Especially smart TVs. They’re especially chatty, accounting for something like 85% of network calls (all blocked).

Agreed. There was a time when it worked impressively well, but it’s become increasingly lazy, forgetful, and confidently wrong, even missing obvious explicit prompts. If you’re using it thoughtfully as an augment, fine. But if you’re relying on it blindly, it’s risky.

That said, in my experience, Anthropic and OpenAI are still miles ahead. Perplexity had me hooked for a while, but its results have nosedived lately. I know they tune their own model while drawing from OpenAI and DeepSeek vs their own true model but still, whatever they’re doing could use some undoing.

Without delving deeper into these numbers, the politics, mechanics, or absurd cost of education in the US - $2.2B is an absolutely staggering amount of funding for a single institution. To say that it is privileged is an understatement.

Tired as Orwellian comparisons are, it’s hard to ignore how much this reeks of a Ministry of Truth.

Here I am, snorting my wife awake at 2 am because of an unexpectedly hilarious cock joke

With everything going on right now, the fact that I still feel physically sick reading things like this tells me I haven’t gone completely numb yet. Just absolutely repulsive.

I’ve seen this come up a couple different ways and it’s almost always a scam. Social engineering to get victims buy-in with plausible tech buzzwords and investing their time as a hook.

But then again, maybe they really are soulless pricks.

I don’t even want to imagine the environmental studies and hurdles they’ll have to jump through to artificially alter an areas day/night cycle. There’s a laundry list of environmental concerns that I’m sure any homeowner or eco-activist worth their salt would jump on. Not to mention glare and impacts to air traffic, on and on.

Would make my solar panels pretty darn effective though. Would probably be great for SAD in winter too. Clever idea. Not sure I can get behind it though.

Whenever I have to brave the Google abyss, I usually use Startpage. Obviously uBlock Origin but if I can avoid being bombarded by devious and distracting ads altogether, I’d rather that.

True but I see this more as a critical thinking problem - which is pervasive in our society and worsened by the tech bubbles. People should want to seek out information that both argues for and against a topic.

The way our education systems work now, at least in the US, that method of thinking only begins around college and varies widely by academic pedigree.

I don’t run VPNs at the router level. The speed and latency hit, plus the spambot triggers aren’t worth it for me. This is purely a non-privacy minded preference, mind you, and I’m totally not an expert.

You bring up a good point though. Regardless of what’s running upstream, if my device is running private relay, it all gets bypassed. So I have to disable private relay.

My preference is to run nextdns over DoH, AdGuard locally on iOS + Stop the Madness, and a VPN when I’m feeling sheepish.

On iOS, I’ve tried quite a few combinations and I’ve gotten feedback from users with others.

When I ran pi-hole or AdGuard home, I also used AdGuard on all my iOS devices - both the DNS pseudo-VPN and safari extensions cause otherwise ads would sneak in. The Adguard app removes the annoying ads from Apple News and NYT apps.

Now I just use NextDNS and the same AdGuard iOS app setup.

The few people on ours are local real estate agents and severe weather alerts lol

Oh! I’ll have to watch that. Hadn’t realized Apple toys with this theme quite a bit. Constellation had so much promise but it flamed out for me. Severance might be tangentially related with the theme, compartmentalized lives, being equally fascinating.

Mr. Robot and Counterpart did things to my brain questioning reality.

Yup. I quit everything but Reddit several years back without a second thought in all that time because I lived in a big metropolitan city.

Now I live in a small suburb where all the towns and businesses post to FB, neighbors have tradeposts and active interest groups on there, the schools and Police post info there too. My wife has connected to “friends” we otherwise wouldn’t exchange info with.

All that has had me wanting to create a new account - just to connect. I was completely ignorant to the role it plays outside of big cities beforehand. Nextdoor is a really crappy alternative.

This is both a terrifying and astonishing thought.

This introduces the possibility that we’re experiencing 2 universes and creating a third within ourselves.

We’re really bringing the most dystopian science fiction to life, aren’t we? Does art imitate life or…?

Oh this is curious! Cause the solution would be for those services to be privatized. I wonder how many would pay for those services.

“No, Jimmy. You don’t need to go to skool. Now go change bale the hay.”

Wait! Have we come full circle? Is Orbs the end before we come back to Beans?