Its like a less capable Emacs wannabe that is designed to frustrate you when nothing works in examples using proprietary crap in VS Code, then leverage your familiarity to get you to give in to using VS Code and its MASSIVE stalkerware stream of constant information across your network with no rhyme or reason for that traffic to exist.

From me specifically? When I was first disabled, I still used most corporate social media and stalkerware. In an isolated environment like I’ve been stuck in for a long time, it became clear that the user retention through suggested content manipulation algorithms and notifications were not able to compensate for someone in my condition and availability. What had always seemed like minor manipulative annoyances, became obvious manipulative annoyances. I started to see how the interruptions had altered my behavior. There were some interests I sought out on my own, but many pointless and frivolous distractions and things or projects I bought into because I felt like I had found or discovered something on the internet. Over the years of isolation, I can more clearly see the pattern of what was really my interests and what was suggested to me in manipulative contexts. One of the prime ways it happens is when I’m frustrated with something I’m working on and getting no where. Suddenly I get a seemingly unrelated suggestion or start getting what seem like random notifications. Those seem to target my emotional state specifically in a targeted way to tended to push me into new things or areas I didn’t really expect or want to pursue prior.

I could write off that kind of thing. I became alarmed most around 2018 when Dave Jones showed some search results on YT and was talking about them. I could not reproduce his search or even find the reference at all. A week or so later, it came up. I had it happen again a couple of months later. No matter what or how I searched I could not find the correct results. It is because google was being paid to funnel me into another website some imbeciles thought was related to my search results but the website in question is a garbage third party referral linking middleman. When they showed up in my search results, I couldn’t find anything I was looking for. They were quite literally paying so that I could not find what I needed. It wasn’t ads placement. It the top 20 pages of google, the results were simply not present at all for what I was looking for. In this situation, I could empirically check and see what was happening. Any company that can do such a thing with what I can see should never be trusted with what I cannot see. That type of manipulation is world changing and extremely dangerous. There are only two relevant web crawlers by size, Microsoft and Google. Every search provider goes through these two crawlers either directly or indirectly. When google failed to work, so did DDG, Bing, and most of the rest. At the time, Yandex still worked.

Since I have offline independent AI running, I’ve been able to test this a bit further. If I start searching for certain niche products in a search engine I will get steered in bad manipulative directions. I do not fit the typical mold for the scope of experience and information I know about going back over two decades ago. When I search for something commercial and industry niche specific, I’ve seen many times when relevant products and information are obfuscated as I am steered to consumer land garbage due to what I shouldn’t know. These are situations where I may have forgotten some brand name, but when searching for all of its relevant properties and use cases, the things never come up in search results. I can chat about the product with a decent AI for a few sentences and it gives me the answer. After I plug that into search results, suddenly I start seeing all kinds of related products in other places popping up like it is some kind of organic thing. It isn’t limited to search results either, it was YT, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and even reddit I noticed similar anomalies. If this kind of connection works in one direction, it must work in both directions, meaning my information bubble is influenced directly by all corporate platforms. It makes me question what interests and ideas are truly my own. I primarily find it deeply offensive that, as a citizen, any corporate shit can cause me to question my informed reality in such a way. Any stranger that asks you to trust them, is nothing more than a thief and con. They are an irresponsible gatekeeper. That is the prima issue.

I would agree more if the thing was a product purchased and operated by the establishment, but these things are always run by a third party and their interests and affiliations have no oversight or accountability. What happens when there is an abortion clinic with one of these present. What happens when the controlling company is in KKK christo-jihad hell where women have no rights like Florida, Texas, or Alabama? What about when the police execute someone at random, who loses that recording? No one knows any of these factors or should need to when they wish to walk into a store. This device is stealing your right to autonomy and citizenship as a result.

It is not like I fail to understand the use case. My issue is that data mining me is stealing from me. It is taking a part of my digital entity to manipulate me. It is digital slavery. To be okay with such a thing is to enslave one’s self; it is to fail at a fundamental understand of the three pillars of democracy and the role of freedom of information and the press. Forfeiting your right to ownership over your digital self undermines the entire democratic system of governance and is an enormous sociopolitical regression to the backwardness of feudalism.

No ancient citizen of a democracy wanted feudalism. These things do not have a parade to welcome them, a coup, or a changing of the guard. This change is a killer in your sleep and a small amount of poison added to each of your meals. Every little concession is a forfeit of future people’s rights. This is that poison. I will go hungry. Enjoy your meal, I respect your right to eat it; after you’ve been warned of its contents. I reserve my right to speak of the poison to any that will listen.

I live under a rock and don’t get out much due to physical disability, but I don’t see a security improvement. I see a data mining monstrosity and further reason to avoid local retail.

Those are not citizens. This is not a democracy.

Normally, I would be quite skeptical of what could be involved, and indeed my ability to diagnose the cause is limited. It is somewhat speculative to draw a conclusion. However, the machine is always behind this whitelist firewall, the only new software on the system was the llama.cpp repo and nvcc, and I’ve never encountered a similar connection anomaly.

