Once I had to use the internet without and ad blocker ( shiver ). It was horrible. I still have nightmares.

Joking aside. I couldn’t believe how crammed full and chaotic sites were without an ad blocker. I have no evidence to support this other than my experience but I think , for me , ad blockers are good for my mental health. Being constantly exposed to all those messages trying to exploit insecurities can’t be good for people.

Anyways ad blockers are the best.

This seems very obvious to me , not that it isn’t worth highlighting. Particularly in a world with open models and weights , which we should desperately want. The don’t worry water marks will be a thing just seems like an attempt have some response that dampers concerns. I don’t imagine most people working in the AI space actually think this would work. I could be wrong.

Yeah I 100% understand and to a large extent agree with this. I think money should be involved , creators should get paid. I don’t think peertube has become “the answer” yet and there is some combination of market level event and technology/feature set that needs to be in place to create enough moment for people to move off YouTube. It will happen eventually ( I think ) but what exist today isn’t enough of a pull to overcome the momentum YouTube has but that doesn’t mean that “we” should give up.

As much as I like the privacy frontends I think ‘we’ have to move to alternative platforms sooner than later and pull the bandaid vs. continuing to indirectly be dependent on google as the base platform.

Yeah it is great – their sales are pretty good but they kind of hide it but I often pick up a bunch of books from there and then host them on my home server so my family can read the books I bought. Also good to support your local book shop if you can , in my opinion.

https://libro.fm/ you can buy audiobooks through independent book store and they are drm free. It’s great. If you want more of an eye patch solution. You could rip audio from YouTube. There tends to be a lot of books uploaded there.

I really wanted this game to be amazing but I’ve heard very mixed things to not good things. Perhaps I will give it a go after the update.

I’ve used StandardNotes for years. They are great, very privacy friendly and lots of good features. I’ve also used Obsidian like others have mentioned but I didn’t use 95% of the features on either standard notes or Obsidian – now days I just use a general markdown files and store them in a git repo – low complexity and I like the simplicity of it. 100% recommend.

I use apple music. On linux I use Ciderwhich is amazing. Super clean interface and lots of nobs to turn in order to make everything sound and behave the way I like. If you like apple music or are looking for a streaming solution cider is awesome.

No worries. Honestly , this is a pretty hard question to answer. I’ve always been NB, but for a long time I didn’t have the ‘words’ or ‘desire’ to acknowledge it. For me it is very much a combination of ‘feeling’ and ‘philosophy’ – It started as an acknowledgment that I was pretending a lot , mostly to try and fit into gendered social circles. For me I wasn’t pretending to be male or female , I was pretending to be either. Once I acknowledge that I was pretending to feel and like or not feel and not like specific things to fit into social structures I started to be more honest with myself and actually be open to who I am. It was and continues to be a Journey. Very similar to you I realized that I “can’t be bothered with [socially] constructed masculinity or the version of masculinity my family expected from me and started distancing myself.” At first I distanced toward Fem but that didn’t work for me either – it does for a lot of people , many of which are probably here and I am absolutely in love with the fact that it does work for them and inspired to continue figuring out my own truth. Eventually , I was really tired of not ‘knowing’ where I fit and just decided to not give a F*** and set everything aside and embrace my non-definable-self. This worked for me and was a literal weight off my shoulders. It just feels right for me. I call this NB. Others do it differently.

I feel bad going off topic to NB stuff in this thread/community meant to celebrate and unite TransFem ( I love my chosen family and community ) but also didn’t want to not respond to you given all of this stuff is hard and we all need support. Happy to answer more questions in Direct Messages if you want. Hope this is helpful : )

I don’t know you but I am proud of you. I am only out to a few people as NB and the thought of coming out to my coworkers is particularly scary for some reason. Thanks for the inspiration.

Same. I used graphene and calyx for a while but really needed the nav features so stoped using them. Very excited for this!!

Hey, I am a machine learning engineer that works with people data. Generally you measure bias in the training data, the validation sets, and the outcomes ( in an ongoing fashion - AIF 360 is a common library and approach ). There are lots of ways to measure bias and or fairness. Just checking if a feature was used isn’t considered “enough” by any standards or practitioner. There are also ways to detect and mitigate some of the proxy relationships you’re pointing to. That being said, I am 100% skeptical that any hiring algorithm isn’t going to be extremely bias. A lot of big companies have tried and quit because despite using all the right steps the models were still bias https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight-idUSKCN1MK08G. Also many of the metrics used to report fairness have some deep flaws ( disprate impact ).

All that being said the current state is that there are no requirements for reporting so vendors don’t do the minimum 90% of the time because if they did it would cost a lot more and get in the way of the “AI will solve all your problems with no effort” narrative they want to put forward so I am happy to see any regulation coming into place even if it won’t be perfect.

I am on pop is for my home desktop. I like the built in tiling manager. Ubuntu for work. Might give nix or kde a go next.

Jobs done

I use kagi. I think it depends on your level of concern , as it does with most things. Kagi has a pretty nicely written privacy policy. They do require an account but I signed up with a masked email and cc. For my use I find their privacy policy enough given the other measures I take but the main reason I like kagi is zero ads or prioritized posting. Experiencing search with out ads is a pretty awesome exp in my opinion. There are other ways to get free search with ads stripped out but this “feel” fundamentally different from a service purpose built to be ad free and private. I am happy to pay for ad free platforms vs using platforms that are trying to do privacy preserving ads but this is more of a personal stance and preference. I know your question was more about privacy than ads but I find the two closely linked. I’ve attached a summary of their privacy policy below:

• Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not see what you are searching at all.
• We do not log or store your IP address. Your IP address is used only temporarily when enriching location/maps searches, and is not shared with any other party.
• We only store cookies needed for site functionality. We do not use any web browser analytics or other frontend telemetry.
• We do not display any ads, or have any first-party or third-party tracking in service of ads.
• We do not share customer data with third parties, except as needed to perform explicitly accessed services. In those cases, we will share the minimum amount of data needed to provide the service, and will do so in an anonymous way.
• We collect only the data needed to provide and protect the service.
• We proxy all images to prevent tracking from third parties.
• We use HTTPS encryption everywhere. All passwords are hashed and salted.

https://kagi.com/privacy

Cool, yeah I logged into my account. This is my user https://bookwyrm.social/user/tulkaa I tend to read shorter fiction and philosophy with a mix of fantasy. Need to port some reviews and books from StoryGraph for the last year or so.

I am reading Once there were wolves. I am about 15% in. So far it is interesting. I am coming in blind so I am not sure what to expect.

I used it for a bit and supported it when it came out but it was super slow. I moved to StoryGraph. Are people liking it? Is it slow? Maybe I will give it another go.