verassol

First of all, don’t waste your precious time enjoying life with privacy worrying and fear. It’s just not worth it.

I don’t know why, but I get the impression the device you are struggling to make more private is a phone. If that’s the case, the extent to which you can make things work is indeed very limited, so don’t try to push it too hard.

You could use a tool like a firewall to have a more high-level control over all apps, like blocking them all and only allowing a few.

This may be less overwhelming than trying to block and contain each app individually. Now, you will still need to allow some Google stuff to have a Google phone work properly (to use the Play Store for example). If you want to go further, I’d suggest trying another OS other than Android, but that may make your phone even less compatible with what you are relying on, so it may be a better idea to instead try it on an old phone first.

On a PC, you have more freedom. Instead of trying to block everything from Google, for instance, you can rely on a separate browser profile (or Firefox Containers if that’s inconvenient) for things that really need Google (e.g. Meet, work/school using Google Apps, whatever) and in your main browser profile you can rely on alternatives. For example, instead of trying to access YouTube behind a Google blocking extension, you could use Invidious or a dedicated app like FreeTube.

I hope you can feel more at ease with the sense of being watched and tracked online, but remember that’s not worth loosing your best moments for if it ends up just causing more distress to you.

It’s a thing!

I think you have a point there, but the reasons why Mint does not ship a streamlined version may be simply because the maintainers don’t want to bother with a whole different context to build, document and support.

I do think there would be value in a less “batteries included” Mint. I disagree with people in this thread who claim the “whole purpose” of Mint is all the stuff it packs, because it goes far beyond the essentials. Mint develops a lot of GUIs for the user to be able to configure the system. I think just these plus the in-house Mint core apps would make for a sweet, lightweight and less bloated system that would have real appeal, but that would also mean more work for the Linux Mint team and perhaps it wouldn’t really mean much for their audience.

I can’t seem to block them by just enabling annoyances blocks on my end.

“EasyList – Other Annoyances” has this:

! Google signin popup
###credential_picker_container
###credential_picker_iframe

“AdGuard – Popup Overlays” has this:

! Warning: check, if auth using Google is not broken
||accounts.google.com/gsi/client^$third-party,script,domain=<several specific domains here>

My impression is that the rules want to avoid breaking Google sign-in completely, which this rule may do.

1. Install UBlock Origin
2. Click the extension’s icon
3. Click the gears icon for settings
4. Open the “My filters” tab
5. Add a line with ||accounts.google.com/gsi/iframe/select?*

Steps 2 and 3 can be replaced by going to about:addons, finding UBlock Origin, clicking the ... button and selecting “Preferences”.

My experience is the same, but it may be that the anti-adblock measures are still being tested on specific demographics and we are in the lucky group (for now).

Your mileage may vary for performance. It really depends what OS and what hardware. In my experience saying all BSDs are slower at rendering would be too broad a statement.

If you’ve done Arch and Debian server installs, you’ll be fine installing a major BSD. Just answer prompts and you are done, particularly if you are using the default disk partitioning scheme. Consider NetBSD. It’s known for its wide hardware compatibility. X is pre-installed, just “startx”.

Consider antiX. It’s very lightweight, supports 32 bit and you’ll have access to the Debian Repos.

Try removing Google from your search engines. If you still want it you can re-add it from search results (click address bar, a new search icon with a + should appear at the bottom) or Mycroft.

Also consider removing/dismissing Google from the new tab page. If you have disabled the option showing your most visited sites, enable it temporarily to remove Google and untick the “sponsored” option in the new tab cog icon on the top right.

Thank you for sharing. Your perspective broadens mine, but I feel a lot more negative about the whole “must benefit business” side of things. It is fruitless to hold any entity whatsoever accountable when a whole worldwide economy is in a free-for-all nuke-waving doom-embracing realpolitik vibe.

Frankly, not sure what would be worse, economic collapse and the consequences to the people, or economic prosperity and… the consequences to the people. Long term, and from a country that is not exactly thriving in the scheme side of things, I guess I’d take the former.

