First ignoring everything outside my direct control.

Still no, but I know what I want in my personal life and I see the path to get there. If the world doesn’t fall into chaos first. It’ll just take time, but what better use of my youth? If the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that trying to get there too fast will wreck my mind and body.

I think a lot of it now comes down to having a ‘Platonic ideal’ for myself and not living up to it. Like strictly an internal matter, I’m fine with other people seeing me the way I am. Even if I lived in a secluded bunker, I’d still be bothered that my eating and sleeping habits suck, my time management needs work, my athleticism is lacking, I never finished learning German, and my screen usage is ruining my back and eyes.

Actually, that would be kind of nice. I’d like to think that if I could be minimally- or un-employed but still well-housed and well-fed for a year, I could finally take a breath and go fix everything that’s been nagging at me.

Well, that’s the thing. I wasn’t going to bow down to that app’s demands or put a band-aid on it, I had to conquer it.

There is a particular camera app that a few of my close friends and I have used for group photos since over a decade ago. It’s proprietary and tracker-infested, but there’s a certain humor and nostalgia to the filters and effects that I’ve never found a good way to replicate without the app. It’s sort of an in-joke that we insist on using it whenever we do get together. So I have it on my secondary device and painstakingly patched the apk so it can run without any unnecessary permissions.

Not yet, but everyone I know that were summoned, total 3 instances, never actually served.

I don’t have a good answer, but I wonder the same and about the technical reasons why, if some websites require such data, the browser can’t just lie and touch up rendering in post to fit whatever unique window size I have. AFAIK, uBlock already does some of its own CSS touch-up so there aren’t awkward gaps where ads once were.

Of the browsers I’ve tried out, the Cromite project goes furthest to mitigate and obfuscate the data it hands out, but in their words, it’s still not comprehensive.

All sorts of animals have superior application-specific circuitry. Like bearded vultures that, while in flight, can drop bones precisely onto rocks to break them open and get at the marrow. But they lack the general-purpose processing power needed to abstract such skills into mathematical representations. Same abstraction likely needed to apply one skill creatively to other uses or apply logic to analyze something.

I’m no neuroscientist/biologist, but I could see an ideal scenario and measurement setup where dolphins and orcas maybe rival our general-purpose intelligence. But whatever it is, it still isn’t enough for them to build any recognizable society yet.

Or maybe Meta’s walled garden is impenetrable to scraping?

afaik, that’s the case for Instagram. After scouring the internet for frontends, there are 3 archetypes:

• black boxes like imginn, gets you images and nothing else. no source code to audit, self-host, or build an API
• self-hostable frontends that get rate limited almost instantly, even for a single user
• proper alternative clients that got cease-and-desisted into the ground

They did a great job making a panopticon, closed to the outside, yet devoid of privacy

Prepaid IoT sim cards

Not a heavy user, so I purchased one for 60 US that gets me 365 days of service or 24 GB, whichever depletes sooner. It defaults to T-Mobile coverage but can fall back to AT&T. No KYC. There are more premium options that get you Verizon coverage, also saw one advertising 300 GB a month at 50 Mbps for 350 a year, haven’t tried those yet though.

For the curious, I purchased from https://www.smartsimpro.com/, their website doesn’t give the best first impressions, but I can say that their data plan does work reliably for me once I configured the APN settings.

Pardon my ignorance, why would those be suspicious?