This had been my philosophy towards tech companies for a while now. I strongly recommend it!
Don’t sign in with Google or Apple or Facebook. They get data out of it and lock you into their platform.
This is why I have never used some services such as PushBullet. I mean, this service would be absolutely useful to me, but without a direct user login it’s persona non grata.
Like many of my fellow lemmings, I already do most of what he suggests. But I also realise I only do it out of principle. I’m not hurting these companies. I’m not costing them anything. A visitor who rejects cookies may not help their bottom line, but that handful of extra page requests isn’t going to cost them a single red cent extra. A GDPR access request may make a smaller company scramble, but the larger ones have systems in place to handle it, and very probably completely automatically.
Sure, stop giving companies your data if you’re so inclined. Just realise it is more of an inconvenience for you than it is for them - even if it’s not really inconvenient for you, it’s even less so for them. Unless a significant portion of users starts doing it, it’s mostly symbolic.
I agree. The solution isn’t to wish that everyone would suddenly change their behavior out of nowhere, the only real hope we have is government regulations.
Ok but what if everyone does it.
Yes but are they? What would it take?
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He mentions libraries and thats awesome, but my library just got rid of their CDs (I’m buying them all this weekend). Their DVDs are next. Really sucks man why can’t we have nice things.
Soon libraries will be gone and replaced with a kindle kiosk 😆
Our library has all sorts of other stuff you can check out like telescopes or tools or cooking stuff. They also offer a variety of services. They’re adapting.
All?
Its a small library. And no , probably not the books on CD, just music. Its 5 dollars to full an entire bag.
Generally a good approach, but…
Do you have to use or choose to use AI products? Why not use every single one of those tokens available to your subsidized subscription? Did your search engine build in a “free” AI product? Ask it as many useless questions as you’d like. Getting emails from AI agents? Why not chat with them and lead them on until they hit a billing wall?
Good thing the planet’s not dying.
Yeah, I’m not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, it’s obviously wasteful. On the other, if dickheads get their money wasted enough, maybe they’ll knock it off. Probably not enough happening to make them stop, though, so probably just a waste.
With the way society is going, that may not be a bad thing.
The planet won’t die. Humanity might, the planet will live on and heal.
that may not be a bad thing.
If humanity dies off despite our exceptional adaptability and the help of technology, you can bet your ass millions of other species will die long before us.
Idk about you, but I’d consider a future that kills all puppies to be “a bad thing”.
the planet will live on and heal.
Unfortunately, this line of thinking ignores the elephant in the room: inertia.
There have been prior climate change events that have gotten up into the +8-12℃ range (which, BTW, means palm trees at the poles and the extinction of any land species over 45Kg/100lbs), but the difference there is that they have taken many hundreds of thousands of years to get there, allowing whole ecosystems to migrate across entire continents while continuing to sequester carbon.
Our changes to date have - when compared to the very-next-fastest event in history - compressed over 150,000 years of climate changes into less than 75.
This means that not only is there a massive amount of inertia involved with our changes - several orders of magnitude greater, which will force CC to continue on well after humanity completely ceases adding to the problem - but ecosystems are just going to die in place. They simply aren’t being given the time to migrate or adapt, leading to significantly unoptimal/degraded CO2 sequestering, compounding the problem.
Or, in other words, this inertia is destroying the brakes that could slow and eventually reverse CC.
Finally, as the sun ages over the millennia, it throws off more and more heat. The global average needed to cause a runaway Venus Scenario has slowly been creeping down over the last few billion years, and may have already crossed the +12℃ level.
Which means that, even if humanity just ceases to exist today, there may be enough inertia to kick off sufficient feedback loops (methyl hydrate eruptions, permafrost eruptions, etc.) to push the planet into that Venus Scenario, extinguishing all life on Earth.
Sweet dreams.
Source: BSc in Physics & Math, former classmates in the CC & biology fields. I read the pre-print evidence they are collecting and can see where it points.
Verify your age…
No
Upload a profile picture…
No
Update your home address…
No
Here’s a cool product…
blocks user, blocks group
Here’s a new feature
disable
Unknown foreign number
Don’t pick up
Unknown local number
Listen, then end the call without speaking
Unknown contact on whatsapp
Block and report as spam
Ads on websites
Block with uBlock originDropbox recently enshittified REAL bad (little fucking diamonds everywhere. The second I see those I nope out because I know its vibe coded shit). It was so fucking laggy. Froze my whole computer. I instantly disabled all their shit, returned it to classic, sent them a review saying their update sucks and no one wants their ai and now I will be cancelling my subscription becuase of it.
Theyre also an evil company anyway so nbd. Dont use them.
While I use those and they are great, we use dorpbox for video and have the 30tb plan which is needed. My friend has no local setup cuz he’s afraid of losing it all as its his job. He does video editing on a Mac and likes Dropbox features (regardless that they are stealing all his video and using it to train bots to take his job in the future, but he doesnt care )
If his data only exists in one place, it’s at high risk of being lost anyway. The cloud is not a backup. Plenty of stories of people losing data in the cloud because of bugs/mistakes, companies closing down, hardware failure, etc.
Seconding the recommendation for LocalSend!
