Install Warzone 2100, start poking the game files, adjust various numbers and see what happens. Give your cannons massive range, make every unit super cheap to manufacture or whatever. Your imagination is the limit. Play the game however you want. The game itself is good, but hacking it is just so much more fun.

“It’s not what it looks like! I can assure you, our relationship is entirely sexual.”

They thought of that. It has to be a video and you have to move your head around as if you’re setting up face ID. Not creepy at all. Then again, this is Meta we’re talking about, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

For a brief moment, I had a a FB/Instagram account for testing purposes. After about a week, Meta started asking to see my face on camera. Needless to say, that experiment hit a brick wall.

I was just following and liking stuff here and there. Didn’t even post anything, but apparently that was suspicious enough for Meta.

On Nebula, the channel also gets a certain share of the revenue if you watch the video on that platform instead of on YT. Some channels actually publish their videos early on Nbula, while other channels make exclusive videos too. Either way, avoiding YT, and favoring other platforms benefits everyone.

Here are my privacy/security tips roughly in the order of importance.

Unique password that have upper case, lower case, numbers and special characters. Also, most passwords are at least 16 characters long.

NextDNS on my mobile devices for ad blocking and privacy.

Linux on my laptop + Firefox and uBock Origin.

No Whatsapp, or Telegram. I prefer to use Signal. If someone insists on using some spyware messenger, I’ll just SMS them.

No Meta, Xitter or other major platforms allowed. When using social media, I don’t share anything too personal. Also, no photos of me or anyone I know.

There are also lots of smaller video platforms built by youtubers. They publish advertiser friendly (censored) videos on YT, but put the real versions on their own platform. This way, fans can support their favorite channels, and get to see videos that are too cool for YT.

You see, the point is that privacy is really nice to have. However, it’s not worth it when the price you pay is your mental balance and serenity. There are easier and cheaper bits of privacy you can pursue, but you need to know where to draw the line. Some things just come with an unacceptable price. Maybe GPT is like that in your case.

Sounds like you might be sacrificing your mental wellbeing for some privacy gains. You should probably consider your priorities. Which one comes first?

Ages ago, when Chrome was still a new kid on the block, I read an article about it. Turns out, this browser is spying on you so hard that it made me, nope out immediately. Somehow, people missed that article, and others like it, and pretty much everyone started using Chrome on their computer (see also: pro-mobile era).

Especially among 4 year old girls, but the kitty merch is a different story.

A friend advised me to put lots of Hello Kitty stickers on my bike so that nobody would want to steal it. I wonder if the same logic applies here.

This looks like a dream target for hackers. Imagine all the data you could find here. If there ever was a single point of failure, this is it.

Mobile phones and earbuds solve that problem for the most part.

I had very similar experiences around 2015. Before that, it was reasonably easy to use a fully FOSS system, but things have gotten worse over the years. Sure, there’s more FOSS for mobile hardware than ever before, but the world surrounding the phone has moved in the exact opposite direction. Being compatible with the world around you is the problem here.

Back then, I couldn’t find a satisfactory solution. One extreme is to go full on FOSS, and cut at least 50% of the entire world from your life, while the other is to sacrifice your privacy at altar of corporate greed. Between the two there are numerous dissatisfying compromises, and you need to do some soul searching to figure out where you want to draw the line.

Maybe it’s automated propaganda and opinion steering.

Perplexity seems to do a pretty good job, whereas Copilot makes stuff up all the time.

All LLMs I’ve tested had a tendency to agree with my delusions and misconceptions, so you have to be very cautious not to ask loaded questions. If you start misleading the LLM, it will go with the flow and give you a wrong answer.

Copilot and chatGPT prefer to avoid PR disasters, but Mistral has no issues with sensitive topics. Mistral doesn’t really seem to have much opinions about anything so you can dive into any topic you like. The other LLMs do have clear opinions and lines they won’t cross.

Facebook has started using AI bots to boost engagement (and revenue). Is Reddit trying to do the same thing?

Using a 100% de-googled Android would be best, but it comes with some serious compromise, so this option isn’t for everyone. The second best options are also pretty good and quite practical in comparison.

It really depends on your situation and the kinds of threats you’re trying to mitigate. If you need to have a spyTV, spyPhone, a spyPad or something similar in your life, using DNS filtering may be an appealing option. Ideally, you would have zero iOS or Android devices in your household, but life isn’t ideal.