Just curious, why are you resistant to turn off your VPN?

I keep mine off most of the time & only rev it up when I feel like I really want or need the anonymity.

I use Pop_OS & the other day I was browsing the Store & stumbled on this app called ‘youtubedl-gui’. Then I found out it’s also available via apt.

Really cool little piece of software. Maybe check it out

D:

Tech people, especially AI researchers, refuse to leave.

What you’re talking about is if AI is actually inventing new work (imo, yes it is), but that’s not the issue.

The issue is these models were trained on our collective knowledge & culture without permission, then sold back to us.

Unless they use only proprietary & public training data, every single one of these models should be open sourced/weighted & free for anyone to use, like libraries.

Thx, that’s exactly my concern as I remember it being an issue when I was flashing ROMs in the past.

I wonder if Square would still work, for example? I haven’t flashed open source ROMs on my phone since like 2012.

Honestly though, I just consider the phone a lost cause when it comes to privacy & use it accordingly. Uncle Googs is always watching, even when the damn thing is turned off.

Mullvad is really for anonymous sessions. It’s meant to blend in with every other Mullvad instance on the Net so it helps make users harder to identify. It’s not geared towards daily use.

On desktop, I switched to Librewolf and installed the Dark Reader add-on.

I will continue using Firefox on Android because I have absolutely no illusions about my privacy on this fucking thing.

Didn’t they also elude to collecting telemetry recently? I know it’s up for some debate but, if true, I’m not sure that’s a thing we can turn off.

I have a theory that this is intentional design.

When products perform smoothly, you don’t interact with them, they become invisible, & Uncle Googs needs you interacting with their products as much as possible.

Thanks to telemetry, Good Ol’ Uncle Googs has millions of hours of behavioral patterns to sift through, provided by all those free Chromebooks for school districts across the US.

So Google know exactly what gets folks engaging with their phones &, I believe, intentionally cause frustration over seemingly simple tasks b/c many many people will forget what they were doing, fix the issue, then get distracted by entertainment apps, doom scrolling, etc.

Dark patterns & behavioral manipulation.

The amount of censorship taking place on that platform every day lately is kind of staggering.