Apparently MFA is broken, the library of keys is harder to navigate now, torrent downloads for books have been taken out, and a few other problems I haven’t dug around for.

Personally the only stuff that’s really bothered in the five minutes I’ve spent “exploring” is being asked to complete four captchas and not being able to see how many bundles are sold on the home page.

Supposedly the site is an affront to the eyes with a generic vibe slop design but I don’t spend enough time on the new web to notice too too much. But it does look like generic key store number 45,679 now, which is a bit sad, but oh well.

Please disregard the irony of a user from a piracy instance complaining about a storefront lmao. Humble was nice and was how I first bought many games I “demoed”

I guess the volume of the Lemmyverse is beginning to chug. Since we federate with most big instances it’s not surprising that these things start showing up.

As far as I can tell this is very similar/identical to the issue that ShJW was dealing with. It seems like they’re not entirely convinced with their solution they came up with and regard it as a bandaid fix.

I’ve had it happen via the Voyager client and on the default web front end.

That said, it’s been an antidote to doomscrolling of sorts.

The option to load again showed up just once and did nothing, so this might be a repeat of a problem someone identified a few days ago.

PWA on iOS

It’s probably almost cruelly difficult to find someone with up to date machine learning knowledge who also violently hates slop as much as they ought to.

Edit: obviously I mean hating AI the buzzword, AI the machine god, AI the magic bean stock goes up, AI the cure to critical thinking, AI will change everything, AI = LLM = photo generator. Not hiring someone who abhors the concept of machine learning. I think most people here got what I was thinking of I guess

I was reading some joking comments about asking fast food customer service bots to reverse linked lists and I was struck by the realization that I didn’t quite remember how that would be done. Data structures were never my strong suit but I landed on something like going through the whole list and filing the pointers in a stack.

I was actually half decent at writing something in a programming language I barely understood back in university, but these days I prod a pandas dataframe twice a year or set up an abomination for one-off data scraping once a year and that’s about it. Maybe I do half of a Zachtronics game.

There’s two sides of this for me:

1. The actual writing of code and the theory has become very rusty (not a pun). I’d ideally like to fully re-learn a lot of the software fundamentals. I did a lot of RTL and embedded stuff in university and I never really got deep into writing that much “traditional” code. Mostly lower level stuff and others would write the high level stuff.
2. I’m actually not very familiar with actual tools people use to build stuff. I’m somewhat familiar with Conda and NodeJS, my understanding of the microcontroller ecosystem is still pretty reasonable, but I’m not very familiar with what people actually build software with. I get that the meta now is electron and web apps but that doesn’t really appeal to me. Everything I’ve ever built has been versioned by saving backups of source folders so even though I understand Git I haven’t really used it for my own work. Student projects were simple enough and abstracted the right way that we just used loose files. Stuff like that

I’m probably not pursuing a career pivot into software development but the idea of having personal projects has never faded away. I know it’s far fetched but the early 2010s dream of making a few little apps or games and quitting corporate still appeals to me. Even before the slop era there was far too much fodder to stand out, but hey, I still like making things, I’m not going into it with the expectation of it changing my life.

As LLMs eat up more and more of beginners’ foundational knowledge I don’t quite know exactly how to feel. I think asking for a regex filter in natural language is neat, it’s also something I can immediately verify without messing up my work. But I hesitate to offload much brain power into that kind of tool. I intuitively understand it would probably be very helpful to explain basics, or to offer an explanation for an error the compiler is being obtuse about, but I don’t know. I see this stuff totally melt people’s brains around me. Competent professionals just throwing away their judgment and experience. Even if my use case is what it’s better at doing, I have reservations. I do worry about the future of online documentation of little weird issues if nobody is asking the dumb questions in an open forum.

I guess the trivial solution is just “come up with a project and learn as you go” which is how I’ve done this before, and I’m assuming most of you have too. But I lose all momentum most of the time pretty fast, and a lot of it comes down to frustration with not having the time to debug like I did as a student, not knowing what the obvious libraries are, just plain blanking on when to use a pointer and when to use an address. My brain still thinks in (bad) C++ so I’ll look at my bad python and think huh this looks nothing like the documentation. Ideally I’d like to be decent or at least confident with both, and be decent at winging it in another language when needed.

