I do avoid those streets where I know there are too many of those. Which is kinda great since it helps me walk for a longer time.
A 50-something French dude that’s old enough to think blogs are still cool, if not cooler than ever. I also like to write and to sketch.
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025
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I would not stay nearby.
Imho this ‘trend’ will end:
- the day enough of the wearers start getting punched in the face. Not that I encourage anyone to do that, I don’t, but seeing how… angry and and willing to fight so many people already are, I can’t imagine it won’t happen more and more as those stupid glasses become more common.
- If enough people start shaming them/their behavior, and it becomes a hurdle to wear those in public.
Otherwise, it will probably become as ‘normal’ as messaging people sitting right next to you instead of, you know, talking to them.
3·27 days agoI have not really considered that aspect, something I should probbaly do. Thx.
I will look into tailscale, thx :)
The other thing is that if it doesn’t need outside access you don’t need to do it which is an extra security step you can take
True that.
Maybe we should watch more a certain movie as it feels like we have largely forgotten that wise advice.
Sadly there is Windows-only software I need occasionally for work but I’m going to go full-linux on all but one of my devices.
That’s what we do at home. My spouse has work computer running Windows that she is expected to use, but our personal machines are running Linux. Only regret? Not having made the switch a few years earlier.
I’ve yet to start self-hosting: nearing my 60s, I confess this is a task I find intimidating (it needs to be done right to be secure and I’m afraid I will not be able to do it right and won’t even know it until it is too late). That being said, living in France, I already moved all the services we use from GAFAM and/or US-owned ones to independent EU-based services, if at all possible ones offering full privacy/encryption.
The real exploit is figuring out how to be human in a world that wants us to be data points.
100%, and this is the hardest fight all of us will ever have to fight because there is a lot of incredibly powerful interests that want us to become, and to remain, mere ‘data points’, not people. They want us to stop thinking we’re equal to them. They want us to be ok with not being… considered and treated as human beings.
When we stop being human like those powerful people, it’s the moment they feel its perfectly OK to have a cop fire shots at a women sitting in her car, you know. Because we’re not people, we’re mere… headless chickens, or data points.
Not that such an attitude would ever be tolerated in our perfect democracies.
+1 for the 2370DN. Works wonder (with Linux, Mac and Windows) and replaced a 12 years old model from… Brother that also worked well.
Sorry, I just noticed your reply. I think you were replying to my other comment, right?
I’m 24, unemployed, job searching in tech. Most employers require LinkedIn, GitHub, email. My actual community - the people I game with, the friends who get me - are scattered across the continent
I’m aware of how intricate everything is, even more so for people your age. And it seems obvious it will be even worse for the next generation.
Your cross-referencing and source verification advice is solid, but it requires people to first recognize they’re in an algorithmic environment
Not really, what it requires is to accept that not a single source not even the ones we agree with should be treated differently. All sources must be double-checked. This requires a little effort most of us are just not willing to do. Much simpler and quicker to Boost or to Like that message we just read.
I hear you on offline community being the real answer. But for those of us who can’t or won’t fully disconnect, reducing the attack surface and building privacy-respecting alternatives feels like the next best thing.
Sorry, it seems I have not made my point clear enough.
The solution is certainly not to move back to offline or to stone-age like tools. But the solution is also not in thinking that some new or different type of tech will be the solution. To me, that is falling from one trap to the next. In French, we would say “tomber de Charybde en Scylla”.
Blind faith in tech put us in that dire situation. Tech won’t get us out of it.
The solution needs to include both online/high-tech and offline, low-tech and even no-tech. It needs to encourage us to rekindle our interest for IRL communities and activities, to care about our surrounding and the people around us. Even if they do not share the same interest and ideas as us.
That solution needs to focus on us, not on the tech itself.
Like educating children never was about having them do homework or get good grades (that’s a by-product) or it should not have mattered ever _provided teachers were still taught how to properly educate kids. Obsessing over the homework (and the grade) like obsessing with tech being the solution is most probably a mistake. Education is about transmitting a certain knowledge and a certain know-how to the kids (the ability to rely on themselves, for example).
