Took a long time, but nice to see this topic getting mainstream attention.

OP if you enjoy a fun weekend project, don’t go with a pi-hole. It literally only takes about 5 minutes. Also I recommend the blocklistproject lists https://blocklistproject.github.io/Lists/

Haha, Ulrich I noticed you on several threads the past few days correcting misinformation, thank you for your service.

In my book a single data point (a phone number) is not “vast amounts of metadata”. Again, I have never seen someone describing Signal as a “paragon of privacy and security”, Signal itself certainly does not say that (It’s presented as an improvement over SMS).

Signal is an excellent alternative if you’re looking for an E2E encrypted SMS replacement your grandmother can use.

Where did you read that they are collecting vast amounts of metadata? Not challenging your claim just that I have been trying to find more info and came up empty. Signal says “we don’t collect analytics or telemetry data” but that’s about it.

I’d be curious to hear your criticisms of Signal! While I haven’t seen anyone describing it as a “paragon of privacy and security” I do think it is a highly accessible SMS replacement that is also open source, end-to-end encrypted, and operated by a nonprofit.

I don’t get why people are so interested in the fediverse.

Because Mastodon is Twitter without the possibility of an Elon Musk and Lemmy/Piefed is Reddit without the possibility of a Steve Huffman. You clearly feel that you can do better than the collective efforts of the ActivityPub devs so I am rooting for you!

“Lemmy” is actually not a platform like Reddit, it’s software and the network of instances running that software is decentralized (Lemmy uses the ActivityPub protocol) meaning each instance is operated by a different person (or group). There are also other similar softwares like Piefed and mBin that work pretty well with Lemmy. That is all to say that if an Admin or Mod is “getting fascisty” you can block that instance, join another, or even create your own. That’s the beauty of ActivityPub!

Matrix.org & the servers they run, which was originally funded by Israeli Intelligence

Can you elaborate on this? The only connection I was able to find to Israel at all is that the British people who originally created the protocol worked for an American company (amdocs) that was founded in Israel in 1982, but bought out in 1985 long before Matrix was developed. Furthermore, Amdocs hasn’t funded the development of Matrix since 2017 and the current Matrix.org foundation is based in the UK.

Wikipedia: Amdocs, Matrix

How does it work self hosting? Is it querying other search engines or just maintaining a database on your server?

I see, I wasn’t comparing an article to a video, I was comparing a video to a text summary of the same video.

Those are great drives but I would not want one of those in the room where I sleep haha

We seem to agree that actually eating real food at a greasy spoon is preferable to reading a description of the dining experience offered at the Ritz. But your replies give me the impression we disagree?

Exactly! Why go to the first restaurant (video) at all if you don’t like the experience? You’re really going to wait outside the door of the first one asking the people leaving what the food tastes like? How is that better than the restaurant (videos) you do like?

It’s a creative work, you are talking about Veritasium as if it he’s reading out a written a security bulletin on camera.

A menu is not a creative work it’s a means to convey information. Veritasium is not reading wikipedia articles on screen, he’s creating an original work.

Listen I am not criticizing how you choose to enjoy your time I just find the entire concept of finding the experience of reading a text summary to be more to be more rewarding than experiencing the thing itself to be alien.

What feels alien to me is the idea that experiencing a creative work is itself a means to an end.

I prefer to digest text too, but still would choose to taste a meal than read a typed up printout of the flavors it contains.

when I read comments like these it makes me realize that maybe all the money flowing to OpenAI isn’t folly and there really are people out there trying to tl;dr their own lives

Not to people with a financial interest in promoting Monero.