• 7 Posts
  • 116 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Privacy used to be priceless. It still is for my generation. I work my ass off to maintain my privacy, which is harder and harder in this increasingly dystopian world, and I lose out on more and more services and conveniences everybody else enjoys as a result. But privacy is non-negociable for many people my age.

    For younger folks, sadly they were born in the dystopia - or an early version of it - and they never lost the privacy they never had. For a lot of younger folks, not enjoying true privacy is their normal. Many of them are waking up to the obscenety of what Big Data does to all of us, but of course it’s harder to wake up than to resist someone trying to put you to sleep.

    And finally, the assault on privacy is so relentless and comes from actors with so much more clout and resources that many simply give up, because it’s just too much. I’m one of those who refuse to drive and take the bus because cars nowadays put their owners under surveillance. But most people are not willing to accept that level of loss of quality of life and it’s fully understandable.








  • open source wasn’t really a thing in the 90s and early 2000s

    Truly written as someone who wasn’t alive back then and just makes stuff up.

    Open-source - which was called free software back then - was very much alive and totally a thing since forever, and especially in the 70s, 80s and 90s. I learned all I know with free software in the 80s. Linux came out in 91 and was a pure product of open source: Minix - the forerunner of Linux - was a fully open-source OS created in 87, and GNU had been around since 83.

    Please read up on things you don’t know before posting nonsense.




  • Install Linux in a VirtualBox virtual machine to try it out. No change to your existing Windows system is needed.

    Better: install it in a virtual machine on a second hard drive: if you like it and you’re ready to switch, switch to booting the real Linux hard-drive and turn the Windows hard drive into the virtual machine, to use within Linux when you need it.

    If you switch to Linux, this will happen:

    • It’s gonna be tough: it’s a different system, you’re not used to it. Like everything else, it’s hard to change and get used to new things. So realistically expect some learning curve and some pain. It’s normal.

    • If you give it an honest shot but you decide Linux is not for you, you’ll switch back to Windows. You’ll be back to your old normal, but you’ll start to notice how infuriating and spirit-crushing it is a lot more, having been exposed to a non-insane, user-centric OS for a while. And then you’ll be that much sadder in Windows and you’ll wish you had the best of both OSes - which you can’t.

    Just be aware than exposure to a non-Windows OS will probably make you hate Windows more and make your life in Windows ever slightly more miserable, even if you don’t stick to the non-Windows OS.




  • Privacy isn’t a cutesy. It’s absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, just like not doing stupid shit when you’re a teenager, you get to find out how important privacy is years later when the stupid shit you did years before comes back to haunt you and it’s too late.

    The problem of course is that Big Data has made it exceedingly difficult and painful to maintain your privacy. Because of course the last thing they want is for you to have any. It hurts their bottom line.

    Because of the corporate surveillance collective, in 2024, if you truly want to maintain your privacy, your life becomes significantly crappier than if you didn’t bother. But that doesn’t mean privacy isn’t as important today as it’s ever been.