I tried to somewhat containerize AI at first, but the software like Oobabooga Textgen defeated this in their build scripts. I had trouble with some kind of weird issue related to text generation and alignment. I think it is due to sampling but could be due to some kind of caching persistence from pytorch? I’ve never been able to track down a changing file so the latter is unlikely.

I typically only use regular FF for a couple of things, including Lemmy occasionally. Most of the extra nonsense on the log is from regular FF. Librewolf is setup to flush everything and store nothing. It only does a few portal checks an hour for whatever reason. I should look into stopping it. With regular FF I just don’t care or use it for much of anything. I just haven’t blocked it in DNF.

Does that sound like legitimate behavior for a compiler. I don’t consider such stalkerware data theft acceptable.

Both Librewolf and Firefox both have the QoL junk. Even after turning booth booleans off for Detect Portal, they still spam the messages constantly to let the host server know I’m still present and trackable, or whatever spin they try and put on that feature.

Yeah, the Firefox junk is just noise, the other 4 are the anomaly, especially those two IP addresses. Neither of those addresses are mine (yes I checked).

I believe my digital person is a part of me. Anyone collecting and owning any part of my person with intent to manipulate me in any way, is stealing a part of my person. I call that digital slavery.

The third pillar of democracy, as we all learned in early primary school, is freedom of information through a free press. The Press, does not mean corporate media owned by a few shitty billionaires. It means freedom of information. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers, Google’s and Microsoft’s. It doesn’t matter where you search the web, the query is going through one of these two crawlers directly or through the third party API. This is like if a hundred years ago, all newspapers were sold by one of two companies. The worst part is that, at the present, search results are not deterministic. If we both search for the exact same thing, the results will be different. This is a soft coup on the third pillar of democracy.

Give them some time. They have to manually reboot the gift card servers.

Everything I run is behind a whitelist firewall on an external device largely for this reason, but also learning curiosity.

I’m biased. I hate digital money for stalkerware.

Graphene, with no google, no extra garbage either. You’re likely getting the same thing too. It’s why I mentioned the issue. Not many people actually monitor their logs, and fewer whitelist their network.

I disable all data and still have issues with T-Mobile garbage. Metro was better for me but I got forced into a family plan with these scumbags as a provider. T is constantly trying to gain WiFi access without consent. My whitelist drops them every few minutes even with 5g and data off. They are like the nonconsensual anal of service providers IMO.

Is there an easy foundational setup that is also quite reasonable for someone on a friends and family charity budget and an old Raspberry π 3? I am slow, a methodical intuitive learner type, with no mentor figure or mobility. I’ve been overwhelmed every time I’ve tried to read into self hosting, usually because I have a purpose I want to fill and not a dedicated interest in the subject directly. I don’t need the pay to play-ignorantly setup; I need the easiest grass roots path to email, next cloud, proxy, (other), - setup. The setup that experience teaches as the obvious easiest and cheapest way to get started with, or use sustainably and build upon over time.

You’re in a metabolic phase where you are craving junk food. Let me shove your favorite things in your face in constant interruptions of your media consumption because you quit buying my product and you’re vulnerable.

I’m an imbecile managing healthcare insurance. Your resting heart rate is well below average because you’ve been an athlete in the past. I’m too stupid to handle this kind of data on a case by case level. You have absolutely no other health factors, but I’m going to double the rates of any outliers because I’m only concerned with maximizing profitability.

The human cognitive scope is tiny. Your data is a means of manipulation. Anyone owning such data can absolutely influence and control you in an increasingly digital world.

This is your fundamental autonomy and right to citizenship instead of serfdom. Allowing anyone to own any part of you is stepping back to the middle ages. It will have massive impacts long term for your children’s children if you do not care.

Once upon a time there were Greek citizens, but they lost those rights to authoritarianism. Once upon a time there were Roman citizens, but they lost those rights to authoritarians, which lead to the medieval era of serfs and feudalism. This right of autonomy is a cornerstone of citizenship. Failure to realize the import of this issue is making us the generation that destroyed an era. It is subtle change at first, but when those rights are eroded, they never come back without paying the blood of revolutions.

Another one to try is to take some message or story and tell it to rewrite it in the style of anything. It can be a New York Times best seller, a Nobel lariat, Sesame Street, etc. Or take it in a different direction and ask for the style of a different personality type. Keep in mind that “truth” is subjective in an LLM and so it “knows” everything in terms of a concept’s presence in the training corpus. If you invoke pseudoscience there will be other consequences in the way a profile is maintained but a model is made to treat any belief as reality. Further on this tangent, the belief override mechanism is one of the most powerful tools in this little game. You can practically tell the model anything you believe and it will accommodate. There will be side effects like an associated conservative tint and peripheral elements related to people without fundamental logic skills like tendencies to delve into magic, spiritism, and conspiracy nonsense, but this is a powerful tool to use in many parts of writing; and something to be aware of to check your own biases.

The last one I’ll mention in line with my original point, ask the model to take some message you’ve written and ask it to rewrite it in the style of the reaction you wish to evoke from the reader. Like, rewrite this message in the style of a more kind and empathetic person.

You can also do bullet point summary. Socrates is particularly good at this if invoked directly. Like dump my rambling messages into a prompt, ask Soc to list the key points, and you’ll get a much more useful product.

See other long comment