BatteryMountain

I've successfully avoided these companies the last 5 years. Gaming as a whole is dead for me, I just play a couple of old games now & then. The culture is toast too, not just bad games or expensive hardware. So not really losing much sleep over any of this. I have linux on all my machines, so I really only play the one's that perform well on linux. Haven't played online multiplayer games since ~2013. Many of us are like me.

edit: like if a game doesn't work, I no longer spend hours trying to fix it, I don't go ranting on the internet about it.. I just uninstall and play something else. Really simplifies things if you can detach from gaming as a core identity anchor.

10 Years ago. Complete garbage spyware.

What if, your brain is over-sexualized and you are obsessed with butthole, to the point your mind associate almost all round objects/shapes with buttholes? Maybe the logo's aren't the problem but rather degeneracy stuck in the brain. Now, think of a doughnut. Disgusting. :p

What I do for my one framework (in dotnet, strong typing & compiler) is to create claude skills (bash scripts and dotnet console apps) that claude can call to do various things within the framework. I have a template engine (for classes/db scripts/view engine templates), build tools, deployment tools, backup tools, infra docs - all of it works amazingly well. I built them in a standardized way so it's easy to chain them together and claude just 'gets it'. It feels like a DSL on steroids.

edit: this is all on linux + posgresql.

And who does this ultimately benefit?...

Claude definitely do not respect all my rules, it often ventures into other folders, most often other projects on the same machine that was greenlit before but not from the current projects' side. One other anomaly I had in the last month: I have two linux users on my laptop, one for work, one for personal. On my work account, it asked me if I wanted to continue with project x, which is in my personal account and not present at all in my home directory with work stuff. So somehow the memory system is keeping context where it shouldn't. Interesting I used this learning to improve the agent framework/harness I have running at work: it now creates a new linux user for each agent which have much stricter rules on how it can read/write to the system, and it is also no longer running as root. Much safer now. Still don't trust it 100% though.

This society is doomed.

So, I've also discovered my limits: 4 terminal tabs with claude. Anything above that and my attention gets shredded and I have to reread whole conversations. That being said, after a day of doing 4 sessions simultaneously like this, my brain is fried in the sense that nothing I do can/will relief the stress. It different from normal stress. I completely zone out in the evening.

Claude even refuses when I ask it about optimizing my taxes (not illegal avoidance) and refuses to engage on it. It has also refused certain infrastructure questions (it was a question about bgp & smtp) - it thinks I want to hack something. So much for that.

They are all doing this. The wrong-think police is already here.

But how will they surveil you if you bring your own device...

Do yourself a favour: install linux (fedora is okay) on a computer; install android sdk + new android cli, install flutter, install claude code. Then, build a basic app, claude can one-shot it for you. Ask claude to make a release build with a real signing key. Leave phone plugged in and connected via adb while claude is coding - it can use the new cli tooling to drive the phone and do full visual testing (can tap, enter text, take screenshot - all by itself). Tell claude you dislike third-party dependencies and to avoid google service and that it must double check with you before adding permissions to the app. Tell it by default to exclude internet access and to opt-out of android/google backup system.

Then, get building. Build a replacement app for each thing you use that don't have an open source equivalent. I'm at the point where I don't even use apps from f-droid anymore. Only my own code, own signing keys, privacy-first. It is awesome.

If you have an extra pc available, setup proxmox with: a container that acts as a build server (install all your sdk's here), gitea (and wire it up with the build server), an S3 compatible storage container (SeaweedFS) & wire it up with gitea. Let claude set it all up. Give claude ssh access to all of it. Then, when you build an app on your local machine, claude will know how to use your development infrastructure and you can automate all of your building your own softwares.

After that, own email server (stalward - rust based email server), owncloud deployment, full-on wireguard with public exit point (don't depend on third party). Get a couple of clean static ip addresses.

After that, become an isp, get an asn, get ipv4 and ipv6 blocks, play with bgp (make friends with your local isp staff..).

Rabbithole goes deep. Point is, fuck all these slimy techbro's. They need to be technologically eviscerated by hackers & get what they deserve for trying to enter our world by force.

If they go through with this, I will make it my life's mission for the coming months to de-google my personal life and break any dependencies on google at work. Done with this nonsense. Shouldn't take more than a month to remove the tumor.

On my android phone:

My own launcher

My own keyboard

My own sync tool for local net

My own net tools to WoL some devices on my lan.

My own tool to control 3 proxmox servers

My own tool that parses groceries slips

My own tool that keep tracks of my vehicles events/lifecycle/purchases etc.

If they break my launcher/keyboard and my ability to use my phone in my customized way, they will NEVER see me as a client again. None of these apps are in the Play Store, they are signed with my own signing keys, which have never been uploaded to google, in fact, no google account is linked to these apps. These apps are also privacy-oriented (even the keyboard, I ship a 1mb dictionary with and it learns my own words, never transmits anything).

