I’m forced into this box that is my subscribed feed or I have to actively search out new communities because all is just a political circle jerk that I don’t care about.

Come on, this is not a problem. It’s a feature. As another user said in another reply, having a algorithm curating your feed ends up curating you. It’s even easier here than on reddit since you can even block whole instances! Block the ones that have the most political communities and you will be fine.

I agree with you on one thing, the lack of content on topics that are not tech or political related. But that falls on us, the users. I hope more communities will continue to grow in the future.

Not to mention the moment I came back I saw a fucking flow chart on the instances drama of the week.

I don’t know, for me at least, it has been pretty funny, especially these days. You enter [email protected], see the big pinned thread that says “Don’t whine”, and then hundreds of people whining. It gives me a chuckle.

It would be good if true, for a privacy first chat, asking for your phone number is the first and biggest red flag.

Someone knows how Delta Chat handles the spam problem? Or spam is only a problem that comes with wider adoption?

I love Debian, I use it as a desktop and it’s installed on all my machines, but it has some problems/quirks that make it hard to recommend it for desktop usage.

First one is that it doesn’t have sensible defaults, the OS expects a user who is an admin, one who will configure things to their liking. I would consider this to be a feature, if it weren’t for the second problem, the documentation. The documentation is wayy too dated, lots of pages in the wiki haven’t been updated since Debian Buster days!

A better recommendation would be probably a Debian derivative like MX Linux. They are more opinionated, but as far as I know, they come with better defaults and offer newer guides, documentation, etc.

Thanks for sharing, i haven’t been able to find a good guide, will check it out. Or more accurately a guide that i can follow with ease.

I went into hyperbole there, my bad. I agree wholeheartedly with your reply.

Admittedly, I have a bias here, since using water for food production feels more justified. Same with some industries. But I concede and agree that meat is not the most efficient way nor the most ethical source of food.

I think data centers rub me the wrong way because, for me, they are the straw that broke the camel’s back. We see how lots of countries pull out of the fight against climate change (not that they were really fighting it, but at least they seemed to care a little) and now they waste more resources on things that are, from my point of view, not productive nor useful to most people. (Ethics aside, my view on Gen AI is that it is a tech that is not mature enough, and that the use of brute force to make it better is a waste of resources)

I will try to be more mindful about my comments.

I kid you not, yesterday while reading about the ai bubble and the datacenters boom i was thinking maybe this is THE filter.

Not a nuclear winter, not the angry alien or the big scary asteroid. Just a fucking chatbot wasting all the water and power. We truly live in a boring dystopia.

I should have seen this coming, even then, I am extremely sad.

This was of the few uses for machine learning that I think it was genuily useful. Mature enough to make an impact without destroying the enviroment.

It was also my main argument for people that are full hate AI. Now gone.

I hope others companies continue this research. It’s in this type of problems where machine learning truly shines.

GenAi is still not mature enough, throwing so much compute power at it, is mostly wasting resources.

Imagine what could be done if all the computer power and researchers wasted on chats went to this type of project.

The Crypto AG story shows that the location of a company doesn’t matter that much. The US simply made legal what they were already doing behind the scenes. Intelligence services have always been and still are above the law.

Unpopular takes incoming.

Signal.

Way too many red flags.

• Why ask for mandatory phone numbers? You could at least make it opt in.
• Why we can’t inspect the latest server code?
• Why not make it easy for people to run their own servers?

Do you truly believe that a company that wants to preserve your privacy would take this direction?

And i don’t care how secure the protocol is, how well the code is audited. They can still map your social graph.

Anyways, because of my threat model, i still use Signal. But if i were an activist i wouldnt touch it.

More unpopular takes:

Tor and Mullvad probably compromised too. If a service gets too mainstream, I dont believe for a second that they would let it run without care. They would take it down, or control it.

Now, these services are still usefull. For example mt threat model is to deny my shit to the big tech. So they are useful if you want to escape data collection for adversiment purposes.

I don’t think they would burn the reputation of these services for low hanging fruit like selling data for ads.

Now that you tell me, I think i have heard about that before. It does make a bit of sense, there may be some of both things to this madness. While speculation i value the observation and i will keep it mind, thank you for sharing it.

