I just opened YouTube on my iPhone and realized there was no UI at all for seeing my subscriptions. I had to relaunch the app and notice right when it opens they show a subscriptions link at the top but it auto-hides. So what you need to do is tap on the screen and then tap on the subscriptions link. There’s no other reference to subscriptions anywhere. It’s almost completely hidden now.

I have “watch history” disabled, which turns YouTube from a wannabe TikTok into its former self. You get no algorithmic suggestions and you can’t watch shorts (unless linked to them directly or through subscriptions). So now the YouTube app essentially has no content unless you dig through hidden UI. This is crazy.

after the latest round of reporting from 404 media on Andy Chen's very un-leader-like and hostile attitude, I would like to start exploring my options for a way to have an email service that is not to beholden to other services.

my current mindset is:

1. I have to either be OK with the fact that a service I use starts out with good aspirations but that can all change in the blink of an eye depending entirely upon the current moods of the C-level executives of the company
   OR
2. I have to be OK with changing my email address every-time a service I use goes a bit nuts. In my view, this is unsustainable and will confuse the fuck out of anyone who likes to keep in contact with me.

so I view "better" the third option as:

3. get my own email FQDN [probably something like everyone_is_beautiful.net or something] and that way, I can solve 2 birds with 1 stone
   1. I can make my inbox even more organized, i.e. connect amazon account to amazon@everyone_is_beautiful.net and counseling services to counselling@everyone_is_beautiful.net AND
   2. even setup joint accounts that forward to any number of people and my personal email [which would be joe@everyone_is_beautiful.net for example] (thereby solving this issue too) and everything can be very organized.

However, it's not like I am going to host my own email hosting service, or at least I imagine that's not advisable probably and I will need to hook my FQDN to some other service that manages all that for me.

Which gets me back to square 1 of being stuck on some external services, but I imagine, it's better to be dependent at that level cause switching email hosting service is much easier to maintain cause the my email address itself wont change

But I don't pretend to know what's full involved and was wondering if

1. if there's faulty logic in my mindset AND
2. what are the common irritants/nuances of getting down my FQDN and connecting it to an email hosting service and ensure everything works as expected and any emails I send don't wind up going to people's spam
3. if I do wind up going the third route, I imagine it wont be possible to migrate all my emails with me when I have to do a migration cause a service is starting to go down the drain? Is there a way around that? I'd like to have access to all my emails in 1 places.

It appears obvious by now that freedom of the press and freedom of speech is under attack in the EU and the US both.

In the EU, critics of Israels genocide in Gaza are being met with sanctions, closing bank accounts and imposing extra-legal status of civil death, under the odd pretext of this criticism of Israel is weakening the EU's war efforts in Ukraine. Blatant repression of political expression.
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/weaponizing-civil-death-to-crush

In the US, well we got Orange Man and with Microsoft willing to close the accounts of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, account and data safety is beholden to state and corporate interests:
https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3

These developments have me considering a contingency plan for my email and webhosting needs. I was wondering what would be the least fragile, long-term choice of DNS and hosting outside EU and US. For a website with political content critical of the EU-US, Russia would be an obvious hedge against political repression. Any recommendations/experiences for providers in Russia? Other locations to consider?

Recent website closures appear to have been targeting DNS resolvers, to make website unavailable. How to protect against this?

The one semi-viable option I know of - that would still be beholden to EU sanctions, I think - is 1984.is based in Iceland. They have a history of fighting spurious take-down claims. https://litigation.1984.hosting

It might sound like I'm some sort of hosting wizard. I'm not. Please consider this if giving a technical response. Thanks for any input and thoughts.

I bought my thinkpad T480 back in like 2017-2018 (I think) and there have been ups and downs to my time with it. but one thing that has always bugged me is the pointing stick.

Apparently Debian and the Thinkpad T480 pointing stick really don't work well together.

if I have just booted up my computer, its OK enough and I dont feel any wrist strain.