Not looking for explicit recommendations as much as just seeing what you guys think. If the world economy crashes and I’m out of a job, doing a few projects on my own time might be good for me. Especially at a time when computing feels like it’s being wrestled out of our hands, and when most people are treating computers as magic black boxes again. I swear the interns are somehow worse at navigating an OS than my grandma.

In the short term I should just try to beat The Farmer Was Replaced, but after that I’m all ears

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/64538524

So this is a bit of a weird one. I have a tech background, which gives me some more authority, but I'm working in a non-tech field at the moment. They're taking this event pretty seriously, they're flying me out from Beirut to one of their Gulf offices, so I would hope that they would make the trip worth it and not only listen for AI boosting.

I'm one of the few people on my team who doesn't use these tools every day. The only benefit I've ever gotten was as an alternative thesaurus when the search engine results don't give me exactly what I want, and as a supercharged content aware fill on my personal laptop when I'm dicking around editing images. I use a low memory local model from 2022. This is all I need or want. I also understand the tech on a much more fundamental level thanks to my background. Not to give out too much information, but we built simulated pseudo tensor cores on an FPGA in university. I'm not a machine learning engineer, but I understand what this thing is better than anyone else in that meeting will - and certainly anyone with AI in their job title.

I have to temper the fuck out of my tone and frustration to make sure I can get messaging across. I also need to be careful not to come off as panicking about AI "stealing" my job. I have a completely different career path than all those business people, so I don't know if that's something on their mind. I also, you know, work from another country. I'm the cheap offshore labor.

I'm obviously not going to word all of the below this way is my point. I have to pick my battles as well, because most of the people with serious authority haven't had a real job in years and think their magic workplan generator and semi-reliable banana bread ratio calculator is the future of work, humanity, and consciousness.

Within my organization, I've seen people with years of knowledge and experience throw it out of the window because of the magic text box in their pocket. I've seen people with very passable English push their work through a slop extruder to "make the wording more natural" - when it makes it look more generic. I've also had experiences where someone in the chain of custody of my hard work did this to something I've made, making the information within it more generic, diluting my effort.

Company policy has banned external chatbots because Microslop Copilot is "more secure". I used to use GPTZero as a detection tool, just to put in particularly egregious paragraphs and send a screenshot to whoever "wrote" it, to be like "Hey, this reads really bad and I expected actual tailored analysis here. Please write this yourself, if it's not this long, it's okay." Slop makes our hard work look cheap! But GPTZero offers an LLM service, I think it offers a "de-roboticization" service, it has fucking GPT in the name, so it's blocked now.

However, despite the ban, I'm still getting ChatGPT links sent to my Whatsapp from superiors asking me if I "checked this" or "if we're covering all of this", with the most generic ass information in there. The corpus of the web is largely Western and this shit just does not apply here. You know it doesn't apply here. If we were having a face to face conversation and I suggested this stuff you'd be shocked, boss man. What the fuck.

I hear people in meetings and in the offices when I fly in openly talk about "ChatGPT being "better"" and using it on their phone. I'm not fighting for Copilot's market share here, I want these people to use their brains!

So many little things as well. Feedback on my work comes back more vague now, like someone brute forcing a prompt instead of actually, you know, being a part of the process of doing work. People who need time to write English or are not confident with their English are not gradually improving their language skills. Some interns and juniors don't learn anything, and are outright awful at looking up obscure information the old fashioned way.

Over the last few months, I've helped push some work friends off paying for ChatGPT, after relentlessly bombarding them with "You already know this", "This sounds off, you worded it better to me over lunch", "This contradicts our call with those guys, don't you remember the argument you made?", that kind of thing. I find it funny that the antidote to this shit is to be 1% more conscious about your work.

I can also probably score a lot of brownie points by overemphasizing my mini pc / raspi homelab situation and using it to do "AI", kind of reassuring them that I am not insulting their digital false idol.

Thing is, with war tensions (usually it's them asking about my safety, ha), this meeting has been pushed forward, but they seem adamant on having it.