Fully agree, while people losing jobs to ai is sad, i have zero sympathies for meta employees. They knew pretty well how insidious that company is, and as you said, they are smart enough to find a good enough job in another company.

A bit off topic, but all this ai stuff replacing so many jobs is a bit baffling to me. At least for certain jobs. It’s not like in the industrial revolution where you could see tangible results in production and efficiency. Even if it come at a terrible human cost you could see the cold logic.
Here in change, they are firing good talent only to get a subpar costlier replacement. Sure there are some places where it works, but i don’t believe it’s yet to the scale where you would fire so many people.

I suppose the wet dreams of a future with no employees is too good to pass.

There are plenty, as others have said, it has been able to help a lot in science. It has been used for finding new drugs, search for composite materials.

Sadly i don’t think the pros will outweigh the cons, the society as is right now won’t let it happen. I truly think this tool, even without any fancy AGI, if used in a responsible manner could help us solve some of the most pressing problems the world has.

But it won’t happen, look at the irresponsible manner the capitalist society has rolled out this tech, which is still in its infancy. It has wasted tons and tons of energy on models that are not yet fully mature. Brute force training of shit models just to get the best monthly benchmark over competitors. It’s so sad to see all the promised goals in terms of saving energy and water that went to garbage the moment the AI hype exploded.

And what we got for that? A bunch of models causing problems because they are not ready. Executives cutting workforce, in part to justify the use the new shiny tooling, only to get shittier services. And worse of all, shortage of water and energy to pump more compute.

Even if we get to a future where AI is cheap, powerful and capable, it will only be used to widen the gap between the wealthy and the common people.

Link Article

Sorry for the doomer rant, its a conflicted topic for me, feel free to skip.

(From South America)

About phones, same advice as monovergent, i use a separate phone for things that require google and another one for work. It’s not ideal since they probably can correlate them, but it’s the best compromise i found.

About ID, you are required to show it for most of the things you ask, which I think is reasonable. We don’t have face id thankfully yet

I see, i will study it over the weekend a bit better and see what i end up doing. Thank you.

I’m leaning towards it, i will probably bit the bullet. Thanks for your comment.

I did, but i don’t know if changing things there will cause conflicts.

Since i have no experience using luci i don’t know what behaviour is normal or expected, and to what extent the custom software glinet uses changes it. Do you think that tweeking the preconfigured networks would cause conflicts in the long run?

After sleeping over it, im leaning towards going full vanilla. It should be easier to find tutorials to solve and isolate problems.

Anyways thanks for your comment.

Thanks for the clarification, i read you wrong, and you are completely right. Whats worse is that even if you are a bit savvy or informed is hard to fully get away from them. But anyways, even if i cant escape them i will try to give the minimum data possible.

whatsapp requires phone numbers. surely they can be called

Sadly the phone number is only for messages, in most cases it’s automated with a bot giving you options.

if you have tech skills, try running a matrix bridge

I didn’t know about matrix bridges. To be honest i’m not familiar with matrix but i have been learning about networking and self host on the side. I could make it part of the project.

Thanks for the suggestions! I should interact more with the community, i have been receiving lots of good feedback recently, i was always a lurker on reddit.

In Latin America most public services, banks ans bussines uses whatspps as their main support line.

To give you an example, if you have no water in your house you need to report on wp. No other way. And this is the standard for a lot of services, wp is the ONLY way to ask for support.

Also, if you are a freelancer or have a bussiness, your clients expect you to have whatsapp, 90% of inquiries and sales goes through wp.

It’s a nightmare, i really want to get rid of meta services but it is impossible for my case.

I have decided to decouple what i can, and use different phones for meta services, but i suspect that they still correlate and collect data. (Based on location, wifi, mac of iot, browsing etc)

Anyways, i ask people to be aware that for some of us, our situations makes impossible to remove some of the meta, microsoft or google services.

My aproach for now is to only use the minimum neccesary, i still search for ways to gradually switch out what i can.

Whatever i can’t rid off, i have another phone for it, how effecrive this is idk but for now is the best solution i found.

Thanks for the explanation!