Yeah you are right, posting a youtube link was a bad call from op, even the rules on the forum frown on it. (First rule even!) A better approach would have been a summary or article with the important points.

And I have to be fair with you… you guessed right. The video is too long, I had to skip a lot since they were repeating the same things over and over. Worse part is that, my awareness pitch, fell flat. I just checked the comments in the video, half of the section reads like this:

“I wont buy from LG anymore” “FuckLG” “Thas why i don’t use tvs”

They didn’t understand that the problem is bigger than one brand or device, that there’s a whole system behind this. Nor the irony of being horrified of spying software while signed to google services.

Sigh… maybe i shouldn’t rush to be a devil’s advocate anymore… it always bites me back.

Anyways, I still think is important to reach people where they are, and youtube videos should help, it has reach and its were the more oblivious guys are. Although, it would have been really really nice from them to host it in a less hostile platform for everyone else.

Now like you, i will end my rant here. Loved yours, even if it was a little spicy, which may have offended some people. But there was truth there, and for me at least, made me reconsider some things.

Cheers!

This! Good advice! I went this path last year so i can give some extra advice for everyone who wants to start:

Before doing anything, buy a new router and put your iot devices and phones in a isolated guest network. Maintain the router updated. After that, you can work, learn and test without fear. Everything stays in your home.

Then like @[email protected] already said, once you get confident, you can run a vpn tunnel to access your lan. This setup is pretty robust, hard to fuck up, and doable even for newbies. (If i can do it, everyone can, i assure you). Lots of guides out there.

Last advice, which you should already be doing, but setup a backup.

Look you are right, but everything that promotes awareness about privacy it’s a plus in my book.

Being the devil’s advocate, nexus gamer is not a privacy channel. They are a tech one that started doing some journalism and they seem to be new to the privacy side of things. This story come about after the monitor ad pop stuff.

Related rant: For me phones are way more scary, they are everywhere, and you have no control on your friends and family devices. You can´t ask everyone to buy pixels and install graphene os on them.

I would agree pretty much with you, but OP posted this 13 hours ago. In ten hours only one person replied and only had a similiar issue about one of the points.

Kubuntu is no a popular distro of choice within the gaming space so i doubt it will easy to find someone who can help to troubleshoot their problem. Also i think i read somewhere that Ubuntu had some problems with 32 bit libraries. I may be wrong tho.

As i replied on another comment, changing distro will probably be the fastest way to solve or at least diagnostic the problem. It’s probably extreme but better than nothing. I would also try the flatpak version first.

As other replies told you, trying another distro to check will probably be the fastest way to solve the problem. I don’t think many people have experience with Kubuntu.

If you don’t want to change distros, you could try the flatpak version, it has their own package of drivers, and runs in a different runtime.

Just know that the flatpak of steam is not official but a community project. I had used it before without problems but i like to be clear about it.

I’m forced into this box that is my subscribed feed or I have to actively search out new communities because all is just a political circle jerk that I don’t care about.

Come on, this is not a problem. It’s a feature. As another user said in another reply, having a algorithm curating your feed ends up curating you. It’s even easier here than on reddit since you can even block whole instances! Block the ones that have the most political communities and you will be fine.

I agree with you on one thing, the lack of content on topics that are not tech or political related. But that falls on us, the users. I hope more communities will continue to grow in the future.

Not to mention the moment I came back I saw a fucking flow chart on the instances drama of the week.

I don’t know, for me at least, it has been pretty funny, especially these days. You enter [email protected], see the big pinned thread that says “Don’t whine”, and then hundreds of people whining. It gives me a chuckle.

It would be good if true, for a privacy first chat, asking for your phone number is the first and biggest red flag.

Someone knows how Delta Chat handles the spam problem? Or spam is only a problem that comes with wider adoption?

I love Debian, I use it as a desktop and it’s installed on all my machines, but it has some problems/quirks that make it hard to recommend it for desktop usage.

First one is that it doesn’t have sensible defaults, the OS expects a user who is an admin, one who will configure things to their liking. I would consider this to be a feature, if it weren’t for the second problem, the documentation. The documentation is wayy too dated, lots of pages in the wiki haven’t been updated since Debian Buster days!

A better recommendation would be probably a Debian derivative like MX Linux. They are more opinionated, but as far as I know, they come with better defaults and offer newer guides, documentation, etc.

Thanks for sharing, i haven’t been able to find a good guide, will check it out. Or more accurately a guide that i can follow with ease.

I went into hyperbole there, my bad. I agree wholeheartedly with your reply.

Admittedly, I have a bias here, since using water for food production feels more justified. Same with some industries. But I concede and agree that meat is not the most efficient way nor the most ethical source of food.

I think data centers rub me the wrong way because, for me, they are the straw that broke the camel’s back. We see how lots of countries pull out of the fight against climate change (not that they were really fighting it, but at least they seemed to care a little) and now they waste more resources on things that are, from my point of view, not productive nor useful to most people. (Ethics aside, my view on Gen AI is that it is a tech that is not mature enough, and that the use of brute force to make it better is a waste of resources)

I will try to be more mindful about my comments.

I kid you not, yesterday while reading about the ai bubble and the datacenters boom i was thinking maybe this is THE filter.

Not a nuclear winter, not the angry alien or the big scary asteroid. Just a fucking chatbot wasting all the water and power. We truly live in a boring dystopia.

I should have seen this coming, even then, I am extremely sad.

This was of the few uses for machine learning that I think it was genuily useful. Mature enough to make an impact without destroying the enviroment.

It was also my main argument for people that are full hate AI. Now gone.

I hope others companies continue this research. It’s in this type of problems where machine learning truly shines.

GenAi is still not mature enough, throwing so much compute power at it, is mostly wasting resources.

Imagine what could be done if all the computer power and researchers wasted on chats went to this type of project.

The Crypto AG story shows that the location of a company doesn’t matter that much. The US simply made legal what they were already doing behind the scenes. Intelligence services have always been and still are above the law.

Unpopular takes incoming.

Signal.

Way too many red flags.

• Why ask for mandatory phone numbers? You could at least make it opt in.
• Why we can’t inspect the latest server code?
• Why not make it easy for people to run their own servers?

Do you truly believe that a company that wants to preserve your privacy would take this direction?

And i don’t care how secure the protocol is, how well the code is audited. They can still map your social graph.

Anyways, because of my threat model, i still use Signal. But if i were an activist i wouldnt touch it.

More unpopular takes:

Tor and Mullvad probably compromised too. If a service gets too mainstream, I dont believe for a second that they would let it run without care. They would take it down, or control it.

Now, these services are still usefull. For example mt threat model is to deny my shit to the big tech. So they are useful if you want to escape data collection for adversiment purposes.

I don’t think they would burn the reputation of these services for low hanging fruit like selling data for ads.

@zarkanian When posting videos try to put a descriptive title or a summary with your thoughts in the body. Not only it opens up discussions about the topic, it always make me more likely to check the content. It’s not in the rules but i think is nice etiquette.