kby

You are onto something here…

Just use Ollama.

Excuse me, but sometimes, I just want to be angry and not “rationalize the causes of my anger”. I think it’s fully okay to be pissed about something and wanting to vocalize your anger without immediately neutering it by “expressing” the thing that made you angry instead. I would even say that trying to extinguish your emotions constantly will cause you to explode like a pressure cooker one day. You are just invalidating your own emotional reaction. Same thing applies when someone hurts me. You hurt me, goddamn it, I am gonna tell you why I got hurt, but most importantly, I am going to express how much I got hurt.

You can try setting up Ollama on your RPi, then use a highly-quantized variant of the Mistral model (or quantize it yourself with GGUF+llama.cpp). You can do some very heavy quantization (2-bit), which will increase the error rate. But if you are only planning to use the generated text as a starting point, it might be useful nevertheless. Also see: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/docs/import.md#importing-pytorch--safetensors

Here are some pre-quantized variants of Mistral 7B: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Mistral-7B-v0.1-GGUF

(all the tools and models I have mentioned in my comment are free and open-source, and beyond that, require no uplink during operation)

Excuse me if this is an obnoxious question: But why not just Firefox with the DDG extension (if you really need it)? Search engine-specific browsers tend to be… bad in general. It’s going to be a wrapper around some other browser anyway.

I personally use a firewall for containing the local services I am running on my non-server PC, ex. Tiny Tiny RSS. If I am only using Tiny Tiny RSS locally, it’s just potentially dangerous to make this service visible and accessible for every client in my local network, which in my case, isn’t populated by my own personal devices, as I live in a dormitory. Other than that, you can block the well-known ports of commonly exploited protocols such as UPnP. That’s not because someone will “break into your device” with UPnP, but rather as a matter of digital autonomy, to control the mode of network communication done by the software on your device.

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Just use Invidious.

“Keys can be stolen or hacked”. Assuming that an adversary gains access to your user account on your local computer? Well, there is no messaging protocol that will “protect” you and your data when an adversary has unrestricted access to your user account.

I am not sure for whom this article was written. “It’s hard to exchange keys” is Computer Security 101. That’s how public-key cryptography without a centeralized PKI works. The only valid argument against PGP I could recognize here is the fact that PGP provides no forward secrecy.

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Uhm, no? I can still start calls on meet.jit.si without logging in.

Whoa, that website has a slick design!

2138 is the year of the Linux desktop!

No, do that. Fully legitimate to choose friends with similar values. If privacy awareness is a big thing for you, do that, really. I survived college without installing Discord. It did bar me out of many groups, but I still had a fairly large circle of friends. I guess Germany is a bit different regarding privacy awareness among younger people, though.

If you are not in the mood for doing much tinkering, there is a German electronics manufacturer called TechniSat and they sell a multi-function radio called DIGITRADIO 3 VOICE. It has an offline voice assistant. The voice commands can be used to pause, change audio source, increase volume, etc. The radio deck has okay-ish sound, I wouldn’t call it hi-fi but it doesn’t sound like two tin cans. The function is actually for blind people (I bought one for my grandma who is legally blind), but I guess privacy enthusiasts would find it adequate, too.

The PineTime has a great feature set, but the build quality is terrible. I guess it’s perfectly justified for the price, but I don’t know; I don’t feel good having to order a new PineTime every six months once the last one I bought dies.

I am planning to buy a Casio B5600. There is a FLOS companion app for it, and it has a G-Shock frame; that thing ought to endure a bit before giving up :P