lrvick

Life is too short to wait on policy changes. Everyone has to take responsibility for achieving their own goals.

I moved a lot growing up, and had to make friends quickly. I got pretty damn good at magic. When a stranger suddenly starts complaining about how spicy the burritos are and blows an actual fireball randomly, you end up in fun conversations with strangers.

My version of it these days is giving tech talks even when they terrify me, because it helps me find the select few people who share my interests faster.

But also if 9/10 strangers blow you off when you try to chat them up, who cares? That is their problem. The 1/10 are going to make it worth it.

I am thankful for EO14434 because it lets me immediately identify which data sources and people are either too idiotic or cowardly to be worth listening to on anything.

> As always, the sane fix is in government legislation and enforcement of privacy regulations.

While I do not disagree, we all know that may not happen in grandma and grandpas remaining lifetime, so lets help out the older generation where we can, and shame lazy hackers that participate in these systems.

Desolder the wifi antenna. No way for software to distinguish that from legitimately not being near any other wifi devices.

When you tell people they can save a couple thousand dollars a year and never be tracked or watch an ad again on their tv if they learn how to setup a VPN and a seed box, a lot of people are quite happy to learn.

I just run stock ubuntu with an airmouse, freetube, a browser, and kodi. Works just fine on my projectors and tvs around my house for me and even non technical guests.

I drive literally everything on my Linux TVs with a only a remote. I do not even attach a regular keyboard or mouse. All my guests use it fine too.

There is no way any guest in my home would not know my views on such things. I would respond to this in the same way as finding out a guest hid a microphone in my living room.

> You must realize there are things like 3blue1brown, Veritasium, and Numberphile on YouTube, right?

And my family and I watch those on Freetube without tracking, ads, sponsored content or even a Google account all from a remote control.

Can your Apple TV do that?

In the amount of time most people spend watching ads they could have taken an hour of that time to plug a mini pc into their tv and hit next a few times on a Linux installer to never watch an ad again.

This is really not that hard.

My non engineer wife setup Ubuntu on a mini PC in the living room herself. Took an hour. All point and click.

I cannot help but laugh at anyone on a hacker forum that thinks this is hard.

Apple marketing has made people too lazy to put an OS on a flash drive, plug it in, and hit next a few times.

My non-engineer wife literally installed ubuntu on a mini PC in our living room. HDR was two clicks and 7.2 surround sound worked out of the box. Took maybe an hour.

There are just no excuses for a technical person being too lazy to do that.

And we have a real big screen web browser with ad blockers etc, a terminal, and Kodi with every movie and TV show we could ever want to watch, and zero internet required to watch any of it and no company gets metrics on what we watch. No ads, etc.

How is that working out in China where Apple caved and gave the CCP control of the HSMs? Apple can and will cave to government pressures for enough money, and will not give technical consumers source code to verify if the privacy claims from yesterday are true today.

Every Apple device is one software update away from giving a full backdoor to anyone that asks Tim Cook nicely with an secret executive order, or simply as a favor for political points given he paid a million dollars just to be seen sitting next to a far right President on TV.

It is not ever okay to recommend people to submit themselves to power dynamics like that.

The only device someone can trust is one with community created and audited software. Software with accountability to the users.

Apple collects your data into a walled garden in proprietary protocols and ecosystems, uses that data to optimize how they manipulate people into buying their products, then charges you for access to your own data and backups. Sounds like surveillance capitalism to me.

And that is why I gave my family access to GPUs I racked up. We do what we want. Cheaper than the subscriptions over time too and we never get rate limited!

Some well placed copper tape on the back of the tv will likely get the job done in many cases.

Or jailbreak/defang the consumer TVs to have privacy anyway, and teach others how, and screw over the entire profit model of the surveillance-subsidized TVs to force things to be sold at a real cost.

You avoided hooking your TV to a surveillance capitalism company that trains on your data to manipulate you. Great!

Then you hooked it to an external device of a surveillance capitalism company that trains on your data to manipulate you. Why?

Or plug in a cheap mini PC running a TV friendly Linux distro and give your data to no one.

Did this for years when I was single living in a tiny room. Nothing wrong with this either!

Sure when the choice exists, but we should encourage de-fanging the hardware that is already purchased.

The Fed is most problematic bank, who prints money at the discretion of the President, apparently.

If all money is fake anyway, I want fake money where the value is decided by the market, not by one person.

In that case, jailbreak it, or open it and unsolder the wifi antenna, or put some well placed copper tape until you no longer see any wifi traffic from the TV from other wifi capable devices running a wifi packet inspector.