I would prefer not to enter job specifics for obvious reasons, but I do want to emphasize that the work we do can have direct positive impact on people's lives and has done so already. Part of what keeps me sane in the corporate machine is the fact that I've somehow found myself in a position to nudge typically unfeeling processes into marginally improving the material conditions of normal people.

Oh but you're a dbzer0 user, that's a pro-AI instance!

Yes and no. The admin is upfront about this being a facet of technology they are interested in, in the technical sense. I am as well. Their focus is on mass proliferation of this stuff with user control. I can't say I share their views on this tech era to the tee, but this does not give me the heebie jeebies the way mainstream machine learning worship does. Also they seem to be horrified at the social phenomenon that is modern "AI", so... It's not that big of a deal. I don't hate the tech when it's in a whitepaper or running in a university server semantically indexing its digital library. I hate it when it kills the web and the brains of the people around me.

AI worship and AI financing is also a bit different in the Middle East, but this is not the place for me to complain about that. Let's just say there's layers. Let's just say a lot of shit keeps me up at night.

So this is a bit of a weird one. I have a tech background, which gives me some more authority, but I'm working in a non-tech field at the moment. They're taking this event pretty seriously, they're flying me out from Beirut to one of their Gulf offices, so I would hope that they would make the trip worth it and not only listen for AI boosting.

I'm one of the few people on my team who doesn't use these tools every day. The only benefit I've ever gotten was as an alternative thesaurus when the search engine results don't give me exactly what I want, and as a supercharged content aware fill on my personal laptop when I'm dicking around editing images. I use a low memory local model from 2022. This is all I need or want. I also understand the tech on a much more fundamental level thanks to my background. Not to give out too much information, but we built simulated pseudo tensor cores on an FPGA in university. I'm not a machine learning engineer, but I understand what this thing is better than anyone else in that meeting will - and certainly anyone with AI in their job title.

I have to temper the fuck out of my tone and frustration to make sure I can get messaging across. I also need to be careful not to come off as panicking about AI "stealing" my job. I have a completely different career path than all those business people, so I don't know if that's something on their mind. I also, you know, work from another country. I'm the cheap offshore labor.

I'm obviously not going to word all of the below this way is my point. I have to pick my battles as well, because most of the people with serious authority haven't had a real job in years and think their magic workplan generator and semi-reliable banana bread ratio calculator is the future of work, humanity, and consciousness.

Within my organization, I've seen people with years of knowledge and experience throw it out of the window because of the magic text box in their pocket. I've seen people with very passable English push their work through a slop extruder to "make the wording more natural" - when it makes it look more generic. I've also had experiences where someone in the chain of custody of my hard work did this to something I've made, making the information within it more generic, diluting my effort.

Company policy has banned external chatbots because Microslop Copilot is "more secure". I used to use GPTZero as a detection tool, just to put in particularly egregious paragraphs and send a screenshot to whoever "wrote" it, to be like "Hey, this reads really bad and I expected actual tailored analysis here. Please write this yourself, if it's not this long, it's okay." Slop makes our hard work look cheap! But GPTZero offers an LLM service, I think it offers a "de-roboticization" service, it has fucking GPT in the name, so it's blocked now.

However, despite the ban, I'm still getting ChatGPT links sent to my Whatsapp from superiors asking me if I "checked this" or "if we're covering all of this", with the most generic ass information in there. The corpus of the web is largely Western and this shit just does not apply here. You know it doesn't apply here. If we were having a face to face conversation and I suggested this stuff you'd be shocked, boss man. What the fuck.

I hear people in meetings and in the offices when I fly in openly talk about "ChatGPT being "better"" and using it on their phone. I'm not fighting for Copilot's market share here, I want these people to use their brains!

So many little things as well. Feedback on my work comes back more vague now, like someone brute forcing a prompt instead of actually, you know, being a part of the process of doing work. People who need time to write English or are not confident with their English are not gradually improving their language skills. Some interns and juniors don't learn anything, and are outright awful at looking up obscure information the old fashioned way.

Over the last few months, I've helped push some work friends off paying for ChatGPT, after relentlessly bombarding them with "You already know this", "This sounds off, you worded it better to me over lunch", "This contradicts our call with those guys, don't you remember the argument you made?", that kind of thing. I find it funny that the antidote to this shit is to be 1% more conscious about your work.

