I'm sure the search engines log the IP, and with enough searches could be correlated back to you fairly easily even if you host it on a VPS? Unless it does some kind of mitigation I'm unaware of.

Qwant is French. Not a privacy search engine and looks like it features AI now. Kagi is really good, but US based and expensive. I think most of Europe does intelligence sharing with the US ("14 eyes" or something like that)?

I find it enjoyable if I know the people well (close friends, coworkers I like and interact with a lot, family). I have social anxiety problems, and am probably a bit on the spectrum, so I do find socially interacting with people I'm not close to stressful and exhausting. I don't really try to "mask" anymore, except for things like job interviews. I'm just a quiet person that doesn't talk very much. I wish I enjoyed social interaction more and was more social, as I do generally like people; just don't like being around them.

Would Mastodon and forums not be considered social media?

Fast food work is pretty stressful, IMO.

If I understand what Wix did correctly (created some kind of interface for people to create web sites without knowing how to code), this makes more sense than some of the other layoffs. A lot of non-coders are using AI to create small, shitty, insecure web sites now.

I'm guessing the cheap, good quality, printers are cheap because they want to capture market share and enshitify (all the proprietary stuff they use is a hint).

I was looking for something to replace my old Creality CR10S a few months ago, Bambu and Qidi were tempting because of the price, but I didn't like how proprietary everything was. The Prusa Core One looked nice, but looks like they're going a little less "free" now with their Open Community License and locked boot loaders. I would have got a Troodon (Voron-derived pre-built printer), but they were out of stock. I settled on just getting a Formbot Voron kit. Took a very long time to build, but I'm very happy with it. I know the printer inside and out, so it's easy to debug, modify, or repair if I need to.

In my opinion, if you're already somewhat familiar with 3d printing, I'd build a Voron from a kit. If not, I'd get a Voron-derived pre-built like a Troodon or Sovol SV8 (I think the Sovol has a proprietary toolhead though). If you want an easy Apple-like experience, but still pretty "open," I'd get a Prusa.

If you think you're going to want to print higher-temp, warp-prone filaments like ABS/ASA/PA, I would not choose a bed-slinger (e.g. Mk4s), because they are harder to enclose nicely and take up a lot of space if enclosed. As one data-point, my core-xy Voron produces much higher quality prints (e.g. less artifacts) and is faster than my bedslinger CR10S.

Relevant novelette: Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future

AI companies offer HIPPA compliant services. They have zero data retention policies (supposedly).

It's possible to do some server side AI stuff with decent privacy guarantees. Apple utilizes homomorphic encryption to do stuff like landmark ID in photos, which is neat.

I've heard the excuse that they're private property so they can't. They're not hard to remove though. They're usually just attached to poles with pipe clamps.

On the other hand, I've seen a lot of stories of people getting addicted to the "agentic harnesses" and personally (and happily) blowing through hundreds to thousands of dollars/month. I've seen people write articles about how their $200/month subscriptions are such a good deal, lol. Companies are forcing their employees to use AI at insane costs. Nearly every software engineering job posting mentions using AI tools as a requirement. Anthropic's revenue is set to double this quarter and be its first profitable quarter (likely using a lot of accounting tricks).

I'm really curious if this AI industry can self-perpetuate itself with stupidity and greed indefinitely as everything becomes shittier and unreliable, and civilization slowly crumbles.

The trend I see are the Mac Minis with a lot of unified memory. These are typically very well off people though. Prices for even old GPUs like 3090s are ridiculous now. I don't think connecting 2 machines over Ethernet would work well, but putting 2 GPUs in a single machine does.