Definitely. And theres also the ability to use it to “hide in the crowd” if you have decent OPSEC and are being anonymous in other ways.

+1

A lot of the VPN hype is sort of left over from before we had “https” everywhere. Most of your Internet traffic is encrypted these days.

I guess there’s a slight advantage with VPNs (vs ISPs) having your data is you can at least choose your VPN provider more freely than you can choose your ISP so in theory you can pick one you can trust.

But this is chasing a pretty small amount of anonymity for most people. It’s not worth it most of the time.

And tbh, you’re most likely worried about the Ad companies and social media giants, not your ISP.

Having reliable and cheap lighting at all hours of the day.

Light was very expensive for a lot of human history.

For anything like this, start with your threat model. Are you trying to protect yourself from Microsoft, from your ISP, from the Ad agencies, or from the government? Depending on which you’re most worried about it will change the actions you’d need to take pretty drastically.

Trying to chase “maximum” anonymity without deciding who you are anonymous to is too vague.

It sounds like you’re at least worried about Microsoft though. At minimum, turn off all the settings you reasonably can to limit what is collected about you. “Windows Privacy Dashboard” used to be a good third party app that made that easy, not sure if it’s still relevant (it’s been a few years for me).

Next level of effort would probably be switching to Linux. Realistically any distribution would be loads better than Windows for privacy.

Using a VPN stops your ISP from seeing (most of) your behavior online, but the VPN company would see it instead, so it’s just trading one adversary for another if you’re focused on privacy. (Not saying it’s useless, but it’s not the panacea that people make it out to be.)

Next most beneficial step would probably be moving your data (emails, photo backups, chat messages, etc) to trustworthy locations.

Anything beyond that depends on who you’re protecting yourself from.

On top of everything else people mentioned, it’s so profoundly stupid to me that AI is being pushed to take my summary of a message and turn it into an email, only for AI to then take those emails and spit out a summary again.

At that point just let me ditch the formality and send over the summary in the first place.

But more generally, I don’t have an issue with “AI” just generative AI. And I have a huge issue with it being touted as this Oracle of knowledge when it isn’t. It’s dangerous to view it that way. Right now we’re “okay” at differentiating real information from hallucinations, but so many people aren’t and it will just get worse as people get complacent and AI gets better at hiding.

Part of this is the natural evolution of techology and I’m sure the situation will improve, but it’s being pushed so hard in the meantime and making the problem worse.

The first Chat GPT models were kept private for being too dangerous, and they weren’t even as “good” as the modern ones. I wish we could go back to those days.

This is my very loose, shower thought level description of my personal belief.

Okay cool.

OP asked for reasons, and I gave one of mine. I didn’t intend or expect it to be convincing to anyone. If I wanted to give a formal argument for the existence of a higher power I would, but that’s not the point of this thread.

If you look at it very very loosely, many major religions are reaching toward the same general concepts and have enough similarities to suggest a consensus that there’s a “something” up there.

We probably all have an imperfect idea of what that “something” is, but there are enough similarities (or echos of the same ideas) across many religions to suggest they’re looking at the same indivisible thing and interpreting it differently.

You’ve just opened a wikipedia rabbit hole. Wish me luck I may never return.

I know wrong community but, what year did early civilizations think it was? Was their year zero our 10,000BC? What was their “the big thing that started the calendar”?

I run Debian on most of my systems and run all of my services in docker (with rare exceptions for node_exporter or stable core tools). My base systems get automatic security upgrades, and then I’ll manually check in every few weeks whenever I feel like it.

My services in docker are version locked to a specific major version (when there’s a tag available) so I can usually re-pull to get minor version updates freely without breaking issues. My few more finnickey services get manual upgrades from me every 6 months or so only.

I usually stick to an OS version for as long as I can, and to that aim I stick to LTS versions with long support windows.

4 major versions in 12mo is…a lot. Especially if those include breaking changes for you. Yikes

Medium

If you’re memorizing your password, don’t change it too often because it’ll just confuse you and encourage you to pick easy to remember passwords which are less secure. Change your password if you hear about a hack, or have reason to suspect your password got leaked. Otherwise there’s no need.

If you have a password manager though, go off. Change it as often as you’d like.

(Also 2FA, unique passwords per site, etc etc etc)

A Windows VM running Windows terminal, SSH’d back into the host, obviously.

Honestly I stick with whatever the default is and never had a problem that led me to find anything else.

Look at Amazon and their Fire TV platform. It’s just android, with all of the Google stuff stripped out.

Sure, Google may not be getting any money for that, but they are getting more dev time and attention on the open source parts of Android which helps to solidify the base of the OS which helps them.

And Android got popular because it was open and manufacturers could build phones that support it without necessarily needing to involve Google (or at least without needing to certify it or meet strict standards) which let the platform grow significantly. If Google closed it up today it would likely cause a fork in the Android platform ecosystem and you’d end up with “Google Android” on pixel and “Open Android” on all others.

Finding pockets of self sufficiency, or at least ways to prevent falling down to the bottom.

Universal basic income helps this by making sure everyone has at least enough to live on.

Homesteading and community gardens help this by making sure you at least have some basic amount of food available to you.

Building walkable cities helps.this by allowing you to avoid or reduce the expenses of a car.

Building resilient cities that leverage adaptive reuse help this by making it cheaper to start new small community businesses that keep money local.

The solutions aren’t in the system of money we choose, it’s in building small sustainable ways to provide for basic needs, even in a small way.

Many registrars let you buy a domain and set up dynamic DNS for it within their system so you can own a domain and get dyndns on it.

Otherwise you could accomplish it with a VPS but you’d only need the smallest one available because it would just need to run nginx to forward to your home ip (and a small tool to update that IP when it changes). So you could probably get something for less than $5/mo.

AI is decent for writing, but a terrible choice for math.

Not too sure, but when I was younger I wanted to fit in and picking colorful stuff made that harder. Id worry about it being on trend, or masculine enough, etc. Now that I’m in my 30s I said fuck it and am getting more colorful.

Doesn’t help that I grew up with a mother who refuses to paint her walls anything but off-white or pale green for resale value. There was so little character.

Daily: Phone, wallet, car/house keys

Frequently also: bike keys, yubikey, Miyoo Mini (retro handheld), pocket knife (varies, but usually a Leatherman Squirt), and a small flashlight.