You say that like they ever do things the right way, even a fair chunk of the proposals I see for Linux take it out of the user’s hands.

I already nuked my hard drive and went to Debian when Microslop kept trying to force me to “update” my local account and turned their creepy AI stuff back on again and again no matter how many times I dug in with PowerShell to shut it off.

We’re going to be running a fork not licensed for use in the US or Europe soon enough, or bowing to surveillance and de-anonymization. Or maybe go back to legacy systems, like dumping systemd and wayland for init and x11, just to have things actually work for us again rather than embrace the ever-present creep of the “Framework of Fuckery” ™ that is being pushed by the corpo scum and their pet “Representatives.”

The rules have always been for us, not for them.

The police are enforcers for the elites, they don’t stop crime, they extract fines from people and provide a deterrent to anyone standing up for themselves.

Except it’s more ZuckID, since Meta was behind the “grassroots” campaigns and wrote the script “representatives” are using globally.

Maybe get some Decks back in, first…

True, when they had humans working for them it wasn’t so bad, there was variance in how they responded to the company position and they could think rather than follow a checklist.

The models were made to be run locally on your own data, let the corpos in and they’ll find a way to destroy the world, screw the people, and add eshitification to literally everything.

They have already had people on them for not stopping scam ads, they get paid by their customers so they don;t care how many of their products are harmed.

And yet the pipeline works because it’s an “inside” thing, the more people who see and recognize the dog whistles the less likely it is to spread with people remaining unaware that is is.

The “indoctrination” is just another Satanic Panic, the dumbest things you have ever heard being repeated enough by “trusted” sources it becomes fact to them.

It’s Meta and Xitter now, though, not James Dobson on AM radio.

Sadly accurate, but it has been wilful ignorance, now it is enforced by what the machines think we want to see.

I think it is worse now, than before, it was a lot easier to pick up that “other” newspaper than it is to break out of your algorithm.

I am a firm believer in “There is no better disinfectant than sunlight.”

I want to see the most vile aspects of people, I want it to be on full display so we know who they are, and we can counter them directly.

I think the algorithm has done a MASSIVE amount of damage by cordoning things off and creating little pockets of filth festering in darkness out of view until it overflows and spills out on us all.

Honestly, I prefer someone else’s untrustworthy.

I don’t trust China at all, but I trust them over the US, if only because they have no stake in me as a foreigner.

Watching all the new laws spew out in Europe I don’t trust them, either.

I’m down to Romania and Iceland, now.

Been dumping German stuff like a plague lately, and already pulled all data out of Canada.

I have one thing in Amsterdam, but their laws have been getting worse and worse, and they’re… Nine, I think it is, eyes which is bad for trusting them with your data. Even Switzerland is getting sus af.

I don’t think they believe him so much as they believe the propaganda about any competition to him.

It’s been “Elect this shitty person because they are not that shittier person!” on both sides my whole life, and without ranked choice voting being national people will always pick the one their echo chamber calls a savior from the “other” they’ve been filled with fear over ignoring any decent option.

He ticks all the boxes.

An institution uses a local model to help organize massive amounts of data, not crawl the whole web stealing everything in sight while being anthropomorphized by a corporations trying to sell you a friend or a waifu…

Which you won’t be able to run because RAM is $500 now.

There are valid uses for LLMs, but I think everyone who calls it “AI” is definitely a scam.

I refer to it as “Boomer Social” as it is the exclusive form of communication for family members over 60. When I purged my Meta accounts, finally, I completely lost contact with my sister.

Seems that old people who were around for email being the norm can’t manage to use it anymore…

Yeah, it makes things a lot harder as I want one that will let me lug my TTRPG library around with me.

Hundreds of books over four systems, all in PDF, takes up a pretty big chunk of storage.

I keep them on my tablet, now, which works. The thing is power hungry, though, so I need to plug it in or it dies in like two hours.

I’d really like a nice eInk (hopefully color, but I can deal with grayscale) reader to manage all that, as well as my books, and my collection of Alan Moore graphic novels and the Neil Gaiman stuff that I still have.

Cards are their own issue…

I had a bank that would always deny my purchase of a game with fraud detection, though I suspect it was because GOG was still banking in Gibraltar then, but then my card was actually stolen and they just let them spend $5 at every store in town until I was overdrawn by the maximum they allowed.

Definitely an adult account, I have kids who are adults, and I had been on Google since I used to use it at the public library. I seem to remember there being a different version of mail from them, before GMail, that was converted when they did the big release. I could be wrong, it’s been nearly thirty years, but I was very relieved to be able to get off Yahoo which only released one good product (Answers, by the way) in the history of ever.

I also started with Android using my account long enough ago to be “adult” as I was using a HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) running Android 1.0 released in 2008, moving from my brief foray into Blackberry from Palm to them and staying through the Galaxy Note 8. Now I use WayDroid to run a few Android apps, Google has just gotten too creepy, and they do derpy things like make me need to fiddle with workarounds to access my files on my device and now they’re pushing the signing for Android trying to kill (or at least data harvest) alternative stores.