I feel like writing another rant, why not.

I guess it visibly started about the time Windows 10 released and probably earlier with smartphones but it is really going into overdrive lately. Especially with all the AI(it is like exponential being used to mean a lot, really. Words have meanings, being minimally precise is not waste of time) being shoved into everything.

Statistical based autocomplete being added everywhere whether it makes sense or not or whether the user wants it or not. They will get it anyway. It makes sense somewhere, in some situations when the user deliberately invokes that.

Settings that really should be standard user accessible are just not and in very lucky cases there are not too painful workarounds. Just several examples. Search bar in address bar(I could write a rant on this alone, is having to decide before using one or the other really that inconvenient?). Forced internet search in Windows start menu search. Automagically starting downloads without any user involvement. Also defaults such as hiding extensions automatically on Windows explorer.

Constant ui reshuffles, generally for the worse(at least from the point of valuing utility and good sized monitor). Less information, straight up insulting language. Uh, oops something broke. This is prevalent even in Linux on some distros. What the hell, why? What broke? Would it be that much effort to link high level overview and logs locations? Or at least start treating the user like an adult again?

Search engines straight up ignoring the actual query entered. I can get any amount of low quality and irrelevant results(not even one or the other, they have to have it both ways) I want but a relevant result on the first page is a miracle regardless if it is actually useful or not. My guess is they simply throw the text into the nearest mainstream bucket with zero regard for nuance and specificity.

Algorithmic content recommendations. That is to say black box content reshuffling made by entity concerned with ads and engagement. Hiding crowd sourced signs of content helpfulness(dislikes).

Forced internet connection, forced online accounts, forced permanent or regular internet connectivity. Forced updates, forced telemetry.

Inability or strong discouragement to take control of the user owned devices. Smartphones, consoles, smart things generally.

Zero chance of being able to read and understand all of the TOS that are thrown everywhere but a strong pressure to accept them anyway. Sometimes after the end user paid already.

It is not hard to see the benefits for one side but I don't understand end users who embrace this. Do they really think it benefits them? It does not take all that much effort to be a generation or two behind the latest user hostile trends even if opting out completely is next to impossible.

Sometimes I feel like there's something wrong with how I use technology, or I'm just incredibly biased and predisposed to cynicism or something, so I wanted to get a pulse on how everyone else feels about AI, specifically LLMs, and how you use them in your professional and personal lives.

I've been messing with LLMs since GPT-3, being initially very impressed by the technology, to that view sort of evolving to a more nuanced one. I think they're very good at a specific thing and not great at anything else.

I feel like, increasingly, I'm becoming a rarity among tech people, especially executives. I run cybersecurity for a medium sized agency, and my boss is the CIO. Any time I, or any of her direct reports write a proposal, a policy, a report, or basically anything meant to distribute to a wide audience, they insist on us "running it through copilot", which to them, just means pasting the whole document into copilot chat, then taking the output.

It inevitably takes a document I worked hard on to balance tone, information, brevity, professional voice, and technical details and turns it into a bland, wordy mess. It's unusable crap that I then have to spend more time with to have it sound normal. My boss almost always comes up with "suggestions" or "ideas" that are very obviously just copy pasted answers from copilot chat too.

I see people online that talk about how LLMs have made them so much faster at development, but every time I've ever used it that field, it can toss together a quick prototype for something I likely could have googled, but there will frequently be little hidden bugs in the code. If I try to use the LLM to fix those bugs, it inevitably just makes it worse. Every time I've tried to use AI in a coding workflow, I spend less time thinking about the control flow of the software, and more time chasing down weird esoteric bugs. Overall it's never saved me any time at all.

I've used them as a quick web search, and while they do save me from having to trawl through a lot of the hellhole that is the modern internet, with blogspam, ads, and nonsense people write online, a lot of times, it will just hallucinate answers. I've noticed it's decent at providing me results when results exist, but if results don't exist, or I'm asking something that doesn't make sense, it falls flat on its face because it will just make things up in order to sound convincing and helpful.

I do see some niches where the stuff has been useful. Summarizing large swathes of documents, where the accuracy of that summary doesn't matter much is a little useful. Like if I were tasked to look through 300 documents and decide which ones were most relevant to a project, and I only had an hour to do it, I think that would be a task it would do well with. I can't review or even skim 300 documents in an hour, and even though an LLM would very likely be wrong about a lot of it, at least that's something.

The thing is, I don't frequently run into tasks where accuracy doesn't matter. I doubt most people do. Usually when someone asks for an answer to something, or you want to actually do something useful, the hidden assumption is that the output will be correct, and LLMs are just really bad at being correct.