That’s interesting. I was looking up “Lemmy Terms of Service” for comparison after getting that quote from the Reddit ToS and could not find anything for Lemmy.ml. Now after you mentioned it, looking on my Mastodon instance, nothing either, just a privacy policy. That is indeed kinda weird. Some instances do have their own ToS though. At least something stating a sublicense for distribution should be there for protection of people running instances in locations where it’s relevant.

the claimants were set back because they’ve been asked to prove the connection between AI output and their specific inputs

I mean, how do you do that for a closed-source model with secretive training data? As far as I know, OpenAI has admitted to using large amounts of copyrighted content, numberless books, newspaper material, all on the basis of fair use claims. Guess it would take a government entity actively going after them at this point.

Yeah, their assumption though is you don’t? Neither attribution nor sharealike, not even full-on all-rights-reserved copyright is being respected. Anything public goes and if questions are asked it’s “fair use”. If the user retains CC BY-SA over their content, why is giving a bunch of money to StackOverflow entitling OpenAI to use it all under whatever terms they settled on? Boggles me.

Now, say, Reddit Terms of Service state clearly that by submitting content you are giving them the right to “a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness (…) in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world.” Speaks volumes on why alternatives (like Lemmy) to these platforms matter.

StackOverflow: *grabs money on monetizing massive amounts of user-contributed content without consulting or compensating the users in any way*

Users: *try to delete it all to prevent it*

StackOverflow: *your contributions belong to the community, you can’t do that*

Pretty fucked-up laws. A lot of lawsuits going on right now against AI companies for similar issues. In this case, StackOverflow is entitled to be compensated for its partnership, and because the answers are all CC BY-SA 3.0, no one can complain. Now, that SA? Whatever.

Recently did something similar and yeah it seems Mint, specially LMDE in my case, is a great fit for such cases. It’s on that sweet spot between being too bare and too bloated.

I’m not the biggest fan of VBox either, it’s just very popular and full of sequential “wizards” to guide the user along the process of creating VMs, so it might be one way to get started. I’d much rather work with QEMU though.

That might be fun then.

QEMU can be as simple as this:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 mydisk.qcow2 20G

Here you are first creating a disk image with the format qcow2 and maximum 20G capacity. This is a QEMU disk image format that will take up very little space and grow as you use up the VM disk.

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 256M -cdrom alpine.iso mydisk.qcow2

This will start a VM with 256MB of RAM, the alpine.iso image in its virtual CD/DVD slot, and the disk image you just created as a virtual drive. This will come with networking enabled by default, so you’ll have internet access from within the VM.

It should now drop you into the Alpine installation. Alpine is very lightweight so it’s great for experimenting, but you could do virtually the exact same for most other flavors of Linux and BSD images out there.

Once you are done installing, you can power off the VM and then start it with this:

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2G mydisk.qcow2

That’s basically the same without the -cdrom argument, this time with 2GB of RAM. I find QEMU a delight to play with because it has sane defaults like that. Hope you have fun too!

I think you might like DIstroSea. If you’d like to persist your experiments, then likely learning how to emulate systems with QEMU or VirtualBox (the latter if you’d like a friendlier GUI-led experience, the former if you want to go full-CLI virtualization). QEMU is great in how lightweight and easy to create and discard self-contained VM disk images can be.

What I mean is that no one will stop you. When you ascertain your own right to do it, it doesn’t mean much that I don’t believe you are entitled to it. It’s pretty much common practice. That is more a semantic matter at this point, but yes I stand by that being messed up for a project the size of Nix.

I don’t think that being a dictator for your project is necessarily “toxic”

Yeah, it is not necessarily toxic. It is at a lot more risk of being, though. Even a collectively managed project will mess up and upset the community, but then there is a sense of shared responsibility and more deliberation on what to do. With a BDFL, it’s just whatever. After your project reaches a certain size, that risk keeps increasing… exponentially.

I have projects that take contributions and I work on others that do not

Precisely. You see, if we take this into the context of a smaller project, specially one managed by a single person as you seem to be coming back to, that is a very different context. I don’t think an OSS maintainer should be laboring physically and emotionally to meet the demands of users. That is a well-known problem there. If this person doesn’t even want to have contact with the community and just ship code once an year, fine. They are just sharing things with the world at no cost. In this context, “suck it up and just fork it” is indeed the way to go.

When you take something as big as NixOS though, that can really be inverted. Now you have a very large number of people who are laboring physically and emotionally to sustain a very large project, and the original creator shifts to a very different place to. It’s another discussion entirely.

If pursuing your own vision is the sole purpose intended, it would not be limited at all.