That’s fine. Do what you want. I’m not here to judge your choices, just point out that Mozilla only fucked up the communication, not the policy itself.

Right? I just do my best to ignore the bot and only enter queries any first year CS student would know. The rest comes from my memory and a few bookmarks I have saved.

Thus far, the local models I’ve worked with have gotten a C- on coding, but an A+ on bullshit.

I work at a company that won’t allow us to use a search engine but has a local model we’re allowed to use, and this is a pretty apt summary.

If you’re referring to that fuckup with the ToS or whatever, that’s not what they’ve started doing. You can verify this by their Privacy Policy, which hasn’t changed in almost a year.

But if you are pointing to other examples, I’m open to learning.

Greedflation! And economists finally agreed a couple years ago that the data proves it’s a real thing that happened/is happening.

Is America Great Depression, yet?

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