I remember, years ago, reading an interview of the late Steve jobs in which he explained he and his spouse refused to allow their kids unlimited use an iPhone/iPad at home and they would not even use one themselves, and that it was forbidden to being a phone/tablet at the dining table, no TV either. They wanted them to have activities and conversations, with other kids, with the family and they wanted them to have time by themselves. Steve Jobs probably knew a thing or two about those high-tech device, right?
(For the very, very young among us, it may be worth mentioning Steve Jobs was the co-founder of Apple and the one who introduced the Mac computer (1984), the iPod (~2000}, the iPhone (2007) and the iPad (2010) among a few other similar piece of tech that no ones cares about)Alberta doesn’t exactly have the densest scene for the communities I’m part of.
I can’t argue on that but I can make a remark: how many people do live in Alberta and how many do you think would there need to be for you to able to meet one you may find interesting to date? And then, why do you think your potential next partner needs to share the same interests as you?
(my spouse is writing computer code, she is kinda good at it while before I met her I had never considered even writing a simple script to automate the boring repetitive tasks I liked to complain about. We’re as different as night and day, and not just on that point, but we also managed to find each other and it has been going fine for 25+ years and counting, being different together is great ;)
All I will say about dating today (at least what I can witness of it as, if I don’t really obsess about dating young women myself, I’m still able to see what’s going on) is that contemporary dating looks like a full time job, with business-like expectations. Heck, it’s even treated like a marketplace with offer and demand! And I think you, I don’t mean you I mean all of you young people, you should all stop running around like headless chicken (you would realize you’re running like them, if you stopped long enough to look around) and ask yourself two simple questions:
- Why has dating turned into a full time job? With all those silly expectations, the ranking and the body count non-sense, and all the absurd requirements (money, status, body height or weight, size of the boobs, ass or d!ck, with even expectation on ideas and preferences… ). With apparently a lot more anxiety than fun (once gain if I can judge on what I observe).
- Does it really benefit you in any shape or form?
Also how do we even explain this to normal people who are not extremely online? How can we help neighbors or the elderly recognize when they are being nudged by an algorithm or seeing a digital caricature?
As an almost ‘elder’ myself (soon to reach 60) I can tell you age is not the issue. A lot of you, younger people, seem as blind to the threat(s) as we older people seem to be, maybe worse since you’re living 24/24 through those tech… and are still willing to use them, even insisting on not using anything but those big tech, and certainly not considering using no tech at all. See how easy it is to conlucde things out of meaningless examples?
So, imvho, a good beginning step before trying to explain anything to anyone would be to not focus on any demographic as a ‘weaker’ one and instead try to consider why so many different types of persons fall to the same trap. Don’t you think?
If it’s not age (or genre or race), what could explain so many of us fall for big tech? Hint: it probably has a lot to do with human psychology, more than age.
Has anyone here successfully implemented local first solutions that reduced their reliance on big tech ai?
I don’t rely on AI, at all. Big tech or no. As far as I’m concerned, problem solved.
Edit: I should made it clear I’m half joking here: I really don’t rely on AI, but I’m also aware my personal choice doesn’t solve anything.I am looking for ways to foster cognitive immunity
I don’t know about immunity, but the way to avoid falling for most scam and lies… used to be common knowledge: cross-referencing one’s sources (of news, or whatever else), and never trust any single source.
It works against scam (don’t blindly follow a link that tells you there is an issue with this or that, double-check whatever unexpected event they want you to react upon, using a different source). It works as well against most manipulations, lies and almost anything else.
How to use that against the social media’s tsunami of fake news and emotional turds that users are faced with?
Well, my solution was to quit using those shit services. For anyone less radical than I, when faced with what apparently looks like many different ‘sources’ (those people we follow) retweeting the same emotional turd or the same lie, one solution is to learn to consider all those people we follow (including friends) as merely avatars of the same (and unique) algorithm that feeds them the same shit in order to make them react in a certain predictable way. The issue? It takes some efforts, sometimes a lot. And it is not ‘friendly’. Too bad, I don’t feel any desire to become friendly with an algorithm, even when that usurps the appearance of a friend.
If we want to protect ourselves and our local communities from being manipulated by these black box models how do we actually do it?
