Use a Google Voice phone number, and an AI generated photo/video.
You can even use augmentations to create different photos/videos of the same fake person. Or create an “altered” version of yourself close enough to match whatever Facebook has.
…Hopefully.
I’m in the same predicament. There’s always eBay, but they take a fat cut on top of whatever is paid for shipping.
You’d gain HDR!
Windows is nearly effortless to maintain if you only use it for entertainment.
Maybe we just have different priorities, but right now, I’d be miserable and wasting so much time if I was stuck on Linux only, even though I use Linux like 90% of the time. Some media and some games just won’t look right.
And to emphasize, it would take sooo much time to massage this issue on Linux. Dual booting saves me a ton of maintenance and tweaking.
Here’s an interesting test:
Say what you will about Safari and iOS, but it rocks with image format support. HDR JPEG XL and AVIF render correctly, and look like the original HEIF file from the camera.
Helium (a Chrome fork) is on the left, Firefox on the right, running CachyOS Linux with KDE on a TV, HDR enabled from AMD output.
Firefox fails miserably :(
Chrome sorta gets the AVIF right, though it seems to lose some dynamic range with the sun.
Completely disagree.
Even setting gaming aside, I’ve started taking family/fun photos in HDR instead of JPEG, and on things that can render them (like smartphones and TVs), they are gorgeous. I can’t imagine going back now.
I took this on a walk this week, completely unedited:
If your browser doesn’t render that, here’s my best attempt at an AVIF conversion:
And JPEG-XL:
On my iPhone or a TV, the sun is so bright it makes you squint, and as yellow-orange as real life. The bridge in shadow is dark but clear. It looks just like I’m standing there, with my eyes adjusting to different parts of the picture.
I love this! It feels like a cold, cozy memory.
Now if I crush it down to an SDR JPEG:
It just doesn’t* look* right. The sun is a paper-white blob, and washed out. And while this is technically not the fault of encoding it as SDR, simply being an 8 bit JPEG crushed all the shadows into blocky grey blobs.
…This is the kicker with HDR. It’s not that it doesn’t look incredible. But the software/display support is just not there.
I bet most browsers viewing this post aren’t rendering those images right, if at all.
Lemmy, a brand new platform, doesn’t even support JXL, HEIF, or AVIF! It doesn’t support any HDR format at all; I had to embed them from catbox.
Dual booting is not bad!
What I do is share an NTFS partition between Windows and Linux for bulk data. If they’re DRM free, you can literally run the same games off the same drive.
Something goes wrong? I can just delete the windows partition and start over in 30 minutes, without losing hardly anything. It’s so much better as a “disposable” OS.
I also use two EFI partitions (the default Windows one and a new one for Linux) so there is zero possiblity of the OSes interacting.
To be blunt, I would never do banking in Windows if you can do linux. It’s just too much of a risk.
I’m on a Sony OLED with a 3090. I game some, and color grade photos/videos in HDR.
…And I can’t get HDR to look right in KDE, even with the display running off my AMD IGP. It has basically zero options for me to tweak.
So I use Windows for that.
Honestly, it’s hard enough on Windows. It’s a coin flip as to whether apps works or not, and the TV needs adjustments for some, lest they crush black or blow out highlights/colors. Many games, specifically, need configurable mods to look right.
One of my saddest video workflows is transcoding on Linux, and downloading the result to my iPhone to see if it looks right.
Yeah, exactly.
Cromite’s explicit focus is, literally, antifingerprinting. With the goal of breaking cross site tracking I guess.
A more accurate goal for Tor/Mullvad is anonymizing, e.g. “blending in with the crowd.”
It’s like radically changing your clothes every day vs wearing super incognito stuff. Different means, each more optimal for different aspects of security/privacy.
Already done, see: https://github.com/uazo/cromite
When I go to the fingerprint test, a bunch of the values like canvas resolution and timezone are randomized.
…Not everything, though.
Whoa. These comments are quick to jump to “your parent doesn’t love you” or talking about divorce. Chill out, folks.
“Come on, Sarah, can’t you just be normal and use Gmail like everyone?”
my mom, scolding me.
I don’t know the context, but… that doesn’t seem like something that should hold your Mom’s attention?
Maybe she’s worried about something else, and the email topic is just a proxy. My Mom was the same when I really got into tech hobbies in some problematic points of my childhood.
I mean… let’s set aside that you are not even covered by GDPR.
Didn’t use my real name, didn’t log in - partly because I didn’t want to trigger Cloudflare’s fingerprinting again.
“When users delete their account, this action is permanent, since we delete any and all data associated with that account.”
