If you get Organic Maps you can use GPS navigation. It works entirely offline so you can turn your phones cellular off and just use GPS which is passive and doesn’t send out signals. Best practice would be Graphene OS as the base and not having google services installed at all too.

HA! Not even. Florida has nothing worth hitting really. You know what I’d hit if I was Cuba? The LOOP. Offshore oil tanker loading and unloading facility in Gulf of Mexico south of Louisiana. The LOOP handles roughly 10-13% of US crude oil imports and is crucial for exports. You think gas prices are bad now? Just wait.

Well technically android is fine its google services that are the problem. If your on Graphene OS or similar with no google services your fine.

This is how I listen to music too. What I did is I made a bunch of massive playlists inside the services of 80s, 90s, 70s, etc music seperated by decade. Like you’d have on a radio station. Then I plugged them into Parabolic and ripped mp3s of them from youtube. Shoved them in a folder and just listen to those on shuffle. As for supporting artists, half the people I listen to are dead first of all, and for the ones who aren’t I do also have a physical media collection. A single purchase of a cd or vinyl gives them more money than 1000 streams would.

For anyone considering switching to using mp3s on android I’ve found the Phocid music player best. Plus the app icon is a little weasel which is a plus. You can typically store 150 or so songs per gb depending on the length and quality. I just use syncthing to keep my phone and laptop music library synced up.

There is a difference between what I was talking about and what these studies are talking about. They are studying the actual effects on users. Because electric toothbrushes are able to clean teeth more quickly and with less effort people generally have better outcomes with them overall. What I was pointing out is that this is not the same thing as a “better brush”. Clean teeth are clean teeth. Doesn’t matter how you get there, and a manual brush is perfectly capable of cleaning your teeth. It’s just that your supposed to actually brush for 2 whole minutes and use the proper technique which most people don’t do. An electric brush compensates for this which is what the improvements seen in those studies is showing. This is what I meant by the common misconception. People see that generally electric toothbrushes cause better outcomes and assume the overall ability to clean must be better, but if used properly a manual toothbrush gets the job done too.

It’s actually a common misconception that vibrating toothbrushes clean your mouth better than manual ones. Just takes a bit of extra effort and time to do it manually. Brushing twice daily for two minutes, covering all tooth surfaces with gentle, short strokes or a proper scrub/polish motion, and reaching along the gumline, is what matters most. Most people fall short on time and technique so that’s why dentists will reccomend the electric ones. They do make it easier to get the job done, but there’s nothing inherently worse about a manual brush.

Does your washing machine vibrate???

I don’t like smart anything. I’ve realized the less connected I am and the less I use ‘smart’ technology the happier I am. Phones are for phone calls. Glasses are for correcting vision or blocking the sun. Let’s keep it that way. If it isn’t my laptop I don’t want it to connect to the internet.

I wonder if it would help to make a few communities that were just like “Post whatever fun random shit you want.” like a catch all for stuff outside the main things. A lot of it is just that while a lot of us have other interests we might post about they aren’t the same interests. But if we could all get in a single community made for like ‘casual posting’ it might take off. Or just slightly more vague things. Like “Peanuts” is so fucking specific. Same with “windows11” like why not just “microsoft” for all microsoft products? Specificity can be the enemy of a communities success sometimes.

Bit outdated map. Those NATO bases in the Persion Gulf should be erased. Somebody blew them up lol. Also the US pulled out of Afghanistan so that one too. Man the US not doing too hot these last few years is it? ☺️

Why would anyone ever spend more than a few bucks on a toothbrush? Just go to the store and find the cheapest ones. There’s only one thing in my house that can vibrate and it certainly doesn’t go in my mouth. . . . . . . . . . What did you think I was talking about? I meant my phone you pervert.

I’m actually a big fan of the Gnome workflow on laptops. When using a mouse i HATE Gnome but when using a trackpad? It has no peers. It’s entirely designed around gestures. three fingers up to switch apps, side to side to switch desktops, up a 2nd time to get the apps page, etc. I do wish it was more customizable like KDE but it’s my go to on a laptop simply because I can’t stand using a trackpad with anything else.

You are right to push back on that guys comment, but I want to offer some more insight on this for you.

Https doesn’t necessarily encrypt your entire connection. While the traffic to that site is encrypted not everything is. I really wish more people were aware of DNScrypt. Which is a method for encrypting your DNS connection.

These things all have their uses.

HTTPS: Encrypts traffic to and from a given websites servers.

DNScrypt: Encrypts DNS queries between your device and the recursive resolver, so your ISP can no longer see those DNS lookups. However, the ISP can still see the IP addresses you connect to.

VPN: Routes your traffic through ANOTHER server adding a layer between your IP and the destination.