I can also probably score a lot of brownie points by overemphasizing my mini pc / raspi homelab situation and using it to do "AI", kind of reassuring them that I am not insulting their digital false idol.

Thing is, with war tensions (usually it's them asking about my safety, ha), this meeting has been pushed forward, but they seem adamant on having it.

I would prefer not to enter job specifics for obvious reasons, but I do want to emphasize that the work we do can have direct positive impact on people's lives and has done so already. Part of what keeps me sane in the corporate machine is the fact that I've somehow found myself in a position to nudge typically unfeeling processes into marginally improving the material conditions of normal people.

Oh but you're a dbzer0 user, that's a pro-AI instance!

Yes and no. The admin is upfront about this being a facet of technology they are interested in, in the technical sense. I am as well. Their focus is on mass proliferation of this stuff with user control. I can't say I share their views on this tech era to the tee, but this does not give me the heebie jeebies the way mainstream machine learning worship does. Also they seem to be horrified at the social phenomenon that is modern "AI", so... It's not that big of a deal. I don't hate the tech when it's in a whitepaper or running in a university server semantically indexing its digital library. I hate it when it kills the web and the brains of the people around me.

AI worship and AI financing is also a bit different in the Middle East, but this is not the place for me to complain about that. Let's just say there's layers. Let's just say a lot of shit keeps me up at night.

Trying very hard to hold back a torrent of rants about the state of tech. I’m clinging onto an older model of something at a time when they don’t make a good new alternative, you can figure out where the problem is.

So far I’ve changed the switches (the mechanical things inside the mouse that click), the outer shell, the scroll wheel, and the teflon pads at the bottom.

Am quite pleased with how it doesn’t feel like it’s falling apart anymore.

It’s sad that the switches and rubber shell especially feel like they were intentionally built to age very poorly. This was not a cheap mouse, and switches that don’t break in two years are like 2$ more than the ones they used. The rubber coating on the outside peeled and crumbled until I finally replaced the whole outer shell with a solid single piece. And the scroll wheel was beginning to rust.

Overall some of the replacement parts don’t feel quite as rigid. The older rubber part, while crumbling from the outside in, was glued to a sturdier-feeling plastic frame than the replacement, which is just a little creaky.

But hey. I love fixing my stuff and using what I want, marketers and their poor record of product discontinuation be damned. I probably wouldn’t have bought a new one. But I don’t like that I can’t if I needed to. I don’t like that everything is built to be disposable when things as simple as a scroll wheel that doesn’t rust, a shell not made of crumbly rubber, or switches that don’t break after two years have all been the default for 40 years before the current tech dark age.

Basically what the title says. I know online providers like GPTzero exist, but when dealing with sensitive documents, I would prefer to keep it in-house. A lot of people like to talk big about open source models for generating stuff, but the detection side is not as discussed I feel.

I wonder if this kind of local capability can be stitched into a browser plugin. Hell, doesn’t even need to be a locally hosted service on my home network. Local app on-machine should be fine. But being able to host it as a service to use from other machines would be interesting.

I’m currently not able to give it a proper search but the first glance results are either for people trying to evade these detectors or people trying to locally host language models.

I have been using Proton only as a burner email service, but I've been intrigued about signing up for the paid version to get a few more of those with less restrictions.

I currently use a different VPN provider for my personal devices, and that's been fine. But I'm sharing some of my device slots with someone else.

Suppose I get a Proton subscription - would I be able to share device slots with someone without granting them access to the drive/emails etc? Obviously I can tell them "Hey I logged you in, don't mess with the settings or it will stop working", and I have full trust that they won't mess around with the settings.

It's cheaper for me to double up on my existing VPN subscription, but hey, I'm all about exploring options. I'm not thrilled about the recent political comments made by people in charge at Proton but I haven't seen enough red flags just yet.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/55365151

I have found myself in a mental hole of tech-nihilism. Maybe even on the road to tech-fatalism. Long, rambly, Sunday night post, heads up. But I think I touch on the risk posed by even using privacy tools, something which I don't think I see discussed here because of where most of you live (Global North, where you have the right to tell a policeman to get a warrant for the most part). This is kind of about two things at once, they're related though.