I feel like you’re making a mountain out of a molehill.
Practically, if you want to delete your account, you just log in and delete your account. If you are worried about cloudflare fingerprinting, well, use the same tools you’d use to resist it anywhere else on the web.
CivitAI doesn’t make it difficult like a lot of services do, which is what GDPR is aiming to cover her. Technically it’d be a violation if you were even covered, but it doesn’t really feel like the purpose of the law? And it says absolutely nothing about protecting you from Cloudflare fingerprinting.
If you’re worried about cross-site tracking, specifically, take a look at Cromite, the browser.
Going beyond Adblock, it’s stuffed with “anti fingerprinting” measures like randomizing your resolution and time, your hardware and drivers, JS execution speed, anything that could be used to try and uniquely identify your PC. It’s SOTA at that as far as I know.
Sounds like exactly what you need as a “backup browser”, as its designed to anti-fingerprint with JS enabled, neutering certain JS feature’s by default.
…But that’s just one form of privacy. If you are worried about any entity logging your visited IPs, you use a Tor browser or something like Mullad.
Here’s what I’m talking about:
And again, I think “use Discord for text, but use this for voice” is a much easier ask than trying to get them to login to some other chat app.
Ehhhh, Krisp is the least of Discord’s privacy problems. I’d say start with all its monitoring of what you do on your system as low hanging fruit.
That being said, try to get all your friends to switch to SonoBus for voice chat, strictly. It’s awesome! It’s way lower latency (so less talking over each other), clear, point to point, dead easy to start since it doesn’t need an account, customizable for quiet or noisy mics, works on everything, I could go on and on.
Windows 11 :/
Though heavily neutered, where even defender is disabled.
I boot CachyOS Linux with a lot of tuning (and some recent game testing). A linux gaming OS! I’m using Cachy like 95% of the time; I am not anti linux.
But honestly… It’s just not worth a few lost features and performance hit over Windows for me, on top of the extra hassle. Its easier to just reboot. Maybe the experience is different on AMD GPUs, but I suspect Nvidia is at a disadvantage here.
This is on a desktop. Based on my experience with a RTX 2060 laptop I used to have, you also have the to deal with graphics switching, rendering on one device while displayong on another, and making sure your 1050 actually goes to sleep when not in use.
Meta pays for PyTorch development as well!
Llama.cpp will be fine of course, it technically has nothing to do with Meta.
But yeah, it’s mostly disappointing IMO…
And kinda stupid. These are literally experimental models; they release one experiment with mixed results, and admittedly catastrophically marketing for it, and Zuck pulls the rug?
Pro is 120hz.
But they are expensive as heck. I only got the 16 Plus because its a carrier loss leader, heh.
And wouldn’t fix some of my other quibbles with iOS’s inflexibility. My ancient jailbroken iPhone 4 was more customizable than now, and Apple is still slowly, poorly implementing features I had a decade ago. It’s mind boggling, and jailbreaking isn’t a good option anymore.
My last Android phone was a Razer Phone 2, SD845 circa 2018. Basically stock Android 9.
And it was smooth as butter. It had a 120hz screen while my iPhone 16 is stuck at 60, and I can feel it. And it flew through some heavy web apps I use while the iPhone chugs and jumps around, even though the new SoC should objectively blow away even modern Android devices.
It wasn’t always this way; iOS used to be (subjectively) so much faster that it’s not even funny, at least back when I had an iPhone 6S(?). Maybe there was an inflection point? Or maybe it’s only the case with “close to stock” Android stuff that isn’t loaded with bloat.
Random aside, I switched from Android to iOS a year ago. I miss Android already.
The UI is more convoluted an clunky than iOS from years ago, just as uncustomizable, and performs shockly bad on heavy webpages on a brand new 16+. It’s got no freaking RAM, no sd card slot. Some free FOSS apps are nonexistant or paid only.
Security and OOTB privacy is better and app support is generally better, but that’s about it? I’d probably keep an iPhone around to bank on when I eventually switch…
I just switched from Android to iOS, and while I have many complaints, I’m pleasantly surprised by how “walled off” the apps mostly are. Unlike Android, they have to comply to function for the general public.
It feels a lot more like tier two, where it isn’t like a spyware implant but your banking app or whatever will still function. And yes I know it’s far from good, just talking degrees here…
Eh at least they presumably pay attention, moderate it, and tailor it to your country.
One of my issues with FB is that it mind as well be run from Alpha Centauri. There’s nothing “human” or local about, its a gaping maw mixed with tons of other predatory service.