Which leads me to the question: would you find visual genAI more acceptable if it weren’t commercial?

For sure. I couldn’t tell you where inspired, but new, work ends and theft begins, or how model training would be funded without commercial incentive. But I would be more comfortable knowing that companies have not ripped potential profits straight from every artist the model had been trained on.

And I like this kind of discussion. What’s bothered me before have been the jabs at the mere presence of AI without deeper discussion as to what qualifies as theft. I haven’t found myself buying art even before such AI models. I wouldn’t buy or sell images that I know are AI generated. And I pay the electric bill for locally-generated ones as if I were doing any other novelty activity like gaming on my PC. I’m curious, what would you think of local models that can be acquired for free?

For anonymity alone, no. You ought to at least aspire to live the nomad lifestyle first and put up with its challenges, then enjoy whatever anonymity comes from it as a bonus.

If you don’t mind apartment living, you could consider the arrangement I had at one point. Private landlord who didn’t run background checks, accepted payment in any reasonable form, many tenants, communal mailbox without apartment numbers or names required. Internet, utilities, etc. all rolled into rent and not individually metered. Might be harder to find but they exist.

To clear my bucket list of food I want to try. Many items require travelling abroad, so I don’t think it’ll be completed anytime soon.

As others have said, no because Google’s components have very good backward compatibility and will come for your device on its stock OS.

I had other vendors in mind when I first read your question. In a sense, older ones could spy less as a side effect of vendor telemetry servers going dark over the years. Samsung also wasn’t as rampant with their spying back then. But either way, such phones would have been long without any security updates.

Gross. Does it still track bluetooth if the phone is already paired with a headset and not actively searching for new connections? Guess I’ll be back to wired headphones if that’s the case.

The US response to Microsoft’s monopoly was meager, this time, they will cheer Google on.

Bottled water in general. If it’s tap water, never with ice, especially at the beginning since whatever pathogens around will be enriched in the ice maker if the establishment isn’t cleaning it regularly. If I’m around long enough, maybe a week, I’ll probably find out whatever precautions the locals take with the tap water and follow suit.

It’s generally fine in major US cities, but do check. It could be anywhere from Flint Michigan water to unregulated well water to being somewhat famous for its purity in the case of NYC. I’ve lived a few years in a town where the water doesn’t pose a health hazard, but the bad taste made everyone buy filters.

As someone who has used X11 and Wayland, it doesn’t matter for the typical user. If you, like me, have a penchant for some smaller desktop environments like XFCE or window managers, you will be stuck with X11, but many are already working on porting to Wayland.

Couple edge cases for gaming, namely screen tearing on some X11 configurations and certain Nvidia hardware running into issues on Wayland. For multi-monitor or high DPI users, Wayland handles per-monitor DPI and fractional scaling far better than X11. Maybe a couple more edge use cases for remoting into the desktop, but Wayland support is also improving quickly on that end. In any case, Wayland is by design more secure than X11.

Yep, ever since I saw them in popups on hosting sites or gatekeeping downloads behind some shady .exe, I’ve associated them with malware and adware.

it should use the encryption passphrase to auto unlock the keyring after the autologin

It doesn’t, hence the need to remove the password. Password only comes back every once in a while, rather than every login. Maybe a bad combination of desktop environment/session manager? LightDM with XFCE in my case.

Meanwhile, I’m fighting to get rid of the password on the keyring each time it comes back by itself. For context, my root partition is encrypted, so it’s not a huge deal if the keyring stored on it doesn’t have its own password, I think. I set up autologin to avoid a duplicate password, but since the session manager no longer unlocks the keyring, the keyring must have no password else I get a password prompt all over again. There’s probably a more elegant way, but I’ve yet to find it.

Trying to get coreboot to run on the nvidia variant of the ThinkPad T510. I guess it boots now, but I’m probably going to shelve it if I can’t get rid of the random freezes this weekend.

Eating one of those mini pecan pies

Anything that requires PII in a separate browser that doesn’t clear on exit. General browsing on my main browser, which clears data on exit, except for a small list of exceptions. It doesn’t defeat non-cookie fingerprinting, but I at least get rid of all the cookies that I don’t want.

I’m happy that you are at a point where you find life to be stable and well-paced. For a lot of people, whatever comforts they might be enjoying are riding on a razor-thin margin. Holding together well at first glance, but only one financial, health, or other incident away from a world of hurt.

Nearly everything that both requires a phone and disrespects my privacy has been work-related, so using 2 phones has been a solid choice for me.

The work phone has a sim from a mainstream carrier and only gets powered on while at work during work hours. Maybe I’m spoiled that my workplace tolerates this arrangement. I couldn’t imagine having to be reachable any time of the day. I didn’t intentionally buy a separate phone, it’s just my old phone repurposed.

The personal phone has an “IoT” SIM which can be purchased non-KYC where I live. All FOSS apps and a personal number via VoIP.

I know it isn’t by any means airtight, but it gives infinitely more peace of mind than just trusting whatever sandboxing mechanism available on one device will be sufficient.

I’ve found that my most immersive dreams have me feeling as though I woke up in the dream without waking up in real life. Maybe that’s when the implausible dream scenarios end and real-life types of events start happening. There’s been a couple times I wake up missing the people I knew from those dreams.

Minimalism. Compared to AOSP, Google components and pings removed. Compared to other privacy GSI ROMs, no weird, quirky, or flashy functions or themes the author decided to bake in.

Luggage aplenty in the airport, just have to make yours more trouble to get into. Which is why I put a keyring through both zippers rather than a lock.

My bigger concern is being able to identify my luggage at a glance, so I paint all of the edges on mine neon yellow.

Whatever the choice, there will be trade-offs. From a technical standpoint, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with the upcoming Motorola phone with GrapheneOS as long as the bootloader is still unlockable and relockable so that the user can install a known good copy of GOS instead of trusting what Motorola put on it.