Different events bubble this feeling to the surface but it's always there in the background. When I (and you) defected from Reddit cold turkey after they decided to cut off the API, I had this feeling. When I started having to use a VPN permanently, I got it again. And when I had to "move" my exit country because the UK started verifying identities online, I got it again. Can you guess how I felt this week, following Microsoft's bullshit about making it even harder to set up their OS without signing in? Or when I tried to use my trusty YouTube downloading scripts, only for them to seemingly require I feed them login cookies now? Or this whole Google Play dev verification thing? I don't even use Android!

I'm sure this is the case for most of you, but being anonymous online feels like more of a challenge and more of a necessity now. I don't want YouTube to log 900 music playlists under my account. I don't want to log into every Windows mini PC I set up for family. I know most of you obviously do not, and Lemmy being Lemmy there's this culture of saying well fuck the corporate internet altogether. Can't rip from YouTube? Fuck YouTube! Don't want to give M$ your blood type to set up a printer server NUC? Image Debian on it. etcetera etcetera. I know. I use Lemmy, I avoid Google search, I most definitely avoid most big tech products when I can. Don't need em.

But like... The corporate internet is still there. I quit Reddit, even though it was my online home for over a decade. But YouTube? That's a completely different beast. This just is where the videos are. I can host Pixelfed for my family and friends but I can't host video, much less expect everyone to. Most people aren't very computer savvy and YouTube is just where most people will post videos.

And since I use their service quite a bit, I did look into actually paying for their service. The folks you watch get a little kickback, and you no longer get ads on your TV and phone. I can stomach paying, even the uBlock Origin and piracy advocate that I am, just because I use it so much. But I use a VPN. And their FAQ explicitly has a page for this: you can't connect from outside of where you're paying, if you're paying. But it doesn't clarify whether it uses the country of your payment details, your IP, your location in Google Maps, or the country your account's settings are set to. In my case, those are four separate countries lmao

These are little complaints, but I don't think this is some "first-world" problem nothingburger. I suspect the UK identity verification scheme, or something similar, will start becoming more common around the world, regardless of how many data breaches happen. And not because some stuck up politicians are scared that a teenager could see a woman's penis online, oh no, I totally think the true purpose is to tag "unwanted" ideologies and prevent their spread. Wouldn't want anyone to type in ultra evil extremist words like "Palestinians have human rights" without consequences now would we. The fact that everyone is using their spin euphemism, "age verification", instead of what it is, "identity verification", gives them too much credit, even when being critical about it.

There is some irony in calling this a first world problem, because I live very decisively in the third world. Lebanon. Our internet speeds are shit, but for the most part, the internet here is pretty unrestricted. Combine this with most people's service coming via legal gray area local """ISPs"""" with haphazard IP ranges and messy CGNAT, and you have a plausibly anonymous and relatively uncensored connection. Beautiful, besides the 2Mb (yes, lowercase) speed.

But. But.

I was looking into setting up a meshtastic/LoRa/whatever network, that would link up my home with a few relatives who live nearby, as sort of an emergency backup. You probably only see bad news from where I live, I promise good things do happen here, but an emergency comms network in case something happens and services go down seems like common sense to me. Especially since these services go down when there isn't an emergency. But setting one of these up would definitely get me on a list here. I'd probably get an unpleasant "interrogation" for setting up a parallel communications network. Best case scenario I get asked to take it down and to keep my nose clean kiddo. Worst case, I'm accused of espionage and thrown in a cell because it's hard to explain what this stuff is to people who don't care about understanding it. I do not live in a place with consistent rule of law, or even the thin veil of it. Staying out of trouble is paramount.

Further, along the same topic. I remember seeing an article about some countries in the EU raising an eyebrow about GrapheneOS, where police are associating its use with drug dealers. Perhaps I would need such an OS in the future, as someone who is not a drug dealer but who hates what is going on with commercial tech. And so I started thinking about what using it would look like. The same concerns with my local police are there, but there is a worse one: I have been flying internationally into countries with much more strict security than Beirut's sticky, comfy little airport. I've been to Abu Dhabi in the past 24 months, what happens when I land in that airport with a "drug dealer phone"? I doubt Lemmy would even be allowed there if they knew what it was. I wonder what kind of shady deals Reddit had to crack to get approved, with how that place's culture and content was.

