lot of Google and Nest products.

My dilemma has been Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes. I was trying to set up Kubernetes in a way that is easily repeatable and self documenting, but ended up with lots of manual steps required to install things and lots of things that I had to write my own helm charts for as well as the scripts to install and set up Kubernetes itself on each of the servers. Lots of custom stuff. Docker Swarm would be way easier, but the issue is I’m worried about Docker getting so proprietary these days and swarm mode getting so little attention, and Podman quadlets aren’t self balancing across multiple small servers like swarm. So that’s why I haven’t switched to Jellyfin yet.

Yep, that’s why I left most social media and try to keep things private. Not because i have anything to hide. I just don’t want everything I do, read, and say to be used against me or trigger hate-based attacks. These days everyone has at least one thing that some hate group would target them for since that’s how fascism works. Make everyone an enemy in small subgroups and trigger hate against that small subgroup whenever you need to distract from taking away rights or taking people’s money.