A 50-something French dude that’s old enough to think blogs are still cool, if not cooler than ever. I also like to write and to sketch.
Mullvad are like a drop of hope in humanity in a sea of shitty and shady business practices.
Alas, VPNs are quite high on the endangered species. Largely thx to countless clueless, when they’re not plain full dishonest and working in their very own interest, representatives doing their best to make our societies a much shittier place for the rest of us.
Haven’t many people experienced that? It’s called scrolling on social media, right?
(from France)
My phone is not rooted. I barely used it, like barely at all (I only have the required apps I need to access to, not a single app more), so I don’t need to tweak it in any way.
I show my ID when I’m required to.
Sorry I cannot help you more than that.
or go to System Settings -> Printer -> Add? I mean, that’s all I had to do and not even that as a matter of fac as Linux Mint detected the printer the moment I plugged it into the network (B&W Network/USB laser printer)
That, or enroll into some local class, if you live nearby some campus check if there aren’t students offering private tutoring for their own native language.
Also, if you already speak French, get an Assimil book for whatever language you want to learn. The older the edition the better (pre-80s) but even the more recent ones remain a good self-learning method, they’re just not as great as the older editions which were really great. Those books can be purchased (with or without accompanying audio recordings, highly recommended) or they can be had for much cheaper on the used market (also, most people have no idea how much better the older editions are so they can be found for even cheaper but the audio files (LPs) will often not be available). These books are 100% privacy-respecting: you’re alone without any tracking happening, there is no ‘login’ required either. Just you and your book (plus the audio files, if you want them)
And photos. I take a ton. But only a few survive my ruthless culling.
I used too. Started as a little boy in the 70s… I quit approx a decade ago when people started becoming hostile towards my kind of pictures (street). It always was my hobby, not worth the hassle. Instead, I switched to sketching street scenes ;)
Interesting take, and maybe you are a kind of pioneer.
I see myself as being a lot more stubborn than a ‘pioneer’ in anything ;)
The day I realized I could not agree with the intense push toward always more invasive tech (with less privacy, less user control and more outside control, be it private-corporation or official/public), I acted accordingly… to the best of my limited abilities.
Pretty radical but it’s been a liberation, similar to your experience.
Indeed.
As for my own phone (I have one: I’m no Luddite, I just wish to stay in control). I use as a mere phone (and barely) and for any app/services I have no reasonable alternative to. Which means I use it for work/business/government/financial things (which is already too much, but like I said there is no real reasonable alternative left for those). So on that phone, there is no social, obviously I quit using all of them beside the Fediverse (that I only access on my computer), no games, no movies, no apps (beside Uber), no music or podcast (for the rare occasions when I want to listen to something on the go, I will use an old iPod one with the wheel). I’ve even stopped taking pictures almost entirely and completely stop taking personal pictures.
In your previous post you mentioned this:
And anyway, for years I have wanted to move from a laptop to a convertible tablet (like the Surface or Lenovo’s Yoga and Duet lines). It makes so much sense ergonomically and even in terms of maintenance.
I was in a similar boat, a few years ago. Then I started I realizing the constant trade-offs I was accepting to do in order to use an always newer and better tech… So, I did what I was trained to do: consider the problem in its entirety, not just as “computers are getting more expensive or they come with too many trade-offs” position (which it is, btw) but as something more global: what do I want to achieve with those high-tech tools and do I really need them to achieve that?
In my case, this is not a universal truth but it’s 100% working for me, I realized that most if not all what I had been trying to achieve with high-tech was to recreate something comparable to what I had been using all my live, since I was a little boy: analog tools. Like, you know, reading actual books, writing and sketching using actual pen and paper, and so on.
So my very personal solution was simply to move away from digital-tech and to rekindle my usage of analog low-tech. It took me some effort to re-educate myself but it was worth it. That was also a true revolution in the preservation of my privacy and… sanity (I quit all social media at the same time, now a few years ago, and it was so liberating).
It’s also cheaper ;)
For the price comparison between then and now: you should probably not compare the price in today money with the price from 10 or 20 years ago: inflation is a reality and your 400$ from 2000 wouldcost how much in today’s money? Maybe 800$, more? So, it’s not that bad.
The real issue, the one you should be worrying about and pointing out to people, is that while inflation is doing its thing (making prices go up), salaries have not gone up at the same rate, quite the opposite: our salaries are worth less. And that is the real place where most people (those who earn their living through a salary, aka most of us) are being screwed up. Bad.
But I’m more worried than ever about how this story is going to end.
I’m not a dev, I’m a mere GNU/Linux user myself (before Linux, I was using Apple computers and have been doing so since the mid-80s), but I too worry.
Not because of the price of the hardware (see my previous remark) but because I see little reasons to be optimistic about the future of the “general purpose” computers in general. And even less reason to be optimistic about the respect of our freedom and privacy on that computer. It almost already is a lost fight on our mobile devices. Edit: and most of it has been lost in the name of ‘convenience’, btw. And it’s a fight we are losing on the political/societal level. At the same speed we’re being un-learned, so to speak, of the core values of what being a citizen in a democracy is supposed to mean.
But that is a whole different story.
PS: I should have predicted the bitterness and negativity and cynicism I would provoke simply by sharing my thoughts and feelings in good faith.
Why worry about that? It’s nothing new (and certainly not exclusive to around here) that most people don’t like being disturbed, or annoyed. They won’t change because it’s coming from you, or from I ;)
I’m no dev so I don’t understand all the technicalities but if I got it right you made it so the AI is itself showing how confident it is about its own answers? That is neat.
Not sure to understand the downvotes? Ins’t it a good idea to make it harder for AI to be telling bullshit without blushing?
Your question is one of the two reasons I love GNU/Linux so much, and will not go back to proprietary tools ever again :)
Even tough as a very average user myself I would never feel like compiling my own kernel, and would even less know how to do such a thing, I know it’s a possibility and I know other users are doing it. And that is a possibility only because of the freedoms we the users are given by the GPL to do… what we want. To me, as an ex-lifelong Apple user (I started being their customer in the early 80s and only switched full time some 7 or 8 years ago to GNU/Linux) this is amazing and wonderful freedom.
Sorry if I have not replied precisely to your question but reading it I realized it was a great demonstration of what freedom is supposed to mean, and I felt like sharing it.