I wonder about this a lot. The VPN I use in Lebanon isn't blocked in the countries I visit for work, so I've felt relatively at ease so far. But I feel these tendrils of surveillance and data collection, of deanonymization. And it kind of terrifies me. I have to stand in the pleb physical stamping line in these techy airports, but I see people just walking through the electronic gates with nothing but an iris scan. It's weird. I can make a burner YouTube account to yoink cookies and download videos, but I shouldn't have to. I can log into a Microsoft account on a machine I'll be logging into their email from every day and connecting to their Minecraft auth servers from twice a year, but... this is not right at all. We all know what's downstream from tying your files to your identity.

I don't know. The rise of tech-induced willful ignorance and authoritarian regimes is scaring me. The fact that people's pensions are tied to AI companies that facilitate the terrorization and mass murder of innocents in the south of my country (and unquestionable genocide south of the border) fucking terrifies me. And it should, even if I wasn't a working-age Lebanese man. Even if I wasn't in those fucking databases.

I'm going to hold myself back from ranting about the fact that tech has come to almost exclusively mean predatory products and bullshit slop extruders to most people. About the cruel summary execution of our dream of cyberspace that we glimpsed on the early web. About how infuriatingly, nonchalantly shit almost every young person is at solving tech problems now. There is an immense, crushing powerlessness. I almost wish I didn't care about tech, about privacy, that I could give Glaxo-McUberzon my mother's maiden bone marrow and carry on with my day.

Almost.

I am 100% on the way to becoming a forest hermit with the way tech is going. And I'm a tech guy. I'm the tech guy to most people in my life. And boy howdy is a life of making coffee, chopping firewood, and screaming into the valley between commits to projects-that-go-nowhere looking real, real good right about now.

I should probably cross-post this to Tech Takes. But I don't think I'll be putting it on my personal blog. Doesn't feel right.

I have found myself in a mental hole of tech-nihilism. Maybe even on the road to tech-fatalism. Long, rambly, Sunday night post, heads up. But I think I touch on the risk posed by even using privacy tools, something which I don't think I see discussed here because of where most of you live (Global North, where you have the right to tell a policeman to get a warrant for the most part). This is kind of about two things at once, they're related though.

Different events bubble this feeling to the surface but it's always there in the background. When I (and you) defected from Reddit cold turkey after they decided to cut off the API, I had this feeling. When I started having to use a VPN permanently, I got it again. And when I had to "move" my exit country because the UK started verifying identities online, I got it again. Can you guess how I felt this week, following Microsoft's bullshit about making it even harder to set up their OS without signing in? Or when I tried to use my trusty YouTube downloading scripts, only for them to seemingly require I feed them login cookies now? Or this whole Google Play dev verification thing? I don't even use Android!

I'm sure this is the case for most of you, but being anonymous online feels like more of a challenge and more of a necessity now. I don't want YouTube to log 900 music playlists under my account. I don't want to log into every Windows mini PC I set up for family. I know most of you obviously do not, and Lemmy being Lemmy there's this culture of saying well fuck the corporate internet altogether. Can't rip from YouTube? Fuck YouTube! Don't want to give M$ your blood type to set up a printer server NUC? Image Debian on it. etcetera etcetera. I know. I use Lemmy, I avoid Google search, I most definitely avoid most big tech products when I can. Don't need em.

But like... The corporate internet is still there. I quit Reddit, even though it was my online home for over a decade. But YouTube? That's a completely different beast. This just is where the videos are. I can host Pixelfed for my family and friends but I can't host video, much less expect everyone to. Most people aren't very computer savvy and YouTube is just where most people will post videos.

