I actually just went hella heavy on Int’l and value stocks, in order to completely divest from Musk exposure in my retirement accounts.

It’s like if I download an app from Google Play Store, and then go to that apps first party website, and pay for your subscription to the app service there , in order to bypass the Google Play Store transaction and thus the developer fee.

I’m trying to figure out why I’m okay with circumventing this to amazon, apple, and every other publicly traded company offering a platform or marketplace, but feel that my favorite privately owned and operated platform should get a pass and be able to restrict the off network transactions.

Orafice. EuroOffice. Eurafice!

Having degoogled this year, I deeply miss Google sheets and the ability to (a) summon it on any device and (b) share it with shy real-time participants.

I am trying out cryptpad which feels both flabby in terms of complexity and ui, but also in terms of delays and nuisances in processing and learning curve. Like if I were dumped into ‘Corel quattro’ or ‘Lotus 123’ for the first time, now.

But I don’t want them being able to slurp up my data and then hand it over to an adversarial government, so I am very interested in continuing to shift to European service providers for email, password management, and office documents.

The criticism in the thread isn’t about the vendor in specific, but the technology in general? Because I need persuasion (not that it’s your job, I just know we are all fumbling towards hopefully “better”)

Can you elaborate?

I’m on Fennec, a Mozilla derivative for Android

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I mean, I used an LLM to generate the ampacty chart when I couldn’t find one I liked with web searches, and then just cleaned it up in a spreadsheet for asthetics, before printing it out. 😅

At first I tried using one of the image generation functions but I noticed that it was making up imaginary values AFTER if printed it. And therein lies my core criticism of relying on LLM’s, that they will lie to me with impunity and with absolute confidence every fourth answer they give.

You and I agree that readily being able to drill down to information is the superpower that we have to leverage in our human world, and that pattern recognition as well as memorization are key tools on that path.

I also feel that delay you’re talking about, injecting latency into my day, as I type out the same question for the eighth time on the sixth day, and realizing this is something that could just be on my wall and that I should probably try to flashcard.

I have definitely seen smart people get dumb with AI though, because it coopts and changes behaviors on some weird and fundamental level. Not just dumb people like me. 😅

I mean, mostly yes, but also I did benefit from an LLM arguing with me and telling me to not be so cavalier with 15kwh of batteries. It was helpful to have some safety guard rails. It was useful for giving more expansive considerations and playing devil’s advocate against my designs.

I only shocked myself twice, from the solar panels. 😅

I feel like I spend months trying to find the right phrase the people will understand when I mention llms, since I refuse to call these things artificial intelligence.

My favorite thus far, are “spicy autocorrect” and “next words calculator.” The fact that it has all of the compendium of human knowledge on physics or last millennium economics, means it is an excellent research assistant and engineering consultant, as long as I can keep in mind that it’s going to lie to me with impunity and with utmost confidence every fourth question I ask.

This is one of the hardest points for me to articulate, trying to convince everyday folks including families and friends that these Technologies are actively making us dumber.

Wiring up a solar and battery array, and then wiring up an entire miniature rack mount full of tech myself using ‘AI’ was absolutely critical in understanding the Nuance between different products and between different wiring schemes, but I realized after about 3 months that I was spending at least 15 times a day asking about the ampacity of different wire gauges (“how much current can this gauge of wire carry safely? What about that gauge of wire?”) Before I finally just made a table of common wire gauges in both aluminum and copper, and then printed it out and tacked it onto my wall like it was still 1997.

I reduced my net time spent querying by at least 20% in the past month by looking at my patterns.

This isn’t a brag. This is me admitting that I got stupid and then I’m forgetting the power isn’t knowing stuff but in having that knowledge at our fingertips, and that asking some mega Data Center two states away to boil half their freshwater and brown out half their town so that I can be told that I really do have to up my wiring material, makes me feel gross.

So much, this. My brokerage apps are my biggest offenders for phoning to unauthorized parties, makes me nervous as hell.

I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, that I miss using Mullvad but that DDG supplanted them as my VPN of choice, just because there are other anti-tracking and adjacent security Services integrated into my life so seamlessly.

Unrelated to DDG, if you sideload on Android I want to shill HARD for this FDroid package, called Hail, , which when powered with Shizuku can fully suspend apps selectively at will.

So I identify any apps that like to phone home regularly, and just tell them to aggressively take naps until summoned, I feel like I only want to allow 10% of my apps to run to the background regularly. This app gives me a toggle for that, and DDG is my lamp light for selecting the most egregious offenders.