The thing is, the internet is full of AI evangelists that talk about their AI stack made up of SaaS products I've never even heard of chained together. They talk about how insanely productive it's made them and how it's like being superhuman and without it they'd be left behind.

I'm 99% sure that most of this is influencer clickbait capitalizing on FOMO to keep the shared delusion of LLM's usefulness going, usually because they have stake in the game. They either run an AI startup, are involved in a company that profits off of AI being popular, they're an influencer that makes AI content, or they just have Nvidia in their stock portfolio like so much of us do.

Is there anyone out there that feels this technology is actually super useful that doesn't fall into one of those categories?

If so, let me know. Also, let me know what I'm doing wrong. Am I just a Luddite? A crotchety old man? Out of touch? I'm fine if I am, I just want to know once and for all.

Back in high school when I was writing essays, my teacher always demanded to use justified text, because simple left aligned or right aligned text looked ugly. Even back then as a totally rebellious teenager, I agreed with her. Print has used it for hundreds of years, why shouldn't we?

The web has always resisted this development because it was difficult. Yes, the css property text-align: justify exists, but browser were always missing the crucial functionality of hyphenating words. That led to very ugly justified texts and so called "rivers" of whitespace because the spaces got so large. Begrudingly, I got used to it.

I was surprised to learn that all major browsers support the new hyphens css property since late 2023. This one adds exactly that crucial functionality. I was stunned and immediately tried it out and oh look, the web is so much more beautiful now.

You can try out yourself here on Tildes! Just right click a comment, click "Inspect" and then when the dev console pops up, add

text-align: justify;
hyphens: auto:

to p, which stands for the paragraph html tag and in which all text posts are rendered on Tildes.

It looks so much better! But I do wonder why it hasn't spread around more in the web. Am I the only one? Am I nitpicky? I feel like the improvement is stark and very good for functionally no extra work. I even installed a browser extension which augments a website's css so I could automatically do it on most websites.

This is the first time in my career that a Mac is the preferred machine for an organization. I've been using Windows for 30 years. This is a big change for me but I want to learn some useful tips and tricks on Mac os.

This could be "what are some changes you made on the Mac settings to make your Mac experience feel more comfortable?" Or "what tool on Mac can you not live without?"

There aren't any rules really, I want this to be a fun conversation, thanks everyone!

** Please do not tell me how to fix my issue below; this is an example, not a tech-support request **

I have a (LibreOffice) spreadsheet, personal tracking data. The other day, I got a new laptop (Framework), put a new OS (Debian trixie RC2) on it.

Now, on the new machine, when I add a comment to a cell, the background color of the new comment is wrong/different from every other comment in the spreadsheet. When I add a comment to the same spreadsheet, opened on a different machine, the new comment still has the "correct"/standard background color, but any comments I added on the new machine continue to have the wrong color.

This happened once or twice in the past couple of days, and I just manually "fixed" the color of each new comment, but this morning, I tried to figure out what the deal was, how to fix it properly/permanently.

And just like that, my 3-minute daily edit of this spreadsheet turned into a 2-hour wild goose chase. I still haven't fixed it, I still don't know whether to blame LibreOffice, Debian, the new laptop, or some other variable I haven't even thought of. All I know is, someone has stolen 2 hours of my life from me, and I really want to know who that is.

Bigger picture ...

This happens all the time. Every day, often 3-4 times a day, it is a regular point of stress, of contention in my life, deciding whether to devote hours (sometimes days) of my life to strong-arming software into working the way it was supposed to work in the first place, or to try my best to accept that we just can't have nice things on our computers, and move on.

This definitely predates the word "enshittification", but I don't think it really predates the concept. Stipulated -- software development is complicated, and software is used in so many different situations -- different hardware, different OSes, different libraries, different supporting/complementary software, versions, etc -- it is extremely hard to make software that "just works" for everyone, all the time.

Nonetheless, I think the entire software development industry just collectively decided that is it okay to release stuff that doesn't work ... dating back to some point in the 20th century, long before Linux, before the Internet, before smartphones ... this issue--this philosophy--goes waaaay back, and there's just no fighting it at this point.

But also, I do not want to live in a world where I have to surrender hours and days and years of my life, fighting with software that doesn't work, because "that's just how software is".

So, that's my gripe. Is there any kind of viable middle ground here, that is less extreme than "cabin in the woods"? 'Cuz I am (yet again) seriously weighing that option this morning.

