I don’t have kids so this might not work for you, but for me getting a nice pair of noise cancelling headphones has been a real godsend. They were a little pricey but being able to just have a silent bubble you can turn on whenever you want is great. They also completely cancel out the background sound of being on a plane.

I deleted my banking app off my phone because it asked me for a selfie lol. I will absolutely switch banks over this.

I suspect it’s just their way of inching towards requiring everyone to provide ID to access the internet, they pretty much always wrap this stuff up in some sort of “protect the children” hysteria, so they can accuse anyone who protests it of being a pedophile.

Also Meta is lobbying for it so they can get off the hook for having to moderate their own stuff by shunting the responsibility onto someone else.

TBH this is just how it goes in general I think. A small group of people build something neat, and if it attracts enough people then the corporations and money come in, they attract more people and it all goes to shit, then a small amount of people from that group leave and start a new thing. reddit was the neat little alternative thing once.

I suspect eventually we’ll probably have to build a second internet lol

I think “making” AI art is essentially the same as commissioning a painting - you’re describing what you want to someone else and they’re making it for you (although in this case ‘someone’ is a kind of highly-optimized plagiarism machine, but same kind of principle.) When it’s done, you might “own” the result, but you didn’t make it IMO.

Still a bigger pile of gold than I have now lol

If they’re worth about the same, I’ll still take the gold then. My logic being: 1. I’m not American. 2. I just think having a big pile of gold is cooler.

I always liked how the best argument against wind farms they could come up with was they’re an eyesore, even though they’re not really that different from windmills, which nobody objects to. But yeah a massive grey cube that drains all the fresh water out of everything in a 10-mile radius is just fine.

‘Jam’ can mean a fruit preserve, to play music, a stuck door, traffic, to cram something into something else, a tense situation, or to block a radio signal. All spelled and pronounced the same.

My ideal scenario:

• As technology improves, it becomes increasingly easy to run AI locally at home.
• The hardware companies/data center AI companies eventually fuck each other over because big corporations always fuck everyone else over eventually and it stops becoming profitable.
• NVIDIA etc. come crawling back to the consumer market, offering things at reasonable prices again. Data centers sell off all their shit and absolutely flood the market with cheap RAM & graphics cards.
• Some other company has started making the hardware in the meantime and the public tells NVIDIA to go fuck themselves and we watch them go into a slow IBM style decline.

Although what will probably happen is the companies will fuck each other over, prices will stay high forever and the data centers that go out of business will just burn all their hardware and all of this will have meant nothing.

I agree nobody is 100% trustworthy, but as a side note Mullvad’s no-log policy has been proven fairly recently after they were raided and the police found nothing at all.

Yeah we had a sweet deal before and we pissed it away. I don’t see why we should get the same terms if we rejoin. That’s just the cost of being stupid IMO

I suspect the ideal outcome would have been to have Leave almost win, like if it went 52-48 the other way. That way they could still keep saying it’s “what the people want” and keep using it as a wedge issue, but without having to actually do anything.

I also got mine refurbished, so that way Google presumably doesn’t get any money from me, at least not directly.

I have a pixel 8 pro currently, but I was running it on a 4a before that. It’s a bit of a trade-off, you get more privacy obviously and some more manual control over stuff, but also you lose some convenience. I’m kind of used to it now though.

It also depends on how deep you want to go with de-googling and stuff too. Currently I’m trying to avoid Google as much as possible (which sounds weird to say when using a Google Pixel lol) so I’m using things like Aurora Store and Obtainium as app stores.

I am in this rabbit hole too! I recently discovered that 3/5 of my external drives are still using inferior LUKS1 encryption instead of LUKS2 so I have to figure that out. Also I just got a yubikey and set it up with challenge-response so now my laptop needs the yubikey inserted, and a password and you have to press the button on the yubikey to unlock it.

All of this is very unnecessary because I have no data that is of any use to anyone else, it’s just become a fun project to see how locked-down I can make my laptop.

Edit: also posting this from my phone running GrapheneOS lol

If we’re just talking famous people and not family/people I knew, Douglas Adams. I don’t like living in a world where Douglas Adams dies at 49 and Henry Kissenger lives to be 100.

https://cybernews.com/security/researcher-releases-bitlocker-bypass-and-privilege-escalation-exploit/

This guy seems to be dropping them on a good schedule lol

Bulgaria’s tourism minister must be shitting it right now though lol. “We have to host WHAT next year?”

Also if you saw all the Moroccanoil sponsorship all over Eurovision this year - let’s just say that company is not Moroccan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moroccanoil