AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

Hence why this article is about them leaving the openly Nazi billionaire's platform while remaining on other platforms that are mainstream and still provide a lot of reach :)

The a series have been great to me so far. The specs are usually more than enough for most use cases you’re gonna have for your phone, and the 9a and 10a both have better battery life than the rest of the 9 and 10 series’ respectively. The a series is substantially cheaper for what is, in my opinion, a totally justifiable Android experience that isn’t gonna be much different than the other models for most people. HOWEVER, I will say that if you plan on running a lot of apps that need to operate in the background or be constantly on, especially if you play games at the same time on your phone sometimes, the RAM could be too low for your liking and might occasionally lead to an app’s background process freezing for a bit. (e.g. a timer might freeze if the app isn’t actively open)

Don’t make trends your identity. You don’t want to look back on your life and all the photos you have of yourself, just to realize every fashion choice, purchase, event you went to, and way you talked was all because it was seen as cool, trendy, or “normal.” Live your life in a way that feels right and true to who you are, and what your values are, not what anybody else things is “right” for you to do.

It’s preemptive for when you DIE. That’s why in the screenshot you sent it says “in the event of my death”, not “if the government comes knocking, violate the law and delete my data first”. You can delete your data from Proton, too, but the payment information, which was how this person was identified, is stored regardless by their third-party payment provider. Mailbox only erases your payment info 4 weeks after you’ve last paid, and ended your contract with them, and they use Ayden for payments, which also has no set date at which they’ll delete your payment information.

If you’re worried Proton could identify you to authorities, either just make a new Proton account and pay anonymously (cryptocurrency or cash by mail), since that’s the only way this person was identified, or you could use what I’d consider to be the next-best, which is Tuta. Nowhere near as slick a UI, less overall offerings (only email and calendar), but it costs less and generally provides similar security and privacy to Proton. Though again, you’d have to pay via private means, otherwise you’re gonna get identified by the same mechanism this person was if the government really decided to come after you by your account.

Proton uses Chargebee for payments, which has its own data retention policy of essentially “as long as we want to”, but Proton does themselves keep limited data like the billing name, and last 4 digits. Proton’s privacy policy says nothing about a pre-set time delay after which they’d delete that data. They only claim that they “reserve our right” to remove your payment information if they think it’s no longer valid. So theoretically, that might mean if your card’s expiry date has passed, but that’s not a confirmation. The best way to reliably make sure Proton wouldn’t have any info on you is to not have ever tied any real information about yourself or your payment info to that account.

And Monero.

Yep! It’s not the same experience as F-Droid (e.g. it’s not gonna be you scrolling through a list of apps, picking the one you want, and hitting install. Obtainium is more of a “get the URL to where the app’s releases are, paste it in here, add it, then hit install, plus you might have to do a little config so it selects the right release if there are multiple”, but once it’s set up, it’s set up. I fully replaced the F-Droid app with Obtainium for actually installing and updating apps, but I still keep the F-Droid app around just because I can go on there, search up apps, do a little browsing, then take the app I want and put it in Obtainium.

Congratulations!

Seconded on Obtainium. Basically any FOSS app is gonna have a repo there with releases regardless, and you can always just use an f-droid repository if they only publish releases there. Plus, way easier to export a list of installed apps to restore them at a later date!

Yep, also owned by archive.today. As is archive.is, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn.

Same here. I get the nostalgia factor, and that tactile buttons can feel nice, but other than that I feel like it's just a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn't necessarily work well. Instead of a quick tap, you have to actually press on each button, which slows down typing. You can't resize, recolor, or reformat your keyboard to fit your needs better, there's no split keyboard functionality for landscape mode, etc. Plus it's just more mechanical failure points and areas that dust and gunk can get stuck in.

In my experience at least, there has not once been an instance where an LLM was able to find answers on Reddit more reliably than I could, and I’ve been using LLMs since before ChatGPT was even a thing. (though granted, most web-search compatible LLMs came later on) I think it will probably be better than the average user, since a lot of people simply aren’t that great at using search engines very effectively in the first place, but I wouldn’t call the answers “practically impossible to find.”

The problem is, it’s not unobtrusive. When I right click and I instantly get an option silently added to the list that sends data to an AI model hosted somewhere, which I’ve accidentally clicked due to muscle memory, it’s not good just because there’s also the option there to disable it. When I start up my browser after an update and I am instantly given an open sidebar asking me to pick an AI model to use, that’s obtrusive and annoying to have to close and disable. Mozilla has indicated they do not want to make these features opt-in, but opt-out. The majority of Mozilla users do not want these features by default, so the logical option is to make them solely opt-in. But Mozilla isn’t doing that. Mozilla is enabling features by default, without consent, then only taking them away when you tell them to stop. The approach Mozilla is taking is like if you told a guy you weren’t interested in dating him, but instead of taking that as a "no." he took it as a "try again with a different pickup line in 2 weeks" and never, ever stopped no matter what you tried. It doesn’t matter that you can tell him to go away now if he’ll just keep coming back. Mozilla does not understand consent, and they are violating the consent of their users every time they push an update including AI features that are opted-in by default.