I thought it would be fun to explore what people on Tildes use for things like email, file synchronisation, webhosting, backups, streaming, password management, etc.
Are you using a common big tech service? Are you self hosting? Something in between? If you are self hosting what does it look like? Are you running bare metal, using containers, a complete proxmox setup with a legion of VMs? And of course, what software are using on top of it all?
I am also curious to see how satisfied you are with your current setup.

To be extra clear, this is not about the OS you are running on your personal computer, we've had plenty of discussion like that already ;).

And also to be extra clear, this isn't just about self hosting.

Posted in ~tech because I want a broad discussion, not just the ~comp folks.

I'll start

I have been trying to move away from a lot of the big tech services for a few years now. For me it isn't an absolute where I don't want any Google or Microsoft in my life, I just don't want to be reliant on them for what I see as critical parts of my personal infrastructure.

Running servers and maintaining them including infrastructure on top like reverse proxies, docker, Kubernetes, etc is something I am fairly familiar with. But it isn't something I quite enjoy or trust myself to do for a lot of important stuff. Specifically when it comes down to security and making sure backups are in order. This means that for a lot of things I have opted to use other services. But in a way that allows me to move away to a different one quite easily.

File storage & synchronization

For years I made use of Google drive, but after running into various sync issues and the lack of Linux clients (even though I am now back on Windows) it was the first service I moved away from big tech.
For this I make use of a hosted Nextcloud instance on Hetzener's "storage share" plan. Honestly, no big complaints here about the core functionality. Files get synchronized just fine and Hetzner takes care of updates and backups.

Email

For email I make use of my own domain in combination with mailbox.org mail hosting.

Media streaming

I still have quite some music, movies and series on my hard drive. For this I use Jellyfin, which works quite well. Though the native apps have some issues where it will start transcoding things that don't need transcoding at all. This isn't an issue with third party apps. On android, I use findroid. On the ipad of my SO I had to compromise a little bit, the best app there seems to be Infuse which isn't open and requires a subscription for some advanced features. Though for Jellyfin playback the free version seems to work fine so far.

Jellyfin itself is just running on my desktop PC. I have been thinking about a NAS of sorts, but decided to hold off on it for now as my computer is effectively always on whenever one of us wants to watch something.

Password management

In the past I have used KeePassXC which with the browser extension works quite well on my desktop. But keeping it synced to my phone as well was sometimes a bit finicky. So last year I decided to switch to Bitwarden with the idea that I can always switch to vaultwarden if I decide to.

Edit: DeaconBlue's setup reminded me that I also use Aegis which backs up encrypted to nextcloud.

Backup

For backups I make use of Hetzner's storage box plans. In order to create the backups I make use of restic, but to make things a bit easier I have opted to use the Backrest front-end for it which basically takes care of scheduling.

VPS for various random scripts and experiments

I am also running a Ubuntu server VPS, also on Hetzner infrastructure, which I use to run a variety of scripts, experiment with stuff I might want to self host, etc. The scripts it runs are mostly related to discord moderation and one I maintain for the /r/history team (even though I am no longer active on reddit).

Webhosting & Domains

While I have a VPS, for simple hosting and since I need to buy my domains somewhere I am making use of a hosting provider in the Netherlands called mijn.host. They are quite affordable and customer oriented.

If you have ever see me share images on Tildes this is also where I have my own image hosting thing running. Which is basically ShareX configured to upload images to a simple PHP endpoint I created that resizes images, strips their exif data and renames them.

Honourable mention: PikaPods

PikaPods basically provides you with docker hosting of a wide variety of open source apps in a very user friendly way. I have experimented a bit with it and while I don't have a current use for it I do think that it is a neat service other people might enjoy.

I'm getting a new phone (OnePlus 13, not that it really matters) and I'm considering the benefits of flashing over something like LineageOs straight away rather than using the stock OS.

Normally, I expect? You'd run stock until security updates stop or something changes where you want a longer running OS, but I'm considering it because I cannot be bothered with all the bloatware they put on modern phones these days.
Plus it should save a heap of battery.

What are people's thoughts on this? Is it something you always do anyway or do you usually run stock for a while?

Who is this book for?

For almost anyone who is afraid of viruses, trojans, greeks, or lefthanded satanistic poodle pruners who want your data. For those cipherpunks who know that The Man is out to get 'em. For those who realize that masking their identity when they buy dog food online is imperative to democracy and freedom as we know it.

Now, the author recognizes that people vary in skills. Consequently, the steps increase in skill level as they progress. The skill level is neatly placed in the margin next to each step.