I like localsend more than kde connect. I like to play around with different Roms on old android phones and would install kde connect every time I wanted to send screenshots and it would enable by default all permissions which I didn’t want except for file sharing
Oh and localsend is written in flutter which is going to (hopefully) become better because canonical is gonna help improve the Linux side of things
For T-Mobile, you can remove voicemail all together. You have to call in. So it stimulates that the phone number is bad and gets removed from calling lists.
I got a new phone a year ago and didn’t bother setting up the voicemail. It’s outdated, just text me.
Even with that, the bots know it’s a real number. If you call T-Mobile and tell them to delete voicemail all together, the phone rings and rings and then it does a Click and hangs up.
Alternatively, answer all unknown numbers, immediately hit mute and let them hang.
Spam text? Request their username and password to continue.
become worthless
Finally something I can be good at!
You might have excelled at it already
Damn overachievers ruining þe curve
Do you have to use a big social platform? Click on all of the ads you see or click on some of them, but don’t buy anything.
Check out AdNauseam, it’s based on uBlock Origin
Using that app kinda makes browsing suck. I’d never gotten captchas from google themselves until I used it, then I got them frequently.
It does good work though.
Oh, I thought my VPN was the reason I got all of those.
TBF, google throws up captchas & ‘suspicious activity detected’ at the drop of a hat these days. One of our clients is a SMB that runs off Google SaaS, and recently implemented a 3rd party, device based SSO that is supposed to sync with Google auth. We’ve has nothing but issues, VPN or no, adblockers or no, and stupid captcha pages all the time. Youtube as a google product sucks now bc embedded videos randomly flag across all browsers and make you sign in to watch an embedded video on someone else’s webpage. I understand (though disagree) with google flagging something like known mullvad vpn IPs or something but a corporate vpn? A company approved ad blocking extension allow-listed in GOOGLE ADMIN? GTFO. Just a mess.
I am doing most of the things he mentioned but I’ve gone further. No social media at all. No Google. No YouTube. I buy physical media and self host all my drm free ebooks and other media I actually own. I only use fediverse sites. Librewolf on Linux behind a VPN and strong firewalls. I have no cameras or microphones on my property. No credit cards and no debt at all through being careful with my resource management.
That doesn’t mean I’m not an asshole though.
im going there but with a lot of debt i dont really care for credit card debt tbh jokes on them for trusting my undiagnosed ass with money
Are you me? Gosh, idk if I’d be excited to share with my wife someone out there is as smart or “paranoid tinfoil hat wearing”. She’d argue the latter.
Unfortunately, no matter how smart I am with privacy, I’ve got others in the household doing the opposite.
No YouTube? Damn, respect.
Use pinchflat and you only need YouTube to find new content.
This is the way. Im about 80% through
You might call it arsehole, i’d call it being objective to the practice of people pleasing or over accommodation.
This is why They want to kill physical media. Itll make it a lot harder to do this. Of course we can with files, but They can easily block ports and ban vpns so we can’t share media either or ban you from an ISP then you have no internet .
You have 0 phones on the entirety of your property? Really?
Lemmy is social media. Do you mean commercialized social media?
Is there ONE person in Lemmy that’s not an asshole? I’ve been searching for non-assholes here, no luck so far.
Plus, that great feeling when we tell someone “lol, that would never happen to me, normie!”, makes the satisfaction of it worth every ounce of being an asshole.
No doubt!
I’ve been buying more physical media lately because I don’t like the idea of paying for digital copies that someone can decide to pull from my library with no recourse.
Also, have found that a way to partly combat being productized online is to build a life, hobby, or community offline. Time not spent on the algorithms is usually better for my mental well-being anyway. YMMV
I still buy digital media, but only if it’s in a format that I can download and keep locally, such as when I buy albums these days, I make sure to buy the MP3 versions so that I can download them to my machine and keep them.
Anything that’s accessed through some sort of app and won’t allow me to download it is an immediate no.
Shout out to Qobuz, I started my digital collection there. They sell DRM-free downloads in FLAC format (when available, otherwise MP3)
.flac is the way
I’ve also been trying to find more physical media lately. I’ve also recently gotten into “retro tech” for computers and other things. I’ve seen a huge uptick in that lately. It’s fun to go back to PCs I used to use in the 90s and early 00s and get them working again. and in most cases, all the parts and stuff still work just fine. I’ve started going to shows and small conventions for retro computer stuff and seeing what other people are working on and restoring is awesome. Seeing people getting old 30+ year old computers working with modern-ish Linux is really cool.
I just finished a project rebuilding a PC with parts from around '97 and '98 that is currently running Windows 98. thing booted on the first go after everything was put together. zero issues. Also because of this stuff I’ve learned to fix motherboards and finally, after decades of promising myself to learn how, I’ve learned how to solder. that stuff is fun. repairing motherboards and other various boards, switching out chips and capacitors, its REALLY fun.
I’m not arguing for boycotts
🚮
You also get less spam and calls that way.
It’s kind of amazing. I do most of this stuff in my day-to-day life without even thinking about it.
Free proton mail for Jane smith. Or Mick Zuck. I thought that was a thing already, the junk repository email.
Someone tell me what I am explaining to g to my doctor?
