This feels like a hobby or special interest rather than a list of genuine software recommendations, unless you're running CoffeeBSD and browsing the web with Netsurf.
No one cares. There’s little serious pushback to privacy invasions by big tech. Flock cameras have been a rare exception. Half the people “have nothing to hide” and half aren’t willing to give up the convenience that the popular app or gadget gives them.
I'm convinced this is the state because people don't know the implications and scale of the privacy invasion. The flock camera incident shows that when people can sense, understand and feel the impact they don't like it. If we pose it as they are selling network data, nobody minds, if we pose it as they are selling your identity on the internet people get uncomfortable. But its hard to convince people of the latter. Mostly because nothing big happens due to big data breaches as someone on HN was remarking recently. Additionally, I think people have resigned to the status quo as they think that is the only way they can get their gadgets for cheap. That is just not true, companies can still make a profit without being predatory. Its just that it will not be the maximum profit.
Part of the problem is most people don't have an idea of what's being collected.
With just a little bit of interaction with the modern internet, the profiles created are stunningly accurate. Age, gender, political ideology, favorite food, relationship status, how many kids you have.
All this stuff gets slowly collected, aggregated and shared amongst data brokers.
People would care so much more if they knew just how invasive advertising actually is. All to try and convince you to drink one more coke or grab one more cheeseburger.
You don't need a new toilet seat? But you just looked at toilet seats and then bought one. Are you sure you don't need another? Don't you like toilet seats?
I see this as a failure of news media. Specially tragic as they don't even recognize this as their duty. Their reporting is almost always single data points. They don't make the overall picture clear when reporting this stuff. Imagine if the financial crisis was reported as individual shares crashing and not a market trend.
What are they going to say? "Trackers, like these 300 we have on our site, are monitoring all this stuff and our NDA doesn't let us tell you what they are doing."
You can’t realistically stop this. The industry is international and any interaction being shared across companies allows you to build this profile. It’s impossible to be fully private while having the openness of our internet interactions. You can try to limit the implications but that’s it
I don't truly understand what you are suggesting here. None of these interactions need to be recorded by anyone. You definitely don't need to sell that data.
It cannot be outlawed 100%, no problem can truly be solved by legislation. But that doesn't mean we can't start by banning sale of user data. I don't understand how it is legal to do even today.
330M people in the country, you can run that entirely though a remote FBI office.
and the people using the data are gonna be the local cops; FBI ain't flying out to chase a couple of basic-ass assault charges or thefts.
email snooping, hand full of highway cameras at known bottlenecks, border crossings -- these are abstractions to most people. the flock cameras in their neighborhood are not, and cannot be absractions.
You should probably get a head start on waiting a couple years to bite your tongue and assume everything you type into a computer is summarized and sent to your boss, government, advertisers, political actors, insurance companies, worst enemy, etc. With phones, Alexas, and little AI tamagotchis, you probably shouldn't say much in person either.
I know fellow stargazers who keep local dark spots secret for fear of drawing attention to them because they are that rare. Places that are dark and legal to be all night are even rarer (public boat ramps are a good place to look). It might be different on the US west coast where there's a lot of public land.
I've got the best results with BreezeTTS, Higgs Audio v3, and Fish Audio S2 Pro. audio.cpp (https://github.com/0xShug0/audio.cpp) is an easy way to run a lot of different models.
Different models have different strengths. If you throw an entire ebook at a model you're going to get a different result than if you craft a perfect 10 second sentence with a model that supports voice direction and emotion tags, so you should try a bunch depending on your use case.
GLM 5.3 Flash for personal hobby stuff. It's the first local-ish model that feels capable enough to be a default model to me (and it's very cheap). I'd rather get addicted to an open weight LLM in a class I can theoretically run if consumers ever get access to RAM again and can't get taken away from me. Locally I use Deepseek Flash, Qwen3.8-Next-Flash, or Gemma 4 depending on how slowly I want my slop to generate.
Whoever does need it, I give you permission to throw out all your old cables, power adapters, and routers. Yes, on the off chance you do decide you need a Palm III dock, Linksys WRT54G, or Sony PSP charger that means you'd have to buy one on Ebay, but you can cross that $10 bridge if it actually happens.
For me it's not the cost that bugs me when I don't have a part, but rather the disruption to my flow. If I can't get a project done all at once I'm much less likely to ever get it done.
No, this method does not work. I tried, got rid of all those stuff because why would I need it ever again. And of course a month later I needed that one stupid thing right there and then. And I remember throwing away... Not again, I keep at least one cable of each in a separate box to find immediately, the rest is stored, it is not asking for any money.
Yeah, what happens to me is I need a thing, go to Amazon to order it, see that I already bought it 4 years ago, spend 30 minutes trying to find it, then let out a big sigh and order it again.
Give them away to a thrift shop instead. Then you've helped somebody else who will find that cable in the thrift shop. So they can put it on ebay and sell it back to you when you need it two months later.
Yeah its hard enough when you need a Mini USB cable. When you need the proprietary RS232 cable for an old piece of hardware, at short notice, that stings.
Speaking as a person that had to buy 2 additional psp chargers (my ebook reader uses one too), please throw those onto ebay or your local marketplace instead :)
And whoever needs something else, I give you permission to ignore this fool and keep your box(es) of cables. I don't regret a single thing about my ~8 boxes of cables.
If you don't need an ebook gadget right now, Boox is about to release the Boox Picco as a direct competitor to this. It's in between the X3 and X4 in size, but has a front-lit and potentially higher resolution screen.
I have an X4 Pro (219 ppi) and I use 14pt font because letter widths are pretty uneven at 12pt and on a screen this small I wish I could use my preferred tiny font size. Other than that, it's great.
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