I’ve been using KOReader on my phone now, ever since my Kindle one day decided to be unrecognisable on my computer. Couldn’t find a solution to fix it so it became a glorified paperweight.

The screen real estate is slightly degraded, but fuck if I give Amazon any more of my money. Besides, I get to store epubs as epubs instead of converting to that god awful mobi format.

The reason they are blackboxes is because they are function approximators with billions of parameters. Theory has not caught up with practical results. This is why you tune hyperparameters (learning rate, number of layers, number of neurons ina layer, etc.) and have multiple iterations of training to get an approximation of the distribution of the inputs. Training is also sensitive to the order of inputs to the network. A network trained on the same training set but in a different order might converge to an entirely different function. This is why you train on the same inputs in random order over multiple episodes to hopefully average out such variations. They are blackboxes simply because you can’t yet prove theoretically the function it has approximated or converged to given the input.

That is the fundamental problem with email as a protocol, yes?

Zero knowledge inbox, externally audited code, a company actually caring for user privacy definitely is a win for me when the alternative is Google hoovering up your data. Is this what you meant by saying it is the next best thing?

How much more private than end to end encryption do you want? Unless you mean something else by private.

I play World of Tanks which has frequent battle passes. I used to try and grind earlier but then came a moment where I said fuck it, this feels like work and not fun. So now I just treat the base game as what I get. Any other reward is just a bonus. This change in mindset has worked quite well for me.

I do not like how websites prioritise the mobile view over desktop view even when it is on a desktop. You have a widescreen and want to waste all that horizontal space? Just ridiculous!

Yeah yeah, I understand it is less maintenance from a developer point of view, but still it is infuriating as a user.

I agree. I only use Brave for very specific purposes - somehow my bank doesn’t like my Firefox configuration, and mostly to access Google maps. Otherwise I use Firefox and its profiles for all other activities.

Depends on if they used cryptographic signatures. Those would be impossible to spoof because any change in the client would change the hash completely.

I couldn’t have been more eloquent myself.

If you don’t mind paying, Protonmail. I pay €12 per month for mail and VPN combined however it is cheaper if you only want the email option. I haven’t used Gmail in about three years now.

Degoogling is a long and difficult process. I highly suggest you start with small steps. For example, you could start using Invidious to watch Youtube videos. It is definitely not without bugs and you will run into issues. Change your search engine to Duckduckgo or Brave or whatever else you prefer. For general searches, these are good enough. Unfortunately, for addresses and navigation, Google Maps doesn’t have a good enough competitor that I know of. I urge you to make Firefox your daily driver if you are still using Chromium-based ones. I have Brave browser as an alternative for sites like banking or to access Maps or Google search. Start an alternate Protonmail account while still using Gmail. Be warned though that the free tier has 500MB, the paid tier 500GB.

If you want to go full hardcore, look into Graphene or CalyxOS as a replacement for your Android. I specifically bought myself a Pixel phone so I can get a degoogled OS for my primary phone. I still have a secondary phone running Android for banking and paying which I turn off when I do not use it. Look into Shelter to freeze apps. For example, Uber doesn’t need to know your whereabouts when you are not specifically looking for a cab.

But please, please, DO NOT start doing everything all at once or you will get overwhelmed. I now almost fully use open source stuff, and I pay and donate for services. I think this is the only way to show support for the projects you love and to have a voice against big tech/ad tech.

All hail the hypnotoad! @_@

Europa Universalis 4. Actually most Paradox games.

I really ought to start looking at usernames before I read comments.

I go back to World of Tanks every once in a while but it is impossible to enjoy it even though I want to. The concept is great, there are tactics involved, but the skill ceiling is just too damn high. So now whenever I get the urge to play, I instead watch a couple of streamers. Skill for his entertaining streams and well, skill (but he gets annoying when he starts raging about not being able to achieve his personal goals), and Dez for the generally chill vibes.

World of Tanks would have been a great game had it not been plagued with the entire pay to win aspect. And don’t get me started on the whole crew training and retraining nonsense. I hate that aspect of the game, and still don’t understand it. Do I keep the trained crew in a tank I enjoy playing or move them onto the next tier tank and then have terrible stats on the new crew and lose interest in the tank I started enjoying? Uff!

Even if there is nothing wrong with Meta trying to federate with the Fediverse, I do not want them here.

Honestly, at this point I am quite jaded and sick of the shenanigans of big tech. Repeatedly they have violated the trust of their users. Unless they show active change in the way they conduct their operations for the benefit of the end user and not advertising agencies, I would prefer to not have them in my life if I can help it.

EDIT:

I might have misread the intention of your post. If you are asking about the fallout of Meta federating, there is a possibility that they attract too many users to their platform. This is my personal anecdote. I wanted to get rid of all products owned by Facebook to the point where I told my contacts that I am switching to Signal and will be uninstalling Whatsapp. I even reasoned with them that I wanted to choose not to use Whatsapp, and that I still wanted to communicate with them, albeit on Signal. I even emphasised that I wasn’t asking them to uninstall Whatsapp. Ultimately, only about a third of my contacts joined Signal.

Everyone says there is a choice in not using Whatsapp, but is it really a choice when there is no one to talk to on Signal? That is my worry that something similar would happen with Threads.

I’ll finally know all the answers in the next episode of No Such Thing As A Fish!

I did the same too. I liked my current instance’s affinity to technology and figured I may as well join a smaller server to avoid the strain of the Reddit exodus.

ChatGPT is an engineering marvel in that it has understood the semantics of language. However, it has absolutely no idea what it is talking about beyond generating the next token in a string of what sounds like natural language. I wish more people would understand this nuance.

I exclusively use Freetube for my Youtube needs. It is great when it works. Sometimes you have to find the right Invidious instance for it to work properly. A few times videos play at 720p. I have also noticed search failing for specific terms sometimes - for example “machine learning”. I don’t know if it is a bug or blacklisted words/phrases.

These are a few reality checks highlighting it isn’t a perfect experience all the time, but I will be damned if go back to a vanilla Youtube interface after having gotten used to Invidious and then Peertube.

The upsides are less fluff that is recommended, you control your own feed with the videos from the channels you subscribe to, no ads, sponsorblock, and I guess more privacy.