It’s a browser made by a company whose main business is advertising.

At one point they were trying a model where they adblock everything, but show you their ads instead. And then hold the money it made hostage untill the owner of the site you saw it on makes a contract with then to get paid for your ad viewing time.

But in general - an advertisement company making a browser is suspicious on so many levels…

The thread in question is about smear campaigns, from a brief skim I did not see any mention about them actually seizing Pixel phones? What did I miss?

I’ve seen people mention that he in the “AI art is art” crowd, even his username might actually be that? I didn’t check, but that would fit.

Yeah, the guy that just released all Adobe products a week ago that barely work, surely releasing another suite of tools next weekend instead of fixing the plethora of bugs is a good sign that he is capable to keep maintaining a project in long term.

I did try the PhotoSlop, and within the like 20 minutes I couldn’t make the canvas the size I asked for, the work (mostly trying random stuff, but that’s not the point) did not get saved when I saved it, and it froze when I alt-tabbed, so I lost all of it.

I’m sure it’s getting them a lot of attention, but why would I use anything of his when he got bored with it and moved to another project in literally a week while it has absolutely blocker issues?

She lived in an entirely different city across the country (Europe, so like two hours of train ride).

She saw me on Facebook, based on photos from a goth festival in our city, so I got a message on Messanger from a profile without a profile picture and no mutual friends. We talked for a bit, I was single at the time, and we eventually decided to meet. I had no idea how she looks like, and I kind of found this idea of a blind date funny - either it works, or I’ll get a good story out of it.

We decided to meet and go to a local goth scene hangout, and not only she was really pretty, she also brought two bottles of mead. We managed to drink both of them before even getting to the hangout, where it turned out that she was actually not only a classmate of my best friend (a long time ago), but also used to be part of the scene around 5 years ago (before I joined it), before she went no-contact and changed her nickname due to a relationship (that eventually turned out really terrible). So, she knew most of my friends.

That was 7 years ago. At the time she was living in a small flat, after just getting out of a 7 y.o terrible relationship that she couldn’t leave due to having a mortgage, but she managed to save enough on a minimal wage to leave when she found out he was cheating. Her grandma was living with her in her small flat, and she was really a terrible person, even had her aunt with the most entitled child move in, and they were even worse. Always arguing, screaming, being rude, and just acting like dicks. She let them live with her, just because they had nowhere to go, even though she was earning a minimal wage. Them saying that “If we don’t like it, we should move out”, or that “I shouldn’t argue, because I don’t live here”, while I was actually helping her with rent they weren’t doing anything for was insane.

I kept visiting her almost daily, spending time in the one small 5x5m room she had for herself, even though it was two hour train ride. During covid, I was mostly staying at her place, and since she loved animals (her mother worked at a zoo, before cancer got her), we discussed what we want to get, and pet racoon was high on the list. And when she said that we will get a racoon once we live together, I immediately found a flat in my city, and we moved in together around 5 years ago. We stole the ashes of her mother and went no-contact with the people living at her old flat. They can burn in hell.

Unfortunately, racoons are not easily legal to own, but we got a lot of different animals instead. She also helped me with starting to make our own goth events, DJ, and help local promoters, and now we’re responsible for more than half of goth events that happen in our city. She’s now earning more that I do (and I work in IT), and I’m really happy how did everything turned out. We have no idea how did the rest of her familly end up, but we don’t really care.

We are kind of planning a wedding, with only witnesses, but so far what’s stopping is that I can’t find my birth certificate, and that it looks like it’s not possible for both of us to have both surnames (the options are one of us keeps theirs, and the other get’s both, or we choose one only, and we both want to have both), so we kind of didn’t want to bother with it for a while.

Few recommendations from the top of my head, from skimming the post.

I’d recommend checking out QubesOS (https://www.qubes-os.org/), especially since it seems you switch between ToR and already use Silverblue, which is AFAIK similar, but why not go all the way in?

Also for VPN - I’ve switched Proton for Mullvad VPN, because I really like the idea they are going for - if you pair Mullvad browser, that is designed to have the same fingerprint for all users, with a VPN that’s from the same company, you can kind of expect that most of the Mullvad VPN users will also be users of Mullvad Browser. Which means you will not be one of the few Proton VPN users with Mullvad fingerprint, but will have the same fingerprint as most of other users of Mullvad VPN. This will make it harder to fingerprint you based on your browser. One word of warning, though - don’t install extensions to Mullvad. If you do, you break the “same fingerprint” premise, and the more extensions you install, the more identifiable you are. Mullvad should be used without any extensions.

Another thing I see is music streaming - I think that in general I’d recommend just getting a cheap laptop/NAS and run your own Jellyfin, and slowly start building your own music collection. You can also run Matrix server as a bonus, and bridge all your communication (including Signal, even though that may not help that much) - but it does help if you need to use some kind of service, i.e Messenger, for group or work related purposes.

My approach to music was to cancel my subscription, and then use the money I save to spend on albums on Bandcamp, so I still support the artists I want. I make sure to do that every month. Since there’s just wast amount of music to get, I use Headphones with an account on redacted.ch to fill my library, but I still make sure to buy albums I like even if I already have them downloaded. The added bonus is that you actually don’t loose any of your music, if the artist decides to pull it off the streaming service, which has aready happened to me several time.

If you want hosting your own LLM, take a look at https://refact.ai/. But note that it’s not really cheap, I’ve recently upgraded my computer and decided to use my NVIDIA 1060 to run refact, and it still didn’t work well - 8Gb of GPU memory is borderline usable, and I couldn’t do the finetuning.