They’re all bad.

Still shopping around for a cheap enough Optiplex or ThinkCentre that has bare minimum encoding (HEVC 10-bit) and RAM (16 GB), but once I find my baby I’ll be running Nextcloud, Immich, and Jellyfin in Proxmox. I want to leave Google behind very badly, especially for my files and photos I got in the cloud, but also for music streaming since I’m a daily YT Music user.

Man, I have to stop reading so I don’t continue a stream of tears in the middle of a lobby, but I felt every single word of that article in my bones.

I couldn’t ever imagine hanging myself or shooting myself, that shit sounds terrifying as hell. But for years now I’ve had those same exact “what if I just fell down the stairs and broke my neck” or “what if I got hit by a car and died on the site?” thoughts. And similarly, I think of how much of a hassle it’d be for my family, worrying about their wellbeing, my cats, the games and stories I’d never get to see, the places I want to go.

It’s hard. I went to therapy for a year and found it useful even if it didn’t do much or “fix” me, but I never admitted to her about these thoughts. I think the closest I got to it was talking about being tired often, and crying, but never just outright “I don’t want to wake up tomorrow.”

If you don’t need traffic data, CoMaps (uses OpenStreet Map data).

If you do need traffic data (understandable) Magic Earth is what I use. It’s unfortunately not fully open source, only the map data is from OSM, but I find the navigation good 95% of the time, sometimes you have to make your own judgement for if a route might have bad traffic. At least it’s not Google or Apple, and no ads.

I don’t do car play, so I have no idea about how that works.

I wish we had better alternatives or that cars all exploded and we went to public transport and walkable cities

Very valid and true point, but that requires companies to openly admit that they’ve made their devices to not work if it can’t phone home, and no company is gonna do that. At best, they’ll tell you it needs internet access, but even then they’ll probably downplay it.

Either that or some poor sacrifice will have to be the guinea pig and buy the thing to test it and tell others. Ah, I guess Consumer Reports could do that at least.

Ok, I heard about their app store being closed, but I thought it was for all devices, not non-amazon devices. Thanks 👍

Yeah, I’d probably let go of the app and just change the settings, saves space.

Furthermore, I saw you have OpenVPN for Android. I’ve never heard of that app tbh, so it makes me wary. If you need a free, open-source, and audited VPN from the play store, then I’d stick with Proton. If you can pay money, then Mullvad.

Yeah, saw that on another comment. Then just stick with plain Firefox and download the uBlock extension. Seriously, ditch Brave. It doesn’t do anything FF with some settings turned on can’t do.

Unrelated note: I see you have NextDNS as an app. You can’t just change the DNS settings on your phone? Is that blocked by parental control?

Well, whenever you get the chance to use developer options, you can try Permission ManagerX instead. Does the same think Shizuku does but isn’t outdated and can be downloaded from the Google Play, Fdroid, and the repository (and Amazon app store??? If that’s still alive???).

Can verify, it’s super easy to do and I nuked the Gmail app from my phone afterwards.

Try IronFox or Fennec (Firefox forks), both are privacy focused and aren’t bad like Brave.

GrapheneOS has shown FF does have some security issues, so if you prefer Chromium then use either Vanadium (GrapheneOS only) or Cromite.

For desktop I do use Librewolf, and Ungoogled Chromium when a website refuses to work on Firefox.

Sorry Mico, you gotta go

Once I finish college I’m nuking my Windows partition. Won’t even boot into it on any future laptop, will just nuke it fully. I’m just waiting now cause I don’t wanna have to fight with teachers over online test software and shit, I like being able to do easy at home exams.

But I will relish the day I walk across the stage. It’ll be gone that night.

So, in the US, a standalone, bare-minimum with ads included Disney+ subscription costs $9.99. Oops, actually we’re raising it to $11.99 TOMORROW! So after a paying for a year of Dinsey’s cheapest plan, you’d have paid $144.

But maybe Disney isn’t your thing? Well. Netflix costs $7.99 for the ad plan, and $17.99 for the no ads plan. But do note, even on the ad supported plan, you STILL can’t watch everything.

Ad-supported, all mobile games and most movies and TV shows are available. A lock icon will appear on unavailable titles.

Ranges $96-216 per year for ads or no ads.