We teach people that communities used to exist offline and have been existing for many thousand of years without relying on any app, any AI, any algorithm, without any Like, Subscribe or Upvote, without any tech… beside the shared ability and desire to talk with one another. Without anything but the willingness to meet and to work together.
I know it sounds silly and quite impractical considering people can instantly chat across the entire planet but, and even more so in that post-democratic and post-freedom societies we Westerners now live in, offline communities should once again become a realistic option, if not our main focus. Big corps/govs can’t as easily track us in the privacy of our homes as long as we… don’t use tech to communicate between one another…
Encouraging people (of all ages) to even consider not using their stupid phone and some stupid app to share some stupid content (I may be slightly trolling here), is the real issue, here. People are lazy as fuck. We are. They want immediate gratification (validation). We all want. And it will take a lot of work and (re)education to change that.
edit: typos.
Why do you think 1password might become US-based?
I was half-trolling, but only half, based on what the all mighty Donald said regarding Canada (and Greenland) having to become part of the US…
2·1 month agoYou do you, that’s fine with me. Waterfox is still an option for other people to consider when they’re looking for an alternative. Like I would consider any new option that presents itself to me: I’m not married to my browser, at least in my eyes it is merely a tool :)
Waterfox?
Bitwarden (paid tier) will give you:
- personal ‘vaults’ (each user their own)
- shared vaults between members of the same group (instant sync between allowed users)
- Web version, Windows, Mac & Linux and mobile iOS/Android.
1Password will give you the same in a nicer package, but is also more expensive (edit: also it is not-US based… at least for now)
You can also use an app like KeepassXC and store your password database in shared end to end encrypted cloud service (say, Filen.io) and give access to whomever you need to share it with but it’s lore hassle, imho not what someone at their working place should bother with.
5·2 months agoWell, I’m the admin there, you should easily be able to get in touch ;)
Have you considered posting it to the !journaling@sh.itjust.works?
Disclaimer: very satisfied user of Waterfox talking ;)
But I believe Mozilla is making a fundamental mistake.
I believe that too, but I’m no millionaire CEO either.
Some will argue that AI browsers are inevitable, that we’re fighting against the tide of history. Perhaps. AI browsers may eat the world. But the web, despite having core centralised properties, is fundamentally decentralised. There will always be alternatives. If AI browsers dominate and then falter, if users discover they want something simpler and more trustworthy, Waterfox will still be here, marching patiently along. We’ve been here before. When Firefox abandoned XUL extensions, Waterfox Classic preserved them. When Mozilla started adding telemetry and Pocket and sponsored content, Waterfox stripped it out. I like to think that where there is want for a browser that simply respects you, Waterfox has delivered.
Long live Waterfox.
This may sound silly to say, and it probably is, but to me it’s almost impossible to imagine I could one day stop being a Firefox user. I mean, my first Web browser was Mosaic, I followed it when it turned into Netscape, which I then followed as it became Netscape, before morphing into the giant Mozilla T-Rex, and finally becoming Firefox.
Take back the Web, I believe(d) in that. Heck, I still have one of their T-Rex t-shirt dedicated by a few of its devs.
I also have a chromium-based browser (Vivaldi) but Firefox has always been home to me (edit: so seeing it moving away from what I care for is not a great feeling). I’m so glad forks like Waterfox exist because if it was not for them, for the first time ever I would not know what browser I can trust.
Thx :) The community focus on journaling, but there are so many more things to talk about. I’m quite happy to see a new community dedicated to pen and paper, even more that I’m still unable to spend time on that poor journaling community and probably won’t be until at least February or even March.
I don’t use Windows or Adobe and things like that (I use Linux and before that I was running a Mac), but for VSCode you may consider using VSCodium instead which is the exact same app (the same source code, running the same extensions) just without MS telemetry.
maybe those newbies would not have a single ‘linux’ to look at at if that was not for that fragmentation that seem to be so much of an issue…
The people working for free to make Linux what it is are doing it on the simple idea they have been promised: their freedom (and right) to make Linux what they want Linux to be. Not to make it what some group of users or some manager want them to make it.
It’s many flavours, like you called it, is in the Linux DNA like freedom is ;)
Edit: rephrasing (it’s early around here, not slept much ;)