[BEGINNER] Step 1. Turn off your computer

If you don't know how to do this, you can yank out the power plug from the wall. If you don't know how to do this, just stop paying your electric bills. NOTE: If you take this latter approach, this will take longer than 30 seconds.

Once the computer is off, you're 80% of the way there. The computer is secure from all but the most insidious of blackbag attacks. Anything beyond this step requires an advanced knowledge of computers. (And some biceps. Eat your wheaties!)

[ADVANCED] Step 2. Smash monitor, case, hard drive, ethernet cable and (why not?) mouse with C and XML 1000-page doorstops, er, textbooks.

Now the computer is completely secure from all attacks.

[GURU] Step 3. Go outside, away from computers. Become a lumberjack or something.

Why are you still reading this? You're supposed to be outside. Some guru you are. Can't even read.

Found this while browsing through the first ever wiki hosting the "WikiWikiWeb" over at C2. As the site and content changes, I am submitting this as a text post. Community is still around, and it has an excellent layout and its just full of very funny and old school (and informative!) things. The site comes to mind on occasion and I just get lost browsing and seeing the amount of information hidden within those pages. I might finally get around to working on a spiritual project.

I'm not sure where to bring this up and I wanted an outside perspective. This may seem like I'm doing the same thing here but I honestly just want to know if anyone has any insight. The trend in talking about is the act of creating a reddit post in the form of a question. I've seen so many posts on Reddit popup that are just questions or screenshots/pictures with a question as the title.

For instance in gaming subreddits I'll see a post with the title of something like "What do you think is the best game in X series?" And they will have a screenshot of what would be the perceived most popular game in a franchise like final fantasy or halo or something. This is only one example, I see so many questions constantly in my home feed.

Is this some kind of concerted effort to train an LLM or is it simply some unspoken advantage that karma farmers use to drive engagement? Or am I simply just diving into conspiracy theories created by my own ignorance?

I think most people would agree that the internet and technology in general have absolutely gone to shit over the past decade or so. There is no corner of the internet nor of the software world that hasn't been affected by enshittification. Everything exists to serve you ads. Everyone wants to extract as much money from you as possible. Every website is in a race for the bottom as they try to find the lowest effort content that makes them the most money. Every piece of software is pushed out half-baked and/or stripped down to the bare minimum with the rest paywalled or with the devs pinky promising to fix it 5 updates down the road.

Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of. And it's probably the one that's doing the best at the moment, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, all of them are just bots and propaganda and engagement farming the whole way down. And the worst thing is, they're complicit. Hell, they're actively encouraging it and trying to find ways to make it worse. And I have no doubt Reddit will bend the knee soon enough too (they just banned /r/whitepeopletwitter because Musk made a tweet critical of the sub).

There's probably some element of rose-tinted glasses here, but the old internet was just so much better looking back. Like, early 2000's to maybe 2012, 2013 or so, that was the peak. No colossal data harvesting schemes feeding into algorithms designed to keep you engaged on their site 24/7 for the purpose of shilling you advertisements and selling your data, no mass propaganda, no Dead Internet Theory (which can hardly be considered a theory anymore). Yeah there was shit content, there was tons of it, but I can deal with shit content and petty forum drama and whatnot; what I can't deal with is all the multi-billion dollar corporations trying to shape the entire landscape of the Web into the perfectly minmaxxed cash-generating machine that does as little as possible for as much data and advertising as possible.

Modern software isn't much better. Windows and MacOS are filled with anti-user features, telemetry you just can't turn off, Windows will often just install shit on your computer without telling you. They turn your computer into a walled garden, where you can do what you want as long as you play by their rules, but without giving you any real control over what your computer does. Yeah you can delete system files and brick your laptop if you feel like it, but anyone who's ever tried to permanently disable Windows updates will know that in the end you're not the one calling the shots: Microsoft are. And... Like, that's insane, right? It's running on my fucking computer, it's my CPU doing the work, I want to know what the hell it's doing and not just the parts it lets me see, and if I want it to do something different then I should be able to make it so.

I hate it all. I'm tired. I want out.

These are my problems. Here's what I've done about it so far.

• Obsessive privacy on the web. No Google services. Firefox with as much telemetry turned off as possible. Protonmail and ProtonVPN for everything (and I'm considering getting out of those too with the pro-Trump stances they've been taking recently). As minimal an online footprint as I can get, I make as few accounts as possible and I don't use shared or even slightly related usernames (my username here is an exception as it's my Reddit username, and no, it's not my real name), I delete accounts whenever I can and I GDPR request the services afterward. Virtual cards for online payments as much as possible. Will probably make a Javascript whitelist at some point too. Is all of this overkill? Yes. Why do I bother? Because fuck them.