The guy you replied to said VPNs encrypt your internet connection. Some VPNs do use end to end encryption, but that’s not like a thing VPNs invented. Not sure why people think it is. VPNs can be unencrypted too. The main use case of a VPN is to act like you’re on another network. This is useful for torrenting to hide your IP, or for pretending to be in a different location. Also VPNs that are encrypted (which most are these days) only encrypt the connection from your computer to the actual VPN server. So if you aren’t using HTTPS then anything after the VPN server is unencrypted.

If the ONLY use case you have is encryption HTTPS + DNScrypt is all you need.

One note though is VPNs can actually protect against man in the middle attacks on public wifi. Where someone tricks you into connecting to their fake wifi pineapple and then shows you common sites as if they’re real, but typically this is not a threat on home wifi or a cellular network. Not a reasonable one anyway. At that point your dealing with state level actors and a VPN aint gonna do shit anyway.

DNScrypt can be subbed for DNS over TLS or DNS over HTTPS. Some browsers even have a DNS over HTTPS option in their settings. This is easier than setting DNScrypt up yourself, but you are also kind of relying on the browser to do a good job in this case. Plus any lookups outside the browser like for other apps or system updates are then not encrypted and would go to whatever the DNS is for your full system.

Even without DNScrypt or one of the alternatives one of the best things you can do is to simply manually choose a different DNS provider. Most ISPs will send you to their DNS provider and can see everything. You can manually select a different one. There are lots of options, Mullvad, Quad9, Cloudflare, Adguard Public DNS, etc. Some will even block ads for you. It’s super easy to do you just go into network settings and put in the IP to your chosen provider. You can look them up online to find a good one.

I don’t know that I’d call them happy. More like coping. A substitute will always be just that. I don’t see it as their fault so much as the fault of capitalism. Most people replace human connection with materialism to some degree. Those people just take it to the extreme.

I am also just concerned that it’s being used a substitute for human connection. With the way capitalism tends to isolate people and get them feeling all lonely. It’s easy to see how someone could get drawn in and use an LLM as a replacement for a person to talk to.

That’s not really what I was getting at.

What I am saying is that LLMs are extremely good at making things sound plausible. That is the issue I was bringing up. LLMs are much better at making things that are incorrect seem correct than many people realize, and people are not infallible.

If you have a human just entirely make something up you can usually tell it is entirely made up if you read it. A human has to put a lot of effort in to make bullshit sound convincing. LLMs do this effortlessly. So when using them it’s easy to make a mistake and let some of the extremely plausible bullshit slip through.

I don’t disagree at all that humans can create bullshit too. My concern is just that LLMs are so good at it that many people get convinced. Just look at all these cases of people using them for normal mundane things who get drawn in and fall into “AI Psychosis”.

I think it is a result of human brains just not being wired to deal with a machine that talks like a person. Psychologically it’s an issue. Even if we logically know it’s just a machine our brains do not. So people end up falling into this trap where they treat it like a person. Then it tells them insane things and they just start believing it.

Even if say 90% of people never had this issue it’s still a problem. If a new drink gave 10% of people who drank it a psychotic break we’d regulate it to hell and back. Put warning labels on everything. Make it prescription only. etc. LLMs are just out there for anyone to pick up and use like there’s no tomorrow. It’s a serious problem.

I think the very design of LLMs makes them not very useful even when used “correctly”. They are basically machines that are very good at sounding plausible. But they have absolutely 0 way of checking if info is correct or not. It’s just whatever is reinforced the most in their model is treated as correct.

I think the underlying technology likely has uses. But the way it is currently being produced into products is something that, even if you tried to use it correctly, would simply end up tricking you with some plausible bullshit. Maybe you tell it to edit a paper and it decides to “fix” one of your opinions to be the most common one. Maybe you tell it to tell you the nuance behind a historical fact and it makes up a very likely sounding story that is entirely bullshit which you then repeat to someone else without realizing.

The ability it has to sound plausible is its biggest flaw. Because an LLM will VERY rarely if ever say the words, “I don’t know.” You’d basically have to have gone in and coded it to respond to that specific question to respond with “I don’t know”. Otherwise it’ll just make something up.

I don’t see it so much as pollution as a smokescreen being put in place on purpose. It is my belief that these companies plan to so heavily flood the internet with AI generated nonsense that they can then begin to charge a premium for access to verified information.

That is why I have made an effort to collect actual physical books all printed before AI became a thing that have lots of info I can use to verify things. I have books on medical info, various crafts, construction, agriculture, copies of works from Lenin, Marx, Mao, Stalin, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, Voltaire, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, etc. Math textbooks, science textbooks. I’ve got around 80 or so right now. A lot of them I got for free and the rest I got for very cheap (anywhere from 1$ to 9$) because I go after used books. Many are from the 70s and 80s.

The idea is that say in like 2035 if I need to know something random I have a bunch of 100% human made and verified information. Even if some is a bit outdated it’s better than AI slop.

Yeah I meant like the end result since yours is the clean white look and mine is very busy lol