Another DIY option to look at is Mycroft. They used to sell devices, but they’ve since stopped all development as of 2023. There’s likely still a community tinkering away, so I’d imagine you could still run your own if you wanted.

As will I, but those look like legit release notes and not a joke. Nothing jumps out as too good to be true or just bizarre.

I use Bazzite on a laptop that’s shared by family, and it’s great. I never have to worry about downtime, and I know they’ll always have a computer should something happen to me.

I once had a bad update, and I just used rpm-ostree rollback, and I was up and running again. Really great for anyone that wants to set it and forget it.

I always liked KeeWeb as an alternative front end for KeePass.

True, but I would suppose that depends how intertwined your account is with your life. A couple of new accounts probably wouldn’t matter that much. I just more meant that they wouldn’t try to sue you, or something.

Sounds like a market opportunity.

I’m able to reply just fine. They have a special address that goes to your inbox, and when you reply, it looks like you’re replying from that alias and not your main email address.

That was one of the first things I checked on, since replying is sometimes necessary.

You can also send by going into your Aliases and clicking “Send” by one of your aliases. This will open a dialogue that creates the recipient address you need to use in whatever email address is verified with Addy.

ETA: and to be abundantly clear, I’m using the free tier. This is all included in the free option.

Perhaps, but you’re just guessing. I don’t know their operating costs, and I would suspect that neither do you.

If you know better, please enlighten me.

Free for me. I haven’t paid them a cent. Depends what you need out of the service.

A very good distinction, and a better way of saying what I said. I might have to amend my rhetoric.

Perhaps, but if I connect from my IP and then 30sec later to a different account on the same IP, and that happens routinely for the same accounts, one could reasonably assume it was potentially one person using two accounts.

You could circumvent that with a VPN, since those IP ranges are usually known and known to be shared, but probably not with a residential IP address.

Anyway, it’s just a guess. I don’t know with any certainty how they might sus out somebody breaking the policy. I just believe that if they find people doing that with regularity, the free tier many people enjoy can be revoked, and so it would be a dick move to try to abuse account creation.

Probably nothing would happen to you. They might correlate your IP address and ban you, but that’s likely it.

However, don’t do that. Servers aren’t free, and if people abuse the charity of these services, they’ll stop offering free options for everyone.

If you need extra addresses, use something like https://addy.io/. if you need more storage, might be worth considering self-hosting your email.

Yes, it’s censorship. But censorship isn’t inherently bad or wrong. Go join an LGBTQ community, and start saying trans slurs. Go to a group for renewable energy discussion, and start talking about how great diesel trucks are. You would be banned, and rightly so, because censorship (aka. moderation) is necessary to protect the group from bad actors.

What becomes problematic is when those with vast amounts of power get to decide what everyone is allowed to say for considerations other than group safety or topical relevance. What people usually mean when they say “censorship” is “moderation without reasonable justification.” Folks like Musk routinely censor anyone who’s critical of his ideals, his friends, or holds beliefs counter to his own.

So as you consider censorship, you need to keep in mind that there’s reasonable and unreasonable censorship, and it’s up to you to decide where that line is and recognize the potential baggage that line (or lack) comes with.

Lack of censorship ≠ less harm.

the FBI is able to de-anonymize Tor users and discover their real IP address remains classified information. In a 2017 court case, the FBI refused to divulge how it was able to do this,

I can fly. No, I don’t have to prove it.

And did you know that Medbeds exist, and “they” are keeping them from people, because they’re actually in league with Satan?

/s

Yes, unfortunately. I dunno if it’s a global thing or just in the US, but several years ago, they started sending your car’s computer data to insurance companies, who then use it to determine how well you drive and what insurance rates they want to give you.

It’s really scummy.

Same reason I don’t want to buy a new car anymore…

Because of the “driving behavior” data that gets sent out via secret cell connections and bought by insurance companies?

But lately I’ve been in a rough state mentally (I say lately but it’s always been with me) and having GPT guide me and being able to just dictate what I think helps me a lot on various levels, for various reasons.

You should consider journaling and/or a support group and/or professional help. You say it’s always been with you, and relying on an LLM to help you parse your thoughts is only going to lead to bad places. It does not have the knowledge or skill of a psychologist, even with its vast database. It doesn’t “know” the correct way to apply psychological concepts or know when you’re engaging in destructive behavior, and it could even reinforce those same behaviors. AI can feel like a friend to talk to, but it’s an illusion.

But at this point, using ChatGPT with a mic, isn’t this basically cancelling every effort I’ve made? (using it in the first place anyway)

If you’re telling it your deepest secrets and current problems, yes. You’re putting your personal information out there for a profit-driven company to use at their discretion. Several people have suggested self-hosting, and I would agree, but ultimately I think you need to seek human help for the root cause of why you’re leaning so heavily upon AI.

Large Language Models only learn and repeat patterns, I don’t think it’s a good tool for introspection, because it’s giving you more generic thoughts and only making it seem personal.

Worse, it’s doing that lazily. People think that just because it has a gigantic database of information that it’s able to parse all that information and put together summaries of that sum total of information, but what it does in reality is find the first solution it can cobble together from anonymous internet sources and present that as an “answer.”

Asking a generic code question about data structures is less likely to produce bad answers, since there’s little disagreement in how to implement them. They’re close to brute facts, and a wrong answer is rarely catastrophic. Asking it about psychology or philosophy, however, is prone to terrible answers, not just because there’s vast disagreement in those fields, but there’s also a lot of personal consideration when it comes to applying the information to individuals.

Goodbye, $92B in tax revenue. But we’re making the government more efficient, right? /s

Linux Mint or Nobara would be great beginner distros and would each be great for gaming. If gaming is more important, I would lean towards Nobara. If general use is more important, Mint.

Keep in mind that you can try most of these out in a Virtual Machine. Some others to consider are PikaOS and CachyOS. I’m also working on my migration, and I install and set up everything with each ISO as if I was doing it for real, to see what hiccups I might run into. It will be slower, but it’s just a trial run, so just expect things to be faster when you do it for real!