A few years ago I was a titled member of a local activist group that was considered “militant” by local police. It was a Black-lead group (I’m white myself) that spoke out and fought against police corruption, had a low-frequency radio station, and some other cool socialist shit. Anyway, I learned in a roundabout way that the local police would come by my house weekly to keep tabs on when I was home and when I wasn’t. I’m pretty sure they did this with every member. I’ll admit it was kind of flattering, seeing as I don’t consider myself even remotely important, but also fun because it wasted some cops’ time.

I don’t think people fully realize that the tons of funding these pig farms get is enough to allow them to arbitrarily put surveillance on everyday folks without even breaking a sweat. Some of the FOIA requests I’ve heard about from people in my local activist circles are wild. FBI vans, country-wide surveillance tracking using ATM cameras, wild shit!

The tl;dr - yes, even you can be under some sort of surveillance. Even if it’s just that the cops have seen your face more than once at various marches.

If this is the eye-scanning orb bullshit, stay far, far away.

All the details point to Palantir from what I’ve read. There is this sudden massive surveillance and censorship push everywhere we look. I’m convinced they are trying to funnel people into a position where they have zero privacy (and eventually payment system) protections. We’re going to see new tech pop up. A Palantir VPN; a Palantir payment processor; some new crypto banking system. They’re forcing us all into a world where Elon Musk’s stupid “Everything Platform” idea is a reality so that we are beholden to a single entity that possesses all of the keys.

Lol mine was too insignificant to make the cut.

Yeah, you get immediate feedback, vs a scenario where you have to manually check the “facts” it provides in order to ensure it’s not hallucinating. I’ve had Copilot straight up hallucinate functions on me and I knew that they were bullshit instantly.

I iterate with it a ton and feed it back errors it makes, or things like type mismatches. It fixes them instantly and understands the issue almost every single time.

That’s the trick. Iterate often and always give it new instructions if it does something stupid. Basically be as verbose as needed and give it tons of context, desired standards, pitfalls to avoid, whatever. It helps a ton.

I’ve had the greatest success with Claude. The company I work for basically let us all go wild with a few to trial, and Claude has been the best for all of us—even better than GitHub Copilot.

I pay for my own pro plan outside of work and use the VSCode plugin. I’d say read the quickstart guide and experiment with it. Start off with having it do smaller changes and don’t be afraid to be verbose. The more context, the better. Point it to existing files you want to follow the patterns of and model after; give it links to resources for best practices, etc. You can also use it in “plan mode” if you want to see its proposed approach before it starts editing.

I also recommend leaving it so that each change it makes requires your approval (it will do this by default and you can step through everything). That way you always have some control and if it does something dumb, you can stop it at that step and pivot with a different instruction. Alternatively, if you want to see it go ham and carry everything out without approval at each step, you can enable auto-accept.

Once you get into it, start looking into how to craft instruction files. You can have those at your disposal for things like writing tests, language-specific guidelines and practices, etc. That way you can make sure it uses those as a reference so you don’t have to give it the same instructions over and over with every prompt.

If you hate writing tests, I’ve had really good luck letting it handle that. I tend to use it more for the bulk tasks that suck. For things where I want more control, I work with it on a piecemeal basis in my project.

Speaking as someone who hates generative AI but has been forced to adapt to using AI in the programming field to stay relevant, this doesn’t suggest they’re vibe coding. The programming world is the only place AI has actually added value (I should note it’s done some neat stuff helping with diagnoses in the medical world too), but like everything, you get what you put into it.

Feed it enough instruction and context, and it can handle the drudgery of things like tech debt updates and other things a programmer knows how to do, but would rather offload to a tool. I’ve had Claude do refactors like that while stepping through and reviewing every single change. It has saved me hours, spared me from hell, and made me look good at work.

That’s my grounded take as a person that has worked with Claude a ton.

But AI everywhere else? Fucking worthless. The whole point is to do the bullshit mundane tasks so that us humans can do art and passionate work, not the opposite.

Qobuz (pronounced Co-buzz). Based out of France.

They will follow anyone. I was being “checked on” weekly by local police a few years ago because I was involved with activist groups. The amount of resources they have to throw at this nonsense is through the stratosphere.

The subtext here: “if you post anti-Israel stuff, you can kiss your chances goodbye!”

It’s really crappy at trying to address its own mistakes. I find that it will get into an infinite error loop where it hops between 2-4 answers, none of which are correct. Sometimes it helps to explicitly instruct it to format the data provided and not edit it in any way, but I still get paranoid.

If working with AI has taught me anything, ask it absolutely NOTHING involving numbers. It’s fucking horrendous. Math, phone numbers, don’t ask it any of that. It’s just advanced autocomplete and it does not understand anything. Just use a search engine, ffs.

“We do not provide bulk information to any government.” Millions of dollars on the other hand…

Most won’t but that’s just reality.

https://github.com/Vance-ng-vn/stremio-seed

Stremio is everything I could ever want and more.

I deleted mine. Leaving old accounts around gives hackers another thing to potentially get into. You could always log in, ensure it’s locked down, and log out forever.