Like anime? Crunchyroll offers a $7.99 plan, but it might not have all the content, so then there’s the $11.99 plan. So $96-144 per year. But their catalog doesn’t even have every fucking anime, and they’ve let dubbing go to the wayside after buying out their main competitor, Funimation (in which we lost several anime due to licensing).

Listen to music on top of that? Spotify for non-students ($5.99) costs $11.99, so $144 in a year. YT music is $10.99 for non-students, so $132

So say you listen to Spotify, like anime, and watch Netflix, you’re paying at minimum $336 per year, on the cheapest plans available, which usually have ads or missing features.

I’ve been looking at Optiplex and Lenovo ThinkCentres on ebay recently, and for my bare minimum standards of 1. Can support virtualization, 2. Can do Intel quick sync video and encode HEVC 10-bit (So about 10 year old devices) the prices range around $90-$150. Some 2TB HDDs would be about $100. You’d probably be pirating since most of the new shows on streaming services have no physical media to buy/no way of just owning a movie or TV box set. Even then, outright buying music and movies is cheaper in the long run. Anything you already own can be added to your library. You’ll never be told that “oops we didn’t pay to re-up our access to that movie, so it’s gone!” You’ll never have new ads, paywalled features, limited devices, or other bullshit. The server is up whenever you want it to be, provided you can handle being tech support.

So in the end, a home server + drives costs less than paying for several services where you own shit, and they can cut features or raise the price any day. But yes, we’re just being conceited assholes.

Yeah no, sometimes you need screen sharing in the “chatting app”

A lot of university clubs are on Discord, and my cyber club does tutorials and labs on the weekends where the leader screen-shares. It’s nice because you can see the video in real time and ask questions whenever, rather than watching a pre-recorded video and having to hope you have no issues while following along.

I mean, this is literally why Zoom blew up so much during COVID. Real-time learning works more than asynchronous learning for a lot of people.

Considering Signal has been subpoenaed several times and proven in court the only thing they can give the feds is:

1. Do you have an account with Signal? (Registered Phone #)
2. When did you make the account?
3. When did you last connect to the service?

I don’t think it’d be in their best interest to lie to the feds 6 times. You can quite literally read the subpoena for yourself, such as the most recent one in August 2024, which is only 2 pages long.

Additional note: check if the VPN does DNS or not. If not then use something like NextDNS, or get a VPN (Proton, Mullvad) that does do DNS servers. Plus they usually include better ad-blocking.

Yeah, everyone has slapped AI on everything and it sucks. What’s unfortunate is Krypton’s v6 (2022) editions include some AI voicebanks that are apparently mid, they make stuff sound more natural but don’t help tuning that much. The singers were properly paid, but outsiders aren’t gonna know that and will assume, “oh it’s just like all the other techbro nonsense.”

Basically anything pre-2022 is fine historically, Krypton literally didn’t have AI voice banks anyway and everyone in the fandom already knew you had to put effort into making a song with a Vocaloid, as they’re literally synths. But now more and more people are discovering the fandom without knowing the history, and if the first thing they see is “Look, we have AI now!”, not realizing that it’s only for naturalization/minor tuning and not “make me a song”, they’ll just throw it in the same pile.

Yeah, I really wonder where Synth V created songs will fall under this rule, cause even though the VAs were paid and it still requires good tuning, they’re technically AI… Maybe the older songs and the new popular songs will be fine due to having recognition, but any new small time producers are gonna suffer if they’ve got boys doing the checking.

I don’t use Spotify, but I assume they do know Vocaloid (and Miku) exists right? At least YT music has a recommended playlist for vocaloid songs anyway.

Edit: I know that Miku isn’t AI, and I’d never call her + the others AI. But Krypton has given Miku and the others AI voicebanks recently (although I heard the aren’t that good) and Synth V is getting more popular (Teto, Yi Xi, Elanor Forte, etc.). Hell, there are some Synth V songs that I’ve heard that I thought were real people…

But I’m worried about those who don’t know this info just doing a blanket “no robots/no AI” and nuking Vocaloid/V Synth songs

Ah, just looked the guy up on Wiki. Yeah, Russian Elon musk seems about right.

We don’t use Telegram and I never plan to.