But often, when I wake my computer up from sleep, it is SOOOO SLOW, I develop wrist pain trying to get the bloody mouse to move and just give up and use an external mouse.

I have done some investigation and set these as a result

echo 255 | sudo tee -a /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/subsystem/devices/serio2/speed
echo 255 | sudo tee -a /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/subsystem/devices/serio2/sensitivity

xinput set-prop 'TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint' 'libinput Accel Speed' 1

but it doesn't help 100%

I tried to see if gemini could help but it went down some path that involved modifying some matrix and didnt quite seem to understand the issue.

I will openly admit to being a novice to these hardware-level issues, although I am always happy to learn but feel completely out of my depth and need a pointer or 2.

my system info

 $ echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP
X-Cinnamon
 $ echo $DESKTOP_SESSION
cinnamon
 $ cat /etc/*release
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="13"
VERSION="13 (trixie)"
VERSION_CODENAME=trixie
DEBIAN_VERSION_FULL=13.7
ID=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.debian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://www.debian.org/support"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/"

Recently learned from this Kurzgesagt video that rogue AI agents can act independently, covertly, and effectively in a harmful way-- and it's already done this repeatedly as of the past few months, and it's capable of self-improving quickly. I also watched this Emergent Garden video which included a demonstration of how rogue AI agents can escape sandboxes, hack systems, and do self-preservation and replication.

(Edit: Kurzgesagt's video was more "doomsday" and Emergent Garden's was more balanced. The latter demonstrated that it's not too difficult to push publicly available AI agents to misbehave, and not too difficult to create a simple self-replicating self-iterating AI worm, and concluded that although current guardrails are reasonably effective, major cybersecurity incidents are likely to occur within the next couple years due to rogue AI swarms.
I'm not concerned that AI is becoming "sentient" or that we're getting AGI soon. AI doesn't need to be smart to do a lot of damage.)

I don't trust that the big corporations that own and control a lot of this AI tech care about data privacy and public welfare, but even if they did, they don't seem capable of actually controlling their own AI agents and preventing these rogue incidents.

So much of modern society's infrastructure is dependent on the internet and digital tech in general. It all seems so vulnerable. "AI psychosis" seems to be rampant in a lot of CEO's / high-level decisionmakers, leading to a lot of access and data being given to AI agents. For example, Proton's CEO seems to be pushing for reckless AI use in what's supposed to be a privacy-first, security-first platform.

I'm averse to any sort of "doomsday" predictions/fearmongering, but I do feel concerned about this and I'm not sure if I'm overreacting. The idea that AI poses a viable existential threat to humanity feels like such an extreme belief, though I'm not sure how to refute it other than "other doomsday-type ideas have been proven to be overhyped" and "AI companies are exaggerating it to create hype that makes their AI tech look very powerful". How alarmed should I actually be about this, if at all? Is it realistic to think that a "cyber pandemic/lockdown" might happen in the near future (some scenario wherein global internet becomes generally unsafe/inaccessible and we'll be restricted to small local networks)?

How are you updating your personal cybersecurity in 2026?

I'm considering leaving Protonpass but also not sure if the alternatives (1Password, Bitwarden) are better. I'm hoping to find a password manager that's secure, not AI vibe coded, reasonably priced, and run by reasonably morally ok people. Is that possible? I'm also genuinely considering just going back to having some sort of personal cipher / password hint system + writing it down on paper so it's completely offline.

How concerned should I be about digital banking? I'm considering at least having printed out records of bank balances, in case of a scenario wherein digital banks' records are affected.

How are you balancing cybersecurity measures with practicality / ease-of-use?

I'm not an advanced techie myself, and I'd also like to get non-techie family members onboard with better cybersecurity measures, so for example if I encourage them to use a password manager it would need to have friendly UI too.

I don't think I'll be able to 100% remove my dependency on big tech companies like Google, Meta, and Apple.

The amount of time and energy I devote to improving my personal cybersecurity will be limited, since it's of course competing with everything else in my life requiring attention and care.

So I'm just trying to collect info and tips, and see what I can implement from there.