Team 13-month-calendar assemble!

I haven’t done enough digging on metric time, but if it’s implemented as a UTC/global time I can get behind that. I’m sick of timezones and DST.

I take your point and I don’t disagree about personal responsibility or that there are a lot of people who ignored all the warnings. And it’s all the more frustrating to be ignored, or labeled as paranoid, by those same people. I was mostly reacting to the pervading unsympathetic response I was seeing.

A lot of people in the privacy community are seeing this as an established professional or someone with the experience/insight/know-how, and from that vantage point it seems so obvious. But it’s a journey. I can think of a few moments that woke me up to privacy and it’s importance. Most of those were just tinkering on personal projects. There’s no general education on this stuff and I really don’t think many folks have had the fortune to encounter this info in a way that they grasp, but maybe I’m kidding myself - i’ll leave room for that. I mentioned Time for a sense of the timeline and sentiment, not as a meaningful endorsement. I know I was ignorant about most of this stuff as late as 2014 and I still have so many gaps.

Maybe this 23andme BS is an experience that turns many more towards privacy, in which case i hope they’re met with a welcoming message like, “that sucks, this is why we have to educate and protect ourselves” instead of an alienating “no shit, idiot.”

was I wrong to assume they meant the entire technology and not just chatgpt and grok?

yes.

That’s all the time I have for sealion questions.

Hindsight is 20/20. ITT lots of folks proud of themselves for not falling into this trap, but try to understand, 23andme was named “invention of the year” by Time in 2008. That’s before google and facebook even began monetizing private data. Data privacy, or even the power of data itself, was hardly appreciated by private companies let alone in the public consciousness.

Orphans, people with absent parents, decedents of slaves, the list goes on for folks who would understandably go for an affordable way to access their genetic history. Sure, their were plenty of folks since then who had all the information and still went for it, but what about all those who became aware of it too late and when they requested their data be deleted were told it would be kept for 3 years!

I’m saddened to see more victim blaming here than anger at the ToS/privacy policy fuckery and a complete lack of consumer protection.

Criticisms of unethically built models can’t help but mention we’re making these tradeoffs for generally crappy returns. A common counter argument I see now is this focus on a small dig while ignoring all other points. I also see this effort to distance while defending. You might not big a “big” ai guy, but showing up to say it can be useful while overlooking valid points tells me you’re a regular ai guy.

If you have an old laptop sitting around, put a linux server or NAS distro on it and start tinkering. There can be a lot of analysis paralysis with this stuff. Sometimes it’s best to just try and fail and learn and try again. More likely you’ll try and succeed and realize other wants and needs and redo it a year later. I think that’s why it makes for a great hobby. Lots to learn and improve upon.

Start small, on your local network. Maybe something like paperless-ngx: not very demanding of resources, and (I assume) easy to backup/migrate. You could see about putting it on truenas to get a sense of what that process is like. I personally like to keep a nas and server separate, then mount the nas on the server.

I’ve found owncloud a bit complex and prefer dedicated solutions. For the seas, servarr apps come up a lot. Paperless ngx for docs. Immich (or ente) for photos/vid. If you’re just starting out, installing on linux and/or using docker is going to be your shortest path to success. proxmox or other VMs can complicate things if you’re not familiar.

gestalt principles?

I envy you. They are the bane of my existence. I have 4 neighbors that use them for landscaping once a week, most of the year. As for the appeal: you ever see a kid use a straw to blow stuff around? My theory is leaf blowers are an extension of that curiosity. A toy, really. When I hear someone rationalizing their use of a leaf blower, I hear someone talking about a toy they like. nevermind all the times i hear folks revving them like they’re on a motorcycle.

The Podcast, “Tech Won’t Save Us” did an excellent 4 episode series called Data Vampires about the problems with these companies and their data centers (episode 1) for those unfamiliar. Highly recommend.

Confirmation bias and anecdotal information, but hey, feel free to speak in absolute terms. If you read the article you’d realize you’re making a claim that not even Mark Zuckerberg, one month ago, is making.

Gives new meaning to hard mode.

Scammers about to try a new angle instead of the tired, old: “Hey (some random name)”

I don’t doubt it’s normalized in big companies. I imagine the bigger the company, the more ai they use. Big companies have the most to gain from the reduced-workforce ai sales pitch, and the biggest (meta, google, microsoft, etc) need a return on their ai investment (I’ve yet to hear of any demonstrable roi).

It makes sense that anyone in those companies would see it as normal, but it strikes me as an observer bias or frequency illusion. There’s so much ai hype. That is, after all, where the ad money and investments are flowing, but I also see a ton of skepticism, fatigue, and general disenchantment with it, which aligns with my experiences: that it doesn’t compare to a good system of books, notes, and bookmarks-- and that’s not even considering the costs (monetary, environmental, social, and political) which seem completely oversized. So that’s why I remain skeptical of the claim that normal people use ai.

quietly used AI like a normal person

Is ai use normal though? Maybe for you and many others but the existence of these communities, articles, and folks who just don’t get much out of it despite industry cramming it down everyone’s throat would suggest it’s anything but normal.

Yes, but we’re talking about 2 different moments. 3D software was in it’s infancy in the 90’s. Things were evolving rapidly, and you’re paying a premium for basically developing prototypes. Every innovation, additional competitor, or even merger will likely bring prices down.

More comparable to today’s desktop/software market, is after autodesk gobbled up the market in the 2000’s. They might offer discounts on bundles after acquiring a new software, but then they’d often stagnate or abandon development shortly thereafter and they gradually made moves to spend very little on dev while continuing to charge customers. So autodesk’s actions were hardly a consumer (prosumer?) victory. I’m simply saying they were increasingly hostile to their customers until blender became competitive.

Dang. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll fully commit like bitwarden did, but I think I’ll pause my donations till this ones settles.

Substantially improved Affinity Designer files (.afdesign) import

The feature i didn’t know I wanted till now.

May be similar to the 3d software world where autodesk created a monopoly and could charge around 5k USD for something like Maya, and then go the adobe route and only rent once innovation dies off. Only when Blender started getting more hype and attention did autodesk start offering cheaper indie versions and licenses.

100%

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

- Marshall McLuhan, Culture is Our Business (1972)

Bill Gates the farmer?

Just trying to find a decent link led me past so many deceptive headlines like Bill Gates owns a lot of American farmland, but not the majority.

So… he’s the largest private owner of US farmland , but he doesn’t own a majority-- What a relief /s