Absolutely there are plenty of good niche ones. I think zen is based on Firefox as well and lots of people like it.

start using firefox or firefox derivatives like librewolf. I know people will say “but they don’t have x feature” or “chrome is faster” well until they have the market share they won’t be able to put the development cycles in to fix that stuff. google owning chrome and everyone using chrome based browsers is lining up a huge issue for the future.

Probably just clone and host a pornhub

I don’t mind you generating an AI answer to gain insight. However it would be better if you took the reply and then gave your own view on it rather than just reposting it.

That’s interesting I suppose everyone has their own moderation styles. To me I am not 100% opposed to all AI. I define AI slop more like really low effort posts and bulk posts. So a person who is just posting all AI generated content and cross posting to tons of community. Basically AI spam I guess you could say. If someone was to say generate an AI image and make a post talking about the prompt they used and maybe sharing what they like about the image and then commenters make derivatives or share their own results using a similar prompt I could see that sort of post being useful. Maybe there is a balance… but at the same time I can see that some people might prefer an instance that takes more of a hard line stance.

I kind of agree. It seems like there is some point at which it’s ideal and then after it grows to a certain size things become unhinged.

I don’t hate it. I think it’s fun as a sort of moment by moment ( I want to see this ) and just generate it and enjoy the wackyness. It does leave a lot to be desired in terms of composition and polish. I also absolutely hate people representing it as their own work. I also really enjoy art produced by people. I think what people produce is still superior in lots of ways. People are often telling a story with their art, and that really comes through. Also I love knowing the amount of thought and effort has gone into a work it makes it that much more impressive. The art people produce is often strongly influenced by art trends, culture, and life experience which we connect to as humans and AI can’t produce that because it has no concept of these things. Sure AI can replicate that but it’s not the same as the interaction and conversation I have with a piece of art produced by a person that I know must have felt certain ways about their work when producing it.

I think “I want to keep my money and let you get gay married”

I have had people tell me " I dont feel like building my own OS from scratch " I’m like what are you even talking about?

This comes up with every windows EOL announcement and it never really ends up with everyone switching to linux

I totally get it I could definitely bypass the ads. However the point is that they are doing it at all. I dont want to use their service if this is going to be their strategy.

I have a vero-V but honestly the apps are lack luster. Its amazing if you have your own library of content. I saw my first homescreen add on roku yesterday. I am pissed.

Exactly and if you have to use stock android or iOS to get this feature you are agreeing to so much intrusions into privacy that it’s sort of moot.

Of course you can’t use it without being part of a huge tech duopoly so yay and it doesn’t work without googles proprietary messaging app.

Not really necessary people make DNS requests which are pretty easy to track if you know what URL was requested that will be the exact product. This can all be done by man in the middle and monitoring network traffic. But even that is sort of unnecessary. They could very possibly have contracts with ISPs or other network operators some of that is likely just secret and they dont disclose it.

Likely every product any amazon customer ever views. They could potentially even figure out which things you buy. But you can get a pretty clear picture of someone’s personality and interests if you know everything they search for.

They do it all to build up a huge web of interconnected data points. Duckduckgo itself they might take as evidence that someone is trying to hide something. Then the government goes to a FISA court and gets permission to have other tech companies hand over all your data. Its not any one site its the picture that can be gleamed from all the data available across all the sites.

Duckduckgo is not the problem. They are using publicly scrapable information. So for instance if they have fingerprinted your device they see you go to duckduckgo, then they see you access a site about buying guns, it becomes trivial to determine what you searched for. They would not have direct access to what you search on duckduckgo and duckduckgo is not giving them access. They are using various methods to collect data based on habits. You can use literally any service you want and they could do the same thing.

Probably just whatever the public metadata is. metadata is super powerful especially if you have a lot of it. if the email was protonmail to protonmail they will get nothing. If it’s gmail to protonmail they will know that user X is talking to User Y in gmail. They will also have the email header information which is basically just going to be clear text. so they can still ascertain who you know, who you are talking about, and maybe a bit about what the conversation has to do with.

EDIT: so I asked protonmail directly about it and they confirmed its only publicly available information that they can get. For instance they can try and verify if a certain email address exists. However proton told me that they actively watch for this kind of thing and block IPS trying to do this sort of monitoring.

Man I’ve had a brother printer so long because of their Linux support this is so annoying