Nice!

I early voted yesterday. Was glad to see a line of about 30 people when I arrived, took about 20 minutes, and the line had grown to 50ish when I left. Normally the polling station is a ghost town in a non-presidential election.

Also same on the machine results. I checked the confirm screen and the ballot printout and both were accurate.

Sounds like something they picked up on TikTok.

Absolutely.

My dad’s roofing business was never the same after 2008, and it had endured since the early 60’s. 2008 and the reaction to it by Obama and Bush is largely what turned me into a hopeless cynic. I plan for the worst in everything now.

Fair enough. 🤟😎

Smart. Good on you for being mindful and taking appropriate precautions.

I have a Windows/Linux dual-boot and keep anything requiring privacy on the Linux side. For Windows, I use O&O ShutUp, which is an application that allows a user to easily shut off all of Windows’ intrusive settings and delete Copilot.

As for LLM’s, they’re my last resort for anything, and I only really use them if I can’t find the information I need on Mojeek or Marginalia-Search, not just for privacy’s sake but because I have an ideological problem with their vast energy use and the economic and environmental impact those applications have.

But none of it’s foolproof, so I always just keep in the back of my mind before doing or saying anything online: Would I want this to go public?

That’s okay.

You’re welcome to your opinion. Have a great day. :)

My profile literally says I hate both Democrats and Republicans. If you had an 80 year-old parent forced to drive for DoorDash to avoid homelessness, I imagine you’d be less than impressed with our ruling parties too.

So yep. Anti-Harris.

Famously trying to hide it, obviously. :D

Well, maybe read it a second time, and the entire thing this go-around, and see if it jars anything loose. Have a great day.

I too read nuanced statements and dismiss them with thought-terminating cliches.

I downvoted you and I’m not a bot. (And also a Trump hater.)

The fact is every fucking CEO sucks, no matter the product, so that isn’t going to be something I consider when choosing one. The pertinent questions regarding any product are price, quality, and the impact of consuming it.

Proton’s a better choice for most because the Swiss regulate privacy heavily, unlike the US.

Cramping AI into everything, including your “privacy” product, is enshittification.

That isn’t necessarily true. AI in and of itself isn’t shit. It’s the training data and the ethics of how that data was acquired that determines whether or not it is shit, and there are a ton of creators who’ve made local models trained only on their own data in order to make their work more efficient.

Most AI users aren’t ethical in that way, but I’d trust Proton before I’d trust a frontier AI developer, if for no other reason than the laws they’re forced to operate under favor privacy. The Swiss are great like that.

Like is nothing private anymore?

Proton has their own AI that they’re developing, which yes, is private. Presumably this is a big part of what they’re doing with their staff, and it makes sense, as they’re going to need people who know what they’re doing and not vibe coders if they don’t want people to hate what they’re making.

Their model has to be private thanks to the laws of the country where they’re incorporated, but think of it like an AI version of Signal, where logs of your prompts and your data aren’t retained. The Swiss don’t fuck around with privacy, and I personally like that Proton doesn’t get to decide this. Every single AI model you’ve probably heard of doesn’t do this, either harvesting any data you put into it or destroying rare books and scraping the web illegally to train its models.

The downer here is that Proton’s AI can’t do some of the things frontier AI can do, but for most users that’s not going to matter.

None of that info makes for fun Reddit rage-baiting, so I’m guessing no one mentioned it. Also, it should be noted that you should never, ever load a file or a prompt into an AI that you wouldn’t want to become public, as servers can get compromised and data leaked.

Oh man, yes. Please let me see another fascist get perp-walked.

Accessible Link

Many work full time and earn enough to cover the cost of basic groceries (even if it means trips to three stores). But their salaries are losing ground to inflation, and their health care costs are skyrocketing. They’re cutting back on salon visits, social activities and fresh fruit runs — and they feel priced out of adulthood.

But so much about the lives of Americans has changed during the last three decades. In 1990, a wedding at 26, a baby shower (or two) by 28 or a first home around 30 was ordinary.

Also, yes, being a young adult now is nothing like the world we came up in. It’s why I don’t give young people advice. None of the advice GenX, Millenials, or Boomers could give doesn’t apply to the world these young people are trying to survive in.

Yup.

Reminds me of the low wage-to-private prison pipeline. Billionaires profit at both ends.

Apple probably didn’t plan for their planned obsolescence to work THIS quickly.

frankly insulting

It’s always ‘just vote harder’ with these partisan assholes, who just kind of ignore the last 40 years of history since the Reagan Administration, and the geographical and political differences between the US and other countries.

Donald is 100% trying to fuck with the Alaska election results. Same with the Omar race in Minnesota.

The only thing you or I can do about this is to vote. If your precinct allows early voting, take the time and do it. (I’m voting today, in fact.)

Do not trust your ballot to mail-in voting this time around if you do not have to, as mail-in voting is fraught with perfectly legal ways to manipulate it, such as shutting down USPS machinery “for maintenance” as was done in 2020.

Be there and put your ballot in the box yourself. That is the only way to know your voice is being heard this time around.

Cool. Now target the student loan borrower databases.