PShaw, that’s how I had to do it. Slackware on floppy. Pre-internet search engine, one computer per household. No cellular data.

windows -> Dial up -> look at some docs, take nodes -> reboot into Slackware -> mess with the console -> get stuck -> reboot into windows -> repeat

Searx is fancy about it though, It queries everybody and gives you the results that came back from multiple places. This effectively eliminates ads, AI, and unless they all missed it, spam.

I think the big problem I have with tor is that there’s no way to know how compromised the network is. From a three letter agency budget, setting up 30,000 nodes wouldn’t be a big deal, you just have them doing other things.

Of course, I’m not really doing anything that would draw the ire of a three-letter agency, so even tor is overkill.

I was also never really big on people running bad s*** through my node. I’ve always felt better using a paid proxy then at least claims not to log, Even if there’s a half decent chance that people are watching their ingress and egress at the ISP level.

If you can go in with a plan and stick to it, they’re a good deal. As long as you only buy stuff you’d get elsewhere and stick to the plan.

50 lbs of rice is way cheaper per lb than a 1 lb bag from the store. Their giant container of Saran wrap and tin foil will last a family years. Their take away containers are cheaper than Amazon.

You just have to figure out how to stop from going oh wait I could use one of those… ;)

If you can go in with a plan and stick to it, they’re a good deal. As long as you only buy stuff you’d get elsewhere and stick to the plan.

50 lbs of rice is way cheaper per lb than a 1 lb bag from the store. Their giant container of Saran wrap and tin foil will last a family years. Their take away containers are cheaper than Amazon.

You just have to figure out how to stop from going oh wait I could use one of those… ;)

That way you can tell them that they’re wrong and by some small fraction feel better about your life choices, yeah we get it.

Same thing with costco. I’m in line, they scan me, look you could pay for our premium membership, you’d have saved $300 last year.

I shouldn’t have even bought the $1200 worth last year, the last thing i need is to have a reason to shop there more often.

Ahh you’re in denial because it’s inconvenient to your world view, splendid!

The pendulum swings both ways. Amazon is absolutely full of fake goods, unsafe goods, stuff you absolutely could not sell in the markets in which they operate. Prior to now, they have refused to make any serious effort to clean up bad actors. For the time being, they’re probably going to swing the other way. Hopefully they can eventually work out a happy medium.

The basic idea is that you build a dossier on everyone. You discover what kind of food they eat, where they live, The size and makeup of their family, their sexual preferences, pregnancies, what kind of porn they watch, where they shop for groceries, where they shop for electronics. You tie together purchases with their credit card to purchases in other apps or even brick and mortar stores. You figure out where they owe money with their education looks like. You look at these things even altogether at some point in your life and go why the hell do I care.

Then 20 years down the road when Chinese companies start pushing out American banks all of a sudden you can’t get a loan for a house or a car . Or maybe you’re going for a job at some point in this data is leaked back out now it’s part of your indelible history.

Perhaps somebody takes it all and throws it into a large language model, All of a sudden they’ve got clarity into your post history on all social media even stuff you thought was private because they know your phone serial number or your home IP address.

Corporations and governments don’t have any business knowing about your private life. They shouldn’t get to make decisions based on your private choices and preferences.

I have better things to do than sit in front of the TV for hours on end.

I hear that. I watch way less than I used to. I’ve also made it a point to stay out of other people’s algorithms as much as I can. I only pull exactly what I want from youtube then go do something else. You can’t doom scroll Lemmy because you run out of doom after 30-40 minutes.

My guilty pleasure is still binging certain series, but I try to wait to watch stuff until it’s canceled or at the very least until the season is over and I can just catch up in a weekend.

I’ll look at those ASAP, super hopeful

Interesting, every API tool I’ve looked at has been shut down. I’m on Mastodon and a perfectly willing to give it a shot. As long as the message gets to me within about three or four minutes it should be fine. How do you do this?

Yeah, actually, that would be a pretty high bar. It puts the onus on them to maintain the list of people, to use an app that individually sends the message to everyone so you’re not giving everyone each other’s phone numbers.

I’d love to see them post it literally anywhere else but it is what it is.

It’s how they communicate that busses have been released. :/

They’re definitely grabbing analytics and statistics. But so is AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Google, Microsoft.

If the Chinese government asked any of those other companies to give them all the data they have on you in particular, They probably tell them to get bent.

But if the US government told them to do it, they would comply and then have a gag order slapped against them to keep them from telling you it happened.

Huawei is beholden to the Chinese government. So it works kind of in the opposite way.

I only use Twitter because my kids school refuses to stop using Twitter.

I’m only on Facebook long enough to catch up with older friends and family.

I tried nc it for a while I would have taken me till the end of days to import all of my files.

I suspect I could keep it running by doing lockstep backups and updates. But it was just so incredibly slow.

I just want something that would give me remote access to my files with meta information about my files and a good search index.

It really wasn’t all that complicated for me. Install the client on two devices set a share up on one device go to the other device Hit add device put the share ID in. Go back to the first devices admin and say allow the share

I could totally see using this as a display wall. *Kyle in a bunch of them as a store display or a small display.

*When you ask for tile and google gives you Kyle.