Because google only pays Mozilla because of:

• Maintaining search dominance

• Preventing anti-monopoly scrutiny

They don’t want Mozilla to compete in any AI space, because there’s already a ton of competition in the AI space given how much money gets thrown around, so they don’t benefit from anti-monopoly efforts, and there’s so many models that they don’t benefit from search dominance in the AI space. They’d much rather have Mozilla stay a non-AI browser while they get to implement AI features and show shareholders that they’re “the most advanced” of them all, or that “nobody else is doing it like we do”.

WE. DON’T. WANT. THIS. Mozilla, for the love of god, stop cramming AI into the browser when the vast majority of your users just want a privacy-respecting browser that works. I’ve said it before, and I’ve said it again: I will not donate any more money to the Mozilla foundation until they stop cramming AI into everything, and you should too.

THANK YOU. I HAVE ALWAYS HAD A LARGE AMBITION TO CONSUME 2,496,266 CORNDOGS. I HAVE ALREADY EATEN 5. AT THIS RATE, I WILL BE FINISHED IN 56 YEARS. DO NOT WORRY, THERE ARE MANY PRESERVATIVES.

Fun fact, the guy who posted that (Caleb Hammer) is a YouTuber that allegedly hired actors to pretend to be broke people making bad financial decisions to get money off selling you a budgeting course when real people weren’t shocking enough for the audience, and also allegedly pressured a guy into doing OnlyFans after touching him inappropriately. Fun! /s https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beware-austin-based-creator-caleb-hammer-victor-vulcano-bjzaf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3ZYxFlcLII

*specifically boomers between years 1946 and 1964, which have actually paid more than they’ll get in benefits. The others are still taking more than they contributed. It’s fair to say that some current boomers have paid for their Social Security, but many others have not, and the situation isn’t getting any better. To put it simply, there are just fewer workers paying in to the system than there are people taking money out, and that number only grows as people get older. This means only about 80% of existing benefit rates are expected to be paid to people when they retire later, and many of those benefiting from existing rates are already taking more from current generations than they paid in. I don’t think we should universally hate boomers just because the economic situation they were in happened to favor them in some ways, after all, I want my grandma to keep being able to afford her retirement care right now before she dies, but it’s also just not true to say that all current boomers have paid for their social security in its entirety. Only some of them have, and with the way things are going, it’s not looking like we’ll be any better as we grow older, as rates will have to decline just to prevent draining the entire fund, while people continue to pay the same % of their income into the system.

Videos, images, and text can absolutely compel action or credible harm. For example, Facebook was aware that Instagram was giving teen girls depression and body image issues, and subsequently made sure their algorithm would continue to show teen girls content of other girls/women who were more fit/attractive than them. the teens who reported the most negative feelings about themselves saw more provocative content more broadly, content Meta classifies as “mature themes,” “Risky behavior,” “Harm & Cruelty” and “Suffering.” Cumulatively, such content accounted for 27% of what those teens saw on the platform, compared with 13.6% among their peers who hadn’t reported negative feelings. https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114054/documents/HHRG-117-IF02-20210922-SD003.pdf https://www.reuters.com/business/instagram-shows-more-eating-disorder-adjacent-content-vulnerable-teens-internal-2025-10-20/ Many girls have committed suicide or engaged in self harm, at least partly inspired by body image issues stemming from Instagram’s algorithmic choices, even if that content is “just videos, and images.” They also continued to recommend dangerous content that they claimed was blocked by their filters, including sexual and violent content to children under 13. This type of content is known to have a lasting effect on kids’ wellbeing. The researchers found that Instagram was still recommending sexual content, violent content, and self-harm and body-image content to teens, even though those types of posts were supposed to be blocked by Meta’s sensitive-content filters. https://time.com/7324544/instagram-teen-accounts-flawed/ In the instance you specifically highlighting, that was when Meta would recommend teen girls to men exhibiting behaviors that could very easily lead to predation. For example, if a man specifically liked sexual content, and content of teen girls, it would recommend that man content of underage girls attempting to make up for their newly-created body image issues by posting sexualized photos. They then waited 2 years before implementing a private-by-default policy, which wouldn’t recommend these teen girls’ accounts to strangers unless they explicitly turned on the feature. Most didn’t. Meta waited that long because internal research showed it would decrease engagement. By 2020, the growth team had determined that a private-by-default setting would result in a loss of 1.5 million monthly active teens a year on Instagram, which became the underlying reason for not protecting minors. https://techoversight.org/2025/11/22/meta-unsealed-docs/ If I filled your social media feed with endless posts specifically algorithmically chosen to make you spend more time on the app while simultaneously feeling worse about yourself, then exploited every weakness the algorithm could identify about you, I don’t think you’d look at that and say it’s “catastrophizing over videos, images, text on a screen that can’t compel action or credible harm” when you develop depression, or worse.

This whole article is just a condescending mess. “Why does everyone who has been repeatedly burned by AI, time and time again, whether that be through usable software becoming crammed full of useless AI features, AI making all the information they get less reliable, or just having to hear people evangelize about AI all day, not want to use my AI-based app that takes all the fun out of deciding where you go on your vacation???” (yes, that is actually the entire proposed app. A thing where you say where you’re going, and it generates an itinerary. Its only selling point over just using ChatGPT directly is that it makes sure the coordinates of each thing are within realistic travel restrictions. That’s it.)