I bought a literal thermometer, not a thermostat just a thermometer, which I wanted to log temperatures, and it insisted on me downloading an app and then setting up a free account. Noped out of that s*** and left caustic reviews but it was impossible to use without a smart device, without internet access, and without the invasion of privacy.

Just repeat that story a hundred times and you’re describing modern domestic life.

Hey dude, just wanted to say that I learned a little bit from you today. Thanks for sharing on here.

I remember Apple famously disallowing any kind of “Write Once, Run Anywhere” platform tech at the dawn of iOS, ATVos and iPad OS, quite openly trying to fuck with Adobe’s and Sun’s shit.

But using apps to avoid needing all of the traffic and rendering capabilities for modern websites was key in its early days and I remember even 10 years ago recommending to clients and customers that were stuck with awful internet connections or underpowered devices, to try using the apps instead of the websites for things.

Nowadays, I only want to visit so many corpo resources strictly through a browser and fighting tooth and nail to avoid ever letting their apps on my phones. I would literally fire a bank for not having a functional Web page to do what I need done , especially since I probably can’t be on vanilla android for much longer the way things are going and too many secure apps require Google Play services for their circle of trust.

The thing about THAT is Bing built their house literally copying Google’s homework. In the early days (maybe 2013? Long before they went masks-off) google published examples of them inventing new unique words that didn’t organizational exist in open web pages, and those popping up and Bing search indexes 3 weeks later.

Kagi, at least according to a few talks Doctorow of the EFF gave in recent history, admit their indices just came from Google’s as well.

Watching everyone’s favorite advertising agency turn heal so swiftly has been one of the biggest bummers of my adult life.

While their first party browser convinced me if it’s privacy capabilities, I need extensions (yes, recognizing that makes me much more fingerprintable) so I use their browser less than 1% of the time.

However, I have subscribed for their premium Services because I already trust their anti-tracker on my mobile devices and they have sufficient number of VPN nodes to be useful to me (I do miss Mullvad, and probably will use them when I’m traveling International, but it is getting harder to find good nodes and they don’t have servers in south Korea at all, either).

And their measures to make a neutered and neutral AI interface is the first time I’ve ever paid for general AI access, finding it’s helped some of my efforts as AI has been a necessary component for building my home studio and mini rack. I’m scared that my brain has already been ruined, acclimating to Google’s integration of Bard and then later Gemini, and I make a regular exercise of hunting for sites that have articles or discussions that will help me work through tech projects and puzzles “the hard way” with just vanilla search queries and amendments.

I love that DDG’s tech stack seems to play well in the general broader ecosystem, so it’s my search engine of choice for all of my Gecko/Fusion browsers (Fennec, WaterFox, LibreWolf, and occasionally, full-fat vanilla Firefox).

I had really thought I could grow into using Kagi but I couldn’t make it make sense for myself. When you’re limiting paid subscribers at the first tier to 300 general web queries a month, and i could consume that many just on correcting my own typos and re-searches alone, DDG was a better investment for me for the time being.

TL;DR - I love that these guys play well with others, so I’ll even pay for the access because I need them to still exist in a decade.

Only if you’re a decent person. I recall articles earlier in the Siri and Alexa lifecycle about how men were telling on themselves in front of prospective dates by being assholes to their virtual assistants. Thinking about that for a decade is why I’m still trying to use whole sentences and communicate with the clangers in a way that the transcript could be a conversation with any of my friends.

I try to talk to the Spicy Autocorrect as if it were a person deserving of respect, so that I don’t lose my humanity along the way.

Updoot for Patrick Boyle.

Can confirm, both are an extension of Corporatocracy and the abortion of privacy.

Can you tell us more about these Bad Actors? Are they in the room with us, right now?

You sound fun at parties. Circular firing squad, much?

Fwiw, several generations of Windows notebooks have suffered from nasty sleep bugs where they wake themselves up from sleep, and drain their batteries while clamshelled in a book bag. Used to happen with my work Dells almost monthly. Microsoft’s announced win11 fix for it is one of the loudest and most venerated I’ve heard, in living memory.

Best I ever got out of the deal was a spicy pillow, no breach, and I’ve been unable to find any articles about any rash of laptop explosions which would have had very high visibility.

It sounds like you have also been as lucky as I have. May we all hope to escape the fires, a little longer.