apart from ne not having that much money laying around a the moment I’m not a fan of people having to pay for their search engine, as I’m of the opinion that such a fundamental tool to use the web should remain free

Yeah, I’ve recently switched to SearXNG instances on some devices, definitely seem to be getting better results

it sometimes seem to, most advanced searching still works, at least on DDG

Oh my god, I feel this so much… Also, I think that recently got even worse, as I recently found myself switching between DDG/Google and finding both extremely bad for my query

Crazy to think that one of twenty people I meet outside use Linux

This is crazy. I’m in exactly the same situation and have been thinking about getting a mobile plan with a Pixel 8 (where I would install GrapheneOS on) as those are getting cheaper with the Pixel 9 out not.

“it’s called free software, but copyleft licenses restrict what you can do with it, therefore it’s unfree!!1!” or so they say

I, too, don’t love the use of AWS/Cloudflare, while I get that you can simply replace AWS S3 with something else for backups, this server setup is innately based on using Cloudflare.

There was a race to the bottom for SSD prices that ended roughly in July 2023, leading to losses with manufacturers having to sell under production cost; this is why NAND/SSD prices increased since then and will probably only slowly start to decrease at the end of 2024. At the same time, there is very interesting technology in the making, I just read about SSDs with up to 1000 storage layers coming in the next few years. Same goes for HDDs, although less so and prices seem more predictable there; my focus for the next few years would be completely new storage methods competing with HDDs/SSDs, but I don’t think any of this will reach consumer markets at competitive prices until 2028. My prediction: HDDs will decrease like in the past years, SSDs will start really decreasing in price with the start of 2025 and it will take a few years for completely new storage methods to arrive.

I agree, although some very unsympathetic part of me internally screams every time I read that.

Data is already plural, so the form datas does not exist. It even has the rarely used singular datum as it is just Latin for “given”, but using data instead is generally also regarded correct.

As others pointed out, having the feeling of knowing (about) things without actually having experienced them yourself is a core feature of what one might call intelligence, and as such not insane.

I would argue instead that the problem isn’t with arguments over stuff you haven’t experienced yourself, but rather people caring too much about their fixed opinion and not about actually trying to find the truth (e.g. though argument) as they might proclaim.

(I am relatively certain of this point as I’ve seen seemingly good counter examples to this provided by the LessWrong community, where people often discuss topics they do not necessarily have experience with, but rather try to find the truth and therefore not have a fixed opinion beforehand.)

Normally I don’t really appreciate hosting suggestions as most of them are pretty similar, but this looks really interesting and I’ll definitely take a look at them.

Logseq, it’s a lot like Obsidian as it also has knowledge graphs, tags, is markdown-based and self-hostable but, in contrast to Obsidian, it’s fully open source

It probably would help, as Google couldn’t connect their advertising services that easily with YouTube, and both parties would have to be more independent.

I honestly think deleting personal social media accounts regularly would be a great privacy measure, as I don’t think most people (myself included) have any clue how much they are identifiable because of their social media activity.

From how they’re presenting themselves on their website, I would also guess their payment methods aren’t private /anonymous at all. It seems like you could even be forced to use the Apple/Google integration to pay for your subscription (which just means you can’t really pay privately).

Also, VPNs that have own apps and don’t allow access via OpenVPN are a red flag. You don’t know what their apps are doing and they don’t give you any reason to trust them either.

No, but as far as I can tell, it’s a private company in the US (which is pretty bad for a VPN). Also, all of its features are closed-source. The encryption seems to be closed source. That should make you question their motives and integrity. And trust them not much more than Google or Facebook. For everything not privacy related, as their virtual cards and in a sense also phone numbers and email addresses (those could be private, but not using this service), this service seems fine.

You’re right that default Android found on nearly all smartphones today is not that much better than iOS. There is the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) however, which means the base of Android is free and open source and therefore allows for lore privacy focused versions of Android to exist such as LineageOS, Graphene OS, Calyx OS or /e/ OS. This isn’t possible at all with Apple’s iOS and one can therefore even claim it to be worse than Android in that sense.

Now I have to imagine you standing in the store scanning ports just to get somewhat usable Wi-Fi :)