The TV belongs to you and it will obey you with modest effort.

Buy any TV you want, ignore all instructions to connect it to the internet, then look for an HDMI port on the back. Plug an HDMI cable into one end, and in the other end plug in a cheap Linux computer like a used Intel NUC from ebay. Then use a nice air-mouse remote like the Pepper Jobs W10.

I watch any movie or TV show I want in 4k via Kodi, but then can alt tab to a Terminal or a real web browser.

Privacy, and dramatically more functionality than any TV would ship with anyway.

Using this setup to type this message right now on pc hooked to a projector in my garage from my couch.

It turns out we never needed Smart TVs in the first place. Just treat it as a screen for a desktop computer.

Turns out all the methods humans used for the few hundred years before smartphones still work!

I met most of my friends at hackerspaces, board game nights, conferences, giving conference talks, parties, bars, etc. Put yourself out there in spaces where human beings of likely overlapping interests exist and you will make the friends that matter most. I first had a conversation with my wife of over a decade by tagging along with a bunch of strangers to a random pizza place. My wife did not use dating apps at all, so in person was the only way a guy could have met her.

I also open my house once a week to anyone I know, and host events every month or so. Met a lot of friends-of-friends that way.

And look, I get it. Doing all that is scary. I still have a lot of anxiety about hanging out with people I do not live with, and I do it anyway. Never regretted it once.

Spending time around other people in person makes us better people.

> Maps: Knowing what's around me physically, up-to-date information, public transport routes, etc. I found some remote paths on CoMaps in the UK which I walked recently, without the aid of the app I would have not known about these.

And I do something often almost no human in the developed world ever does; I get lost. I wander a bit. I give myself a bit of extra time so I can try alternative routes and see if I figure it out and maybe see a new part of my city along the way.

I look up maps in advance and print those when going somewhere the first time on a tight schedule, but that is about it. For the most part I just actually know my city.

Also research on Taxi driver brains indicates regular reliance on a GPS makes you as much as 20% more likely to develop Alzheimer's.

Turns out not using parts of our brains ever is bad for them.

> AntennaPod: the wealth of information and interesting topics I've been exposed to via podcasts is hard to overstate.

When I want music on the go I take a small standalone Rockbox media player. Can handle podcasts or years of music no problem. No internet on the go needed.

> Home Assistant: being able to control my home, optimise the energy usage, improve security.

I love Home Assistant and I optimize and automate it when I am at home, so I do not need to away from home for short periods. For long periods, I check it from a laptop at a hotel once a day or so and that is plenty.

> AI: I can talk to an AI anywhere. Instantly upload a photo, for example I use this to identity plants.

I use a notebook. I write down things that interest me. I do not need instant answers to every question. That leads to endless answers we remember few of. Better to be intentional with research that we still think matters in a day. Most of the things will not matter in a day, but there is a note just in case.

I once had google glass full time so I was never a second away from information and screens. I had every wearable that existed.

I am thankful for now not being reliant on any of it to be happy and productive on the go. I like to use computers intentionally at fixed locations so I can walk away from them and have a forcing function to exercise other parts of my brain.

> Don't forget that your car may also have a cellular modem and rat out your driving habits to dealers, data brokers and insurers.

This is why I never drive a car I cannot repair myself in a pinch that requires zero software or even a working battery to operate, which means low tech, manual transmission.

5 percent is generous!

Still, many of us are experimenting with ways to decentralize power and have no interest in the traders and grifters. We have an interest in buying things online with privacy like VPNs or servers. Donating to people that were cut off from banks like political dissidents. Having some access to liquidity that will work even when a false accusation freezes your bank accounts. Or a way to pay creators tiny amounts of value in exchange for content without needing ads or big payment network fees. See projects like LBRY making an alternative to Youtube. Most of the interesting things happening in crypto are happening quietly without VC marketing budgets to attract the finance bros.

It is important these experiments continue to evolve until something checks enough boxes for the average person to trust it more than a bank or paypal.

This may take decades to get right, but humanity will be better for it.

As someone that feels both parties are irredeemably corrupt, I left because I am anti authoritarian and Twitter both before and after Musk has repeatedly unfairly applied rules for clear political reasons which made it no longer a fair or honest platform to participate in.

Because the big centralized corporate banks having complete control of our lives is a great solution that we should never try to compete with in decentralized and sovereign ways?

I use Freetube instead of YouTube exactly because no login, no algorithm, no ads, no sponsored content. Just chronological actual content from channels I care about.

It really is a big difference.

That said I would only -consume- content ripped from YouTube. I have no account and no interest in publishing there.