Nothing will ever make me like ad tech. America keeps acting like this massive tech innovator, but they just keeps rehashing ads, or pushing AI that can’t exist without stealing from everyone.

The fact that this is considered a viable option because we live in a country with a government that refuses to actually provide for its people, is painfully depressing. AI as your therapist… seriously what the fuck is this timeline? I work in tech and the people constantly blowing AI hot air are not folks you want in charge of the tools for your therapy and wellbeing.

Oh I am a terrible navigator haha. I lean on tools a ton, so it’s not faulting you. I just worry about AI because of how complex and enticing it is.

I find that if you diversify the models you use, you can find what works best for what you’re asking. I use Copilot daily at work and I have to coach it sometimes. I’ll go off on the web to check its work and correct it as needed. Sometimes it works, other times it gets into a loop of unhelpful answers.

Oh wow, that’s awesome. I’m gonna have to try that model out. I have an old XFX 7950 I can try burning out lmao.

Privacy issues aside, don’t allow yourself to become too comfortable with leaning on AI for so much. Aside from the obvious things like AI info being flat out wrong sometimes and hallucinations, it’s going to train you into some bad habit holes during a vulnerable time. Look at how quickly we reach to map software for travel. It causes us to get mentally lazy.

If you are focused on using it and worried about privacy, you can host your own model like someone else mentioned, but you need a pretty beefy computer for it, and you could potentially host a model on the cloud (I know that breaks privacy and self-hosting rules a bit), but that can get expensive.

Edit: You could give Jan a try.

I’m a programmer and I’ve had to discipline myself with how I use Copilot. I try to lean on it for troubleshooting code I’ve written, and for doing tedious tasks that I know how to do but want to save time on.

It’s only Chinese surveillance and censorship when you don’t use an open source fork of DeepSeek, which is not possible with OpenAI or any of the other US-based big names. There’s already versions of DS that remove the telemetry and censorship. So it becomes a moot point for one and an unsolvable problem for the others.

Edit: I can’t find one that mentions removal or blocking of telemetry, but this one removes the censorship mechanism. Point still stands. Your data is out there with whoever your AI provider is. It’s part of why I don’t use AI for anything sensitive or important.

All AI does this. It just becomes more obvious that this is tired old anti-China propaganda because we don’t see similar articles for OpenAI and other US-based AI tools.

The difference is that OpenAI is closed-source so you never know what it’s actually doing, and DeepSeek being open source means the data being sent can be seen, and the mechanisms can be removed.

I saved them from a landfill! They smell kinda weird though.

I take it as more of an observation and use it to be more mindful of what I buy, the services I use, etc. The reality is that we don’t know what happens behind the scenes with so much of this stuff, but we can still be conscious of it and use it as an opportunity to reduce clutter in our lives.

Agreed. If I haphazardly ditched services based on the opinions of tech folks, I’d be reduced to using a pair of cans attached with string and nothing else.

Yeah, I think (hope?) we will find that his opinion is not echoed among them.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and that applies to tech. I pay for Proton and this is disappointing af but not shocking. Corporations and wannabe billionaires always fold to fascism.

Gonna start looking around at alternative email services to consider but I use my Proton email everywhere, so switching away is going to suck.

Bye bye, Giphy.

Wouldn’t it be better to at least put a modicum of effort in to have some privacy, than to put zero effort in and have none at all?

Aww what a bummer. It’s been really handy and helps me avoid fraud easily with the one-time use cards. You can also make cards with limits set that cannot be exceeded.

If you’re comfortable sharing, where are you at? I can look around for a similar service.

Spin up a card using a service like Privacy and use that. I make one-time use cards with it all the time.

I think the airport near me is getting them soon, if not already (it’s been a little while since I last flew). This seems like a handful of companies saw an opportunity to sell the concept of security to people that are naive, and they went along with it. Typical government tech contract type stuff that in this case they use as an additional data aggregation vector. It explains why there was no push or response when OP opted out. When someone knows that an action or inquiry can be perceived as questionable or invasive, they want to end the exchange quickly like it never happened.

Wow, this seems like they’re trying to take advantage of an opportunity to slip something irrelevant in to the process. Like someone was trying to think of a way to get facial recognition data and the TSA lines were the “perfect” place.

I think this might be anonymized enough where they can’t do the same old fingerprinting. But idk the full details. For anything else in terms of tracking, that’s where I recommend finding other tools and adding layers to anonymize and block further.

The reality is that people want stats on their advertising and that’s fair, as much as we (rightfully) hate ads. Completely and truly anonymizing the data seems like an acceptable compromise in this world. Mozilla is one of the few entities left that hasn’t absolutely folded to capitalism, and I’ll take what I can get.

• Joplin has a lot of customization
• Can store your notes wherever you want (Dropbox, WebDAV, OneDrive, Nextcloud, Joplin’s own cloud service, etc)
• Backups can optionally be encrypted (you set a password used to decrypt them and store that somewhere)
• You can make multiple notebooks in the hierarchy structure you want
• Open source
• Markdown (if you’re into that)
• Plugin support
• Tags

Love that you have Joplin on the list! I started using that recently to handle all of my notes and it’s been great.

I’m in tech and could never take myself seriously ever again if I built this.