And since I use their service quite a bit, I did look into actually paying for their service. The folks you watch get a little kickback, and you no longer get ads on your TV and phone. I can stomach paying, even the uBlock Origin and piracy advocate that I am, just because I use it so much. But I use a VPN. And their FAQ explicitly has a page for this: you can't connect from outside of where you're paying, if you're paying. But it doesn't clarify whether it uses the country of your payment details, your IP, your location in Google Maps, or the country your account's settings are set to. In my case, those are four separate countries lmao

These are little complaints, but I don't think this is some "first-world" problem nothingburger. I suspect the UK identity verification scheme, or something similar, will start becoming more common around the world, regardless of how many data breaches happen. And not because some stuck up politicians are scared that a teenager could see a woman's penis online, oh no, I totally think the true purpose is to tag "unwanted" ideologies and prevent their spread. Wouldn't want anyone to type in ultra evil extremist words like "Palestinians have human rights" without consequences now would we. The fact that everyone is using their spin euphemism, "age verification", instead of what it is, "identity verification", gives them too much credit, even when being critical about it.

There is some irony in calling this a first world problem, because I live very decisively in the third world. Lebanon. Our internet speeds are shit, but for the most part, the internet here is pretty unrestricted. Combine this with most people's service coming via legal gray area local """ISPs"""" with haphazard IP ranges and messy CGNAT, and you have a plausibly anonymous and relatively uncensored connection. Beautiful, besides the 2Mb (yes, lowercase) speed.

But. But.

I was looking into setting up a meshtastic/LoRa/whatever network, that would link up my home with a few relatives who live nearby, as sort of an emergency backup. You probably only see bad news from where I live, I promise good things do happen here, but an emergency comms network in case something happens and services go down seems like common sense to me. Especially since these services go down when there isn't an emergency. But setting one of these up would definitely get me on a list here. I'd probably get an unpleasant "interrogation" for setting up a parallel communications network. Best case scenario I get asked to take it down and to keep my nose clean kiddo. Worst case, I'm accused of espionage and thrown in a cell because it's hard to explain what this stuff is to people who don't care about understanding it. I do not live in a place with consistent rule of law, or even the thin veil of it. Staying out of trouble is paramount.

Further, along the same topic. I remember seeing an article about some countries in the EU raising an eyebrow about GrapheneOS, where police are associating its use with drug dealers. Perhaps I would need such an OS in the future, as someone who is not a drug dealer but who hates what is going on with commercial tech. And so I started thinking about what using it would look like. The same concerns with my local police are there, but there is a worse one: I have been flying internationally into countries with much more strict security than Beirut's sticky, comfy little airport. I've been to Abu Dhabi in the past 24 months, what happens when I land in that airport with a "drug dealer phone"? I doubt Lemmy would even be allowed there if they knew what it was. I wonder what kind of shady deals Reddit had to crack to get approved, with how that place's culture and content was.

I wonder about this a lot. The VPN I use in Lebanon isn't blocked in the countries I visit for work, so I've felt relatively at ease so far. But I feel these tendrils of surveillance and data collection, of deanonymization. And it kind of terrifies me. I have to stand in the pleb physical stamping line in these techy airports, but I see people just walking through the electronic gates with nothing but an iris scan. It's weird. I can make a burner YouTube account to yoink cookies and download videos, but I shouldn't have to. I can log into a Microsoft account on a machine I'll be logging into their email from every day and connecting to their Minecraft auth servers from twice a year, but... this is not right at all. We all know what's downstream from tying your files to your identity.

I don't know. The rise of tech-induced willful ignorance and authoritarian regimes is scaring me. The fact that people's pensions are tied to AI companies that facilitate the terrorization and mass murder of innocents in the south of my country (and unquestionable genocide south of the border) fucking terrifies me. And it should, even if I wasn't a working-age Lebanese man. Even if I wasn't in those fucking databases.

I'm going to hold myself back from ranting about the fact that tech has come to almost exclusively mean predatory products and bullshit slop extruders to most people. About the cruel summary execution of our dream of cyberspace that we glimpsed on the early web. About how infuriatingly, nonchalantly shit almost every young person is at solving tech problems now. There is an immense, crushing powerlessness. I almost wish I didn't care about tech, about privacy, that I could give Glaxo-McUberzon my mother's maiden bone marrow and carry on with my day.

Almost.

I am 100% on the way to becoming a forest hermit with the way tech is going. And I'm a tech guy. I'm the tech guy to most people in my life. And boy howdy is a life of making coffee, chopping firewood, and screaming into the valley between commits to projects-that-go-nowhere looking real, real good right about now.

I should probably cross-post this to Tech Takes. But I don't think I'll be putting it on my personal blog. Doesn't feel right.