• As little social media presence as possible. Real life necessitates some amount of social media interaction of course, I have Facebook and Instagram but use them exclusively for messaging. I often see people excluding Reddit from social media but I don't fully agree, even if it's not exactly in the category it still targets a lot of the same psychological weak points in us, encouraging doom scrolling and shaping our opinions through echo chambers and propaganda (it's always important to remember that echo chambers and propaganda you agree with are still echo chambers and propaganda). I still use Reddit admittedly, but I've tried to minimise my usage as much as possible and I'm shopping for alternatives.

• Free and Open Source software as much as possible. I'm all in on GNU these days. Yes, it's a massive pain in the ass. My job unfortunately requires some Windows-only software so I'm running a dual partition but I'm trying to get as much of my computer usage onto Linux as possible (I use Arch btw). Like I said above, it's my computer, if I can't control what it's computing then it stops being my computer, it's at best shared between me and all the developers of the proprietary software I have installed on it.

That's my rant. It's been a long time coming.

There are still things I'm looking to change, especially with how I use the internet. Getting rid of Reddit is the next big step for me, I think. I just can't be bothered with it anymore, but there is still something about it that I love, every time I look through a small niche topic community, or an interesting new hobby sub I've never seen before with years of cool posts for me to go through. And yeah, I do still enjoy browsing through /r/all even when it's 80% shit and objectively bad for my mental health. But at this point the overwhelming mass of utter shit is just not worth digging through anymore. I'm tired.

Tildes is really cool. It reminds me of the old internet, the ideal usage of the Web. I open the site, I see a link to an interesting article, I read it, I give it a like, I read and/or contribute to the discussion in a comments section. I want more of this.

If anyone has any links to cool sites that I should check out I'd greatly appreciate it.

I'm considering installing some abandonware games, and, as anyone who trawls the internet for old executables knows: they are often rife with viruses/malware.

It's easy to avoid the ones that are clearly malicious using tools like VirusTotal, but it gets trickier when the "is it clean?" is more of a "maybe" than a "no" because you're not sure if something is a false positive.

I'd rather not take chances and will generally avoid anything I find even slightly suspicious, but it did get me thinking: if I ran the games through Linux instead of Windows (e.g. via WINE or Proton), am I equally vulnerable?

Does something like that sandbox the virus? Is the virus rendered ineffective by being in a system it's unable to exploit as intended?

Or is this wishful thinking and it's still risky no matter what?

I'm not asking this as a "help me play abandonware games" plea (though, if there are best practices out there feel free to enlighten me). Instead, it's a curiosity -- a "help me better understand Linux vs. Windows" from someone who's not super techy.

As a Brit who's now effected by the Great British Firewall I'd like recommendations for VPNs that meet the following criteria either directly or via additional software/Firefox extensions:

• Use VPN only for specific apps on iOS (apply to Reddit, Discord, BlueSky and Twitter/X, Wikipedia (if it ends up banned) but not others)
• Use VPN for specific websites on Windows/macOS (apply to Reddit, Discord, BlueSky, Twitter/X, Wikipedia (if it ends up banned) websites)
• VPN considered generally trustworthy and not an American firm

Personal recommendations that you have experience with only please.

Hi everyone, I'm feeling inspired to start a tool library out of a community space. I am resisting the urge to roll the software myself and I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions about existing projects that I might look into, ideally leaning towards the lightweight side of things.

What say you, Tildes community?

Ironically, AI has boomeranged from surpassing human intelligence to having us spot it like a dove in a pond. So now, leave in all the little flubs to make it a bit more clear that a person at least typed this in a keyboard, you know?

Can be viewed here

Is this just the usual pointless Apple fanfare?

I'm not very techy so I'm just wondering why this is a big deal. It seems to me it's just a different theme of sorts? But in this video MKBHD is making it out to be a really big deal. Is it like technologically super impressive? What's the big deal?

I'm starting an archive project of long form interviews with locals in my area. Do any of y'all have advice on what might be the best handheld voice recorder that's high quality sound but small and discrete so my interviewees can forget that they're being recorded?

I was about to recommend wordpress.com (free tier) to someone and realized I have no idea if I should. I am not a tech person but I should have an idea of what to suggest when someone even less technical ask me for advice. Did it all die down? Is Wordpress safe to use now?