I’ve seen this come up a couple different ways and it’s almost always a scam. Social engineering to get victims buy-in with plausible tech buzzwords and investing their time as a hook.

But then again, maybe they really are soulless pricks.

Whenever I have to brave the Google abyss, I usually use Startpage. Obviously uBlock Origin but if I can avoid being bombarded by devious and distracting ads altogether, I’d rather that.

True but I see this more as a critical thinking problem - which is pervasive in our society and worsened by the tech bubbles. People should want to seek out information that both argues for and against a topic.

The way our education systems work now, at least in the US, that method of thinking only begins around college and varies widely by academic pedigree.

I don’t run VPNs at the router level. The speed and latency hit, plus the spambot triggers aren’t worth it for me. This is purely a non-privacy minded preference, mind you, and I’m totally not an expert.

You bring up a good point though. Regardless of what’s running upstream, if my device is running private relay, it all gets bypassed. So I have to disable private relay.

My preference is to run nextdns over DoH, AdGuard locally on iOS + Stop the Madness, and a VPN when I’m feeling sheepish.

On iOS, I’ve tried quite a few combinations and I’ve gotten feedback from users with others.

When I ran pi-hole or AdGuard home, I also used AdGuard on all my iOS devices - both the DNS pseudo-VPN and safari extensions cause otherwise ads would sneak in. The Adguard app removes the annoying ads from Apple News and NYT apps.

Now I just use NextDNS and the same AdGuard iOS app setup.

The few people on ours are local real estate agents and severe weather alerts lol

Yup. I quit everything but Reddit several years back without a second thought in all that time because I lived in a big metropolitan city.

Now I live in a small suburb where all the towns and businesses post to FB, neighbors have tradeposts and active interest groups on there, the schools and Police post info there too. My wife has connected to “friends” we otherwise wouldn’t exchange info with.

All that has had me wanting to create a new account - just to connect. I was completely ignorant to the role it plays outside of big cities beforehand. Nextdoor is a really crappy alternative.

I used perplexity pretty exclusively for a while. Especially for work. Both have their place and use cases but when I’m looking for something truly specific or nuanced, it’s DDG and a manual search.

blahaj.exe.tar.gz

Seen it. Covered it.

🎶 we are Farmers!

I recently started playing Diablo 4. I’ve never bought DLC or cosmetics but I recall the horse armor uproar. My shock when some of these cosmetics are $20 for mount or town portal…what?!

ChatGPT+ has been a revelation. We’ll see what happens with iOS 18 too.

They’ve got a really active and dedicated community on discord. I returned mine before this story broke for unrelated reasons but it really is a neat little device that fits a very specific niche. Outside of that bubble though, almost no one gets it and that’s their biggest problem.

I can’t justify Kagi’s pricing but I liked it. I’d blow through the cheapest plan in a week. Neeva was pretty good too before they pivoted, also pricey imo though.

But go to the ER if it lasts more than 4 hours

I had the urge while out the other day and had to wipe, like a peasant. Bidets should be a right in the kingdom.

OP: The hero we don’t deserve.

I’m an idiot! (You’re an idiot!)

Holy shit! Is this a thing? Cause that’d explain a whole lot for me

I don’t think this is Gerald’s work…