Agreed, I was warned off of PIA 5+ years ago.

It’s not about you being in bluetooth range of the person you want to talk to, it’s about all the people sitting in between you both that pass the message along without touching the internet.

So you can be on a cargo ship, or on a remote island, with 20 other people and all use chat. If 1 person has internet, then you can all chat globally as well.

It’s the same basic method of how airtags work. Everyone with an iPhone connects to the airtag and passes data to Apple. It’s just done in the background, so users don’t ever notice.

You have to do something physical. Run, do some intense workout with cardio and weights, wail on a punching bag. Maybe all 3.

Let your brain focus on something that isn’t words in your head, and exhaust you physically, and you’ll quickly learn how inconsequential other people’s petty BS really is in the grand scheme of things.

Best lil’ machine I ever had was a 10 inch Dell mini Hackintosh. Loved it, and got me through grad school .

I used to at work. I would do a half filled mug, give it 2-3 minutes of heat so it didn’t suddenly boil over, then drop in the tea bag and fill with regular water.

It’s worth it to pay extra for anything that doesn’t need an app or WiFi connectivity.

Those are huge red flags. Avoid anything “smart” like the plauge.

Appliances with “smart features” are simply scraping your whole home, not just your phone, for data to sell to advertisers. Very often the app or even the company won’t outlive the appliance itself, so as happens frequently, in 2 years you’ll be stuck with a perfectly workable appliance that refuses to work because some server in China went offline.

Aside from the Ars Technica article in the xpost, there’s a lot of “it depends.”

It depends on not just the OS, but if it’s a custom image built for Dell or HP or Asus etc. computers, what settings are on, what settings were on by default, what bloatware is pre-installed, etc.

Typically, all MS or Apple really want are to know what apps you have installed, zip code, email address, IP address, crash reports, and possibly keywords they can associate with advertising. That’s their baseline wish list, which is all advertising fodder, and depending on your settings, that can quickly expand to “anonymized” (it’s not) cookie use, tracking of websites visited, etc.

If you have a custom image (i.e. a Dell specific version of Windows) the laptop manufacturer will look for access to roughly the same data.

With the whole Copilot fiasco, recording things like keystrokes and screenshots really are potentially in play now. But, again, only if you have foolishly installed Copilot and turned that stuff on. And that only after huge public outcry. So there’s always a non-zero risk of that, but do your due diligence to know you settings.

Can you strip out bloatware and tighten down Windows to a reasonable degree? Sure. But because MS can and does change system settings without your consent, you might find in 6 months an article about a setting you turned off, that they turned back on and you had no idea.

“Just” as in nothing that demands a phone number to validate. Meaning that OP will be asked to enter a phone number when signing up and may not have to worry about it being the same one as their email account.

Namecheap let me register with just a Tuta email. Payment could maybe go through an online prepaid debit card. Never had a human check AFAIK.

Can you show me an example of a website outside of a .DE site that offers translation into any of them?

Find a Linux distro you like and install it instead of Windows.

Use LibreOffice, not MSOffice

Ditch Google, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

Tech walled gardens are insane asylums. Leave them.

I’m not saying it’s a good idea, i just see it a lot. Maybe I’m only paying attention to this in Europe, where it’s a bit more clear-cut, rather than tracking down population data to select a template option on a website for something like a cafe menu.

Please try and look at this as a reasonable person.

Do you go to Italy, see a QR code on a table in a cafe, and berate them about their online menu showing an Italian flag, but the Italian language predates the Italian Republic?

It’s simple because this is someone coding a site in one language, and then likely running it through Google Translate to get other options. Maaaaybe with a single human reviewing it of they’re lucky. But likely not even that.

Not every website has a translation team of 20 or 30 PhDs working to ensure optimal linguistic understanding and anthropological and historical accuracy. Likewise, no, I’m very sorry to tell you that people very often don’t really care about others. If pay 3 people in India, or ask an LLM, to code a website with German translation, either the drop down will say Deutsch or it’ll say that and have a German flag. What should Austria have, a tiny picture of Mozart but the site is still just German?

German dialects are still…German language, yes?

I’m just telling you what I’ve seen used. Typically it’s a lot of European flags for languages that originate in Europe. So UK for English, German for German, French for French, Spain for Spanish. Belarusian would be the flag of…Belarus? Not sure why that’s a challenge.

To your question about China - What should be used for Swahili? What should be used for Yarouba or Hausa or Shona or Chewa? Africa is the problem, and so the typical method for doing this is very Euro-centric.

Tell me… Where did, roughly speaking, German originate? Germany, perhaps?

Does Germany have a flag?

Not sure why this is some sort of hidden secret code.

Typically they’re used for the counties where the language originated.

UK for English France for French Japan for Japanese Spain for Spanish Russia for Russian Portugal for Portuguese

UK.

Just bad UX design. Typically this should include flags or the language’s name in the language if they really did a good job.

What a time to bail and get as far away from MS products as possible.