Captain_Faraday

I can relate to this. A much more senior and older engineer in the department I used to work in was lead over much of my projects. He would call me on Teams over and over until I picked up or harass me via chat messages. 75% of the time it was an “IT issue” he had and it was like changing the channel for my grandparents lol. Dude is wicked smart/experienced at electrical engineering, but computer illiterate and abusive to younger engineers like me that are tech literate. While he stressed me out a lot, I felt obligated to helped him d since I sorta reported to him. I recently moved departments to work on stuff I’m much more passionate about. He did it again at 4:52pm on a Friday night and was like nah bro lol.

Didn’t read the article, but honestly who cares what they say regarding this? Money talks and they invested $$$$$$$$ into these shenanigans.

Unless they’ve got an equally intensive use for all those expensive data centers built (and being built) for Ai, how on earth would they similarly profit by taking Copilot out of more things when it collects so much marketing data for them to sell? Their stock value dropped probably from the backlash, but I highly doubt they care about their users. It’s the money and image clearly.

My job has me working on the power systems supplying some upcoming data centers for multiple clients. Everything is constantly changing deadlines in engineering, but max throttle to get everything done. I’m certain this kind of rapid expansion is for Ai provisioning.

Yeah, my therapist told me this about my extended toxic family: “You can just let them do crazy over there and you live your life away from that drama over here.” I think that also applies here. lol

Yeah, I deleted all my Meta accounts several months ago and have never felt better or looked back honestly. lol The most I miss is getting funny memes from my spouse on Instagram, but she can just show me in person and that’s real connection anyways.

True, I keep one on me and show some of my fellow technical friends, yet they don’t use one either. I just wish I’d known about it sooner. I feel like I sleep better at night knowing everything is secured like that.

It’s like some of the benefits of Obsidian but with E2E notes accessible in the browser too. (I haven’t used Obsidian, but only passed due to lack of web interface since I sometimes access notes on work PC)

If you have a hardware security passkey like Yubikey as the only way to access the account and NO recovery phone or email, ONLY just backup codes secured locally, I feel like this wouldn’t be an issue anyways. I recently had someone try to use my old but still lightly active gmail to order Chipotle. I knew they couldn’t have access to my email though because only I have the Yubikey passkeys to get in.

Installed Vivaldi and Brave from the MS Store on work laptop from the official pages. Got a Trojan in each that IT had to remove. Yeah no

Okay, someone had asked what I had done and I finally cobbled together some info lol

I didn’t fully harden it like you might see in some YouTube videos, I.e bought with cash, no internet/bluetooth/airdrop enabled, location devices off, no Apple account during set up. My spouse didn’t want me to do that lol.

I picked and chose some of the steps in this Naomi Brockwell video namely, though some I found in regular Google search.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1g0RzOGxe40&t=1669s&pp=ygUdTmFvbWkgYnJvY2t3ZWxsIHR2IGhhcmRlbiBtYWM%3D

These are some of the highlights:

1. Disabled Siri

2. Enabled FileVault

3. Time server: pool.ntp.org

4. Disabled any targeted advertising and diagnostics telemetry I could. Apparently to turn off personalized ads in recent Mac OS versions, you have to wait till first one pops up at a random time in Apple Store or something OR you can use the terminal to kill it before they happen. I think this was the one I ran: defaults write com.apple.AdLib allowApplePersonalizedAdvertising -bool false

5. Installed LuLu for outgoing firewall so we can monitor apps like Adobe to see when they request outgoing connections and what they are requesting. (Spouse loves Adobe, I lost that battle lol)

6. Installed Brave browser and made default over Safari

7. Installed Proton Mail web app since we share account for home/critical stuff

8. Installed BitWarden, although they still like using Apple Keychain for their personal passwords. Critical stuff and shared stuff goes in BitWarden so not isolated in Apple’s stupid Keychain lol. (Good luck accessing your life’s worth of passwords if you lose your Apple devices or they self-sabotage like spouses $$$$ iMac did one day during Mac OS update a few years ago…)

I got my spouse to start using our cupid BitWarden vault and we recently setup a relatively hardened MBP for their work/now home use since their mini PC running windows 11 has basically bricked itself because windows… But yeah, they aren’t using the windows computer, so a hardened MBP is a win in my book even though Apple can be similarly privacy-invasive if their devices aren’t hardened.

This is the way

My refurbished 2011 Lenovo W530 Thinkpad with 24GB from college has been running as a proxmox cluster node for the last year at least! No battery, the replacement died years ago. 🤣

Omg, you’re so right. I didn’t read it that way until you pointed that out.

lol that just occurred to me too

Omg, I love this! Thank you

Wait, Clippy was not helpful but at least pulpy and funny. I honestly miss that sorta stuff in software. Everything is so minimal and sterile these days. I mean, I use Neovim and prefer finding ways use my terminal for things, but I love my themes to be fun and still useful at least. I wish there was a local LLM you could run with Clippy as the animated face of it lol.

Saw this on Reddit earlier

No Roblox in our house… I have spoken. ~Probably Kuiil