turboSnail

Machine learning in general is pretty awesome. It solves many problems behind the scenes, but even that side is overhyped.

We hoped it would solve hard problems, but it can’t. It solves boring problems. We hoped you could implement it easily, but it isn’t that straightforward either.

Generative AI for text, audio, images, and video is here, but the same problems persist. It doesn’t solve hard problems, no matter how hard we want it to. Also, implementation is harder than expected.

Then there’s the misuse of LLMs. Oh boy what a dumpster fire.

This simply means they’ve finally run out of money. If that doesn’t help, Apple or Microsoft will just end up buying OpenAI for pennies.

Enjoy the fireworks from a safe distance. I think the Low Earth Orbit is too close. Always wear protective goggles too. The flashes can be very bright.

Good catch! Fixed it now. I already knew I swipe too fast. Should spend more time reading before posting. 😆

They’re just backup copies hosted in the Galactic Museum. There’s no way a species that stupid would survive long enough to invent FTL travel. Just surviving the nuclear era was borderline miraculous.

The Internet as a whole isn’t the problem. Specific sites are. Steer clear from those sites, and you’ll be just fine. Take notice of which sites and services result in negative emotions, and find alternatives to those places.

What doesn’t kill you, will probably maim you for life. Although there is a slim chance it will make you stronger, but don’t count on it. Most likely, several internal organs will wither, and you’ll get very familiar with kidney dialysis treatment.

If you need a handful of plugins to make a site tolerable, there’s probably something terribly wrong with that place. We can keep on patching it with an ever growing list of plugins, but is it really worth it.

And pigeons are flying rats.

Always remember, distrohopping is allowed. Your first distribution doesn’t have to stray with you forever. It can, but doesn’t have to. If you hear about a cool new distro, feel free to try it out.

One option is to use a a dumpster browser for all the corpo trash that requires JavaScript. Just disable JS on all the good browsers and carry on as usual. If a site doesn’t work there, throw it into the dumpster.

It also depends on how do you use that mailbox for. In my case, Gmail doesn’t get to see anything related to my professional life. I have another email provider for more serious conversations like that. For the most part, Gmail gets to see a bunch of mailing list junk I never subscribed to. I also use Gmail to logging into various services I don’t really care that much about. Nothing important, nothing serious. If it involves money in any way, Gmail doesn’t get to read those communications.

However, I am tempted to move all my serious email communications to a more serious paid service. There might be immediate practical benefits too. I could set up a dedicated email address for each creepy company and that way I would find out which one sold my data to spammers.

If you just Google something like “health effects of hibiscus,” you’ll find a mixture of information too. Most people probably can’t tell which claims are well researched and which ones aren’t.

You’ll be left with a mixed bag, but reading all that takes more time than it takes to read an equally flawed summary you get from a gas powered AI. From a convenience perspective, I can understand why some people might prefer an LLM. From a reliability perspective, I can’t favour either option. Regardless, the difference in environmental impact should be clear to everyone.

I already use several Firefox forks for different purposes, and all of them are reasonably resistant to fingerprinting. I also have a special container for all the corpo trash I have to deal with. When I click a random news articles on Lemmy, those sites are opened in a different container and their creepy cookies get deleted as soon as I close the tab.

I’m doing all of this out of of philosophical reasons. It’s also pretty easy to set up, and there are hardly any downsides. Disabling java script is something I have tried too, but it did come with all sorts of severe downsides, so that’s where I had to draw the line.

Regardless, I still find the idea of a privacy respecting email appealing. Philosophical reasons again… Recently, I also made a quick and dirty risk assessment about the potential risks, and I still didn’t see an urgent need to mitigate them. The practical side of it still requires a bit more reading before I can justify an ongoing expense like this. Naturally, the email provider would have to be EU based.

The Last Airbender was awful, but enjoyable. You just need to forget about the anime series for a while, and enjoy the movie as it is. It’s not meant to be a cult classic or anything reviewers would praise. Brains off, action on. That’s all there’s to it. Watch it once, enjoy your two hours and never tell anyone you actually had a good time unless you want to start a fight.

That works too. I’ve had a pihole for years, and that was great as long as you’re on wifi. Also, it required a little bit of admin work, which I usually forgot to do. On the other hand, it’s really good if you want to know exactly what’s going on. Recently, I came to realize, I don’t really mind outsourcing this service to the pros.

If you’re scrolling while waiting on a bus stop or while sitting on a train, you need to use something else. I guess you could connect to your pi from anywhere, maybe even set up your VPN and all that. I’m sure there’s a away around that problem, but that would obviously require some reading, setting up, tinkering and admin work. Technically doable, but I just didn’t feel like doing all that. I’m definitely not an IT pro, which means that I end up screwing things up in hilarious ways all the time.

Also, opening up my pi to the whole internet is a scary thought. If I set up my pi like that, that would definitely require quite a bit of reading. That’s what ultimately lead me to pay for this service.

NextDNS.
This way, you can very easily filter out most of the ads on your mobile devices.

If you want to, you can also play this game on hard mode, and start blocking telemetry more aggressively. It can be done, but various apps will stop working. When that happens, you’ll unlock a fun new mini game: DNS White List Tuning.

I’m still using the services of Big Email, which means I’m the product in this setting. From a philosophical standpoint, that sucks. From a practical point of view, I don’t really see any downsides. Surely there are some that I’m just not aware of.

If they want to show me some ads, I have ublock origin and NextDNS to take care of that. What else should I know about my situation?

Aah, the pre-web internet era. You would intentionally connect to a specific BBS with its own special rules and culture. I remember a magazine that had its own BBS for its subscribers. Pretty cool stuff for its day. Although the UX wasn’t great, download speeds were abysmal, but it’s better than nothing. The other alternative was to get your software from the floppy disks that came with magazines.