I will not give google my ID , neither Persona or anyone else. I'm very happy to go back to using bank card + chip + pin than use google wallet. Trust me I will walk away. I already move 4 family members off of Windows in the last 2 years, I will get them off google too.

Dictatorship. Complete with a trashy despot. Coming to a country near you.

I will never ever give Persona my ID.

I don't have historic use of kde but I switched to it about a year ago, after a big release, and its been awesome. Very stable for me, allows custom dpi's for each of my monitors, it doesn't break itself like gnome does. I haven't bothered with other DE's since I tried it, not even xfce (old favourite of mine for tablet & low spec pc), kde performs even well on low specs. And highly configurable out of the box. Its the most stable DE I've encountered for daily driving so far.

What was so much better in the old days (besides memory consumption)?

I want to give my bank my public key (preferable at a branch), so that ANY comms coming from them I can prove it came from them as.

Preach. Exactly.

We will eventually be forced down this path though, be patient! Upfront key exchange in-person will be the only way left to prove comms are real. GPG is just one path but someone will come along and make it easy on organizational level.

We will end up with a situation where all interactions with computers (remote systems), including email, will need an initial step to pair/exchange keys, much like ssh. So when the bank wants to send me email, they can only do so if they have my public key. We should try to make this as frictionless as possible. Or, we generate semi-random email addresses that are short-lived, so that each company I interact with get their own unguesable email address.

Either way, we are getting to a point where offline-2FA will be mandatory for all auth systems and when interacting with another party, it will need something like the above to be sure you are dealing with the correct company.

Same, but for android. My best one so far is my own launcher/home screen. Works great.

So, what if, we build a stack/set of transistors in same shape as a trained model? It would eliminate most of the software stack too and should run very fast. No memory/gpu required, the chip acts as both storage and processing device, purpose built to be physical model of a trained model.

OH.

My problem with protonmail (and telegram) is that in my country, only scammers use those two services. So when I encounter these, I immediately distrust the person I'm interacting with and assume the worst. Even my one neighbor uses it and I distrust him immensely as he is not tech savvy yet he uses proton... its strange. How does he even know about it? He and his wife are not forth coming about what they do for a living, they seem to be nice people, but they both use proton. In our country its a huge red flag.

Webcam firmware & colour grading & programming is a black art btw.

Those are specific firmwares for those devices that are either closed-source binary blobs, open-source hackjobs/reverse engineered attempts, or just plain missing firmwares. The fault is not on Linux but rather on Qualcomm not releasing things for that specific SoC. Some SoC's have better support than others. ARM cpu's themselves works perfectly fine on linux.

Intel has closed things down: some wifi and webcam firmwares are poop and a massive pain to get working on newer chips (if at all). Their wifi firmwares also don't respect certain kernel overrides (which is why I replaced my Intel Wifi 7 chip with a mediatek Wifi 6 one). Blame is 100% on intel and not linux. Broadcom is also pretty bad at being a team player in this regard.

I basically recommend everyone to stick with AMD chipset & GPU's where possible, because they have mainline kernel support nailed down 95% of the time.

Again, ARM works fine, their extra firmwares for extra devices on SoC's are to blame if you struggle.

Well, linux already runs perfectly fine on ARM chips, so it probably won't matter much. The real bottleneck is getting game studios to build arm releases of their code, which by itself is easy in normal circumstances but they often have third party code that doesn't have ports or are abandoned or hidden behind NDA's (networking code, sound processing, custom tooling etc). So ARM and Linux are not the blocking factor at all and I'm willing to bet most of the engineers working on game engines have ported them to linux/arm for fun already, they just can't release for various reasons above.

So if anything, we need to push more game studios to use open source dependencies which will make porting easier.

Amazing resource, thanks!

The chickens are coming home to roost across the industry. The next 5 years ALL technical debt will have to be repaid or you all will be eaten alive. Good luck all.

To make an omelette, some eggs need to break, right? These companies released AI to the public and thought it will be all sunshine and roses.. there are legit bad actors in the world that hates society and people and they will use AI for expand on that, is that not clear? We need controls on AI similar to any other restricted materials (like nuclear stuff).

Both reddit and 4chan has hosted csam in the past 25 years or so... yet they continue exist. Their operators don't go to jail (specifically the ceo of reddit was supposedly a moderaton of csam a group). If I want to host anything semi dodgy, I'd be in jail in no time. Everything online (domain rental, dns, hosting, carriers & bgp peering, email, any kind of cloud usage, certificate authorities) can be traced back to real people and real bank accounts. Thus I think these things are allowed to exist as and act as honeypots, and my strong suspicion is that intelligence agencies must be involved somehow. The amount of blackmail material (even something as simple as starting an OF account and submitting your ID and then deleting again = easy blackmail on a young woman who changed her mind) generated daily is worthwhile for all these dark ops. I'm about 30% sure the entire chain of trust (from secureboot to certificate auths to ssl to disk encryption) has been compromised a long time ago and they just don't reveal that they know certain information and always find an indirect way to act on it.