Well, I’ve had a computer in front of me since the 70s. Don’t conflate longevity with knowledge tho. I’ve had no formal training, even tho I ‘ran’ the IT dept for a small construction company in another life. One of my jobs was to train old head construction workers on how to use a lap top, a digital camera, how to interface with our servers to upload data from the field. That was wild.

But, no formal training here. Most of what I know I learned by: Reading, screwing it up, doing it again, ad nauseam. And then when something worked, write that shit down.

But actually, specifically on the topic of reddit…

I use https://safereddit.com/ a lot. It’s just the one LibRedirect is pointed to.

I mean, people fetishise it. Ad blocker, third-party cookies blocked, fingerprint-resistant browser, Pi-hole, VPN… all to visit Reddit.

Well, if I were visiting the raw, unfiltered version of Reddit, I’d want a condom for my network. That place is nuts.

When the simple solution is Lemmy.

Reddit is a vast repository of data and info not really present in Lemmy.

As far as plugins for anti fingerprints, et al, I keep them to a minimum. My standalone pfsense firewall does a lot of the heavy lifting so all I really need on my browser is Ublock Origin.

ETA: I didn’t notice who I was replying to, lol. Good to see you again.

but I wonder sometimes if some of this adblocking stuff doesn’t go overboard.

How so? I haven’t seen ads on any of my devices in decades. In fact, if I can’t bend a site to my will, with my parameters, I’ll go elsewhere. 90% of the time, that info is duplicated a hundredfold across the internet.

I’m not trying to throw shade on your project nor am I trying to discourage you in any way. I think it’s a noble ambition. I hope you make a mint doing it. If I live long enough, I’ll be able to tell people ‘Yeah, I met the dude on Lemmy before he was so successful.’ But if 71 years of experience has taught me anything, it’s that it has to be so easy a cave man could do it - as if it just fell in your lap, and it has to be work and trouble free. Otherwise, the average Joe Schmoe citizen isn’t going to spend the time. Having a secure network takes work. Keeping up with updates and making sure they aren’t going to make the wheels fall off, takes work. Work is where the vast amount of people fall off the wagon.

I bookmarked your project and I’ll give it a serious look see. I will tell you that the demo site: oasis.circuitforge.tech, returns a bad gateway Error code 502 from Cloudflare.

Rock on with yo’ bad self.

Saying it’ll never happen and giving up won’t make that 2% get any bigger

Again, you get a standing ovation from me for your drive. Emphatically, I hope you and others with your drive succeed. I’m just giving my perspective of being involved with people and their computers since the mid 70s. I’m no IT guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I like helping others with their digital devices, because it is my desire for everyone to use said digital devices in the most safe, private, and anonymous manner possible. If any morsel of my experience can help someone, then I’m all about it.

However, and for instance: It’s been back at the beginning of the year, I had almost a 2 hour ‘training session’ with a friend on how to effectively use UBlock Origin. Something so very simple but quite effective. But you have to ‘train’ it to get the most out of UBlock Origin. Three weeks later I’m over at his house and he’s disabled UBlock Origin because it was annoying. Work, yes it takes a little work to learn how to drive the bus, and that’s where most people fall by the wayside for just about anything, not just digital devices.

If you want to help beta test, I’m working on an appliance-level automated installer for provisioning home cloud servers.

I’d be willing to take a look at it. I’ve got a couple empty boxes around here. Back when Microsoft released their Home Server edition, I thought ‘Finally! I hope this catches on’. But they killed it. I’ve always thought some bright, young, entrepreneur could take a couple of small ThinkCenters, construct a server environment, put it in a box, with almost a fool proof, one touch button that went out on your network, connected all devices to that one small central server, deploy apps etc, and everything would be jippity jippity. The problem, however, with making things fool proof is that fools are quite ingenious little buggers.

Decouple people from big tech

I’m not making fun of what you’ve said, and I’m not talking down to you. That said, I like where you’re going, but that will never happen. You can mark it on the calendar: ‘That irmadlad asshole said - never happen’. On the one hand I applaud you loud and clear. On the other hand, we live in a global consumerist society. Corporate is just giving them their fix. That’s their plug.

My entire stack runs off a 14kw solar array

I have solar too. Hell I have solar on two barns. I like it. I often think about how far along we might be here in America if a lowly peanut farmer had not been ridiculed beyond belief for putting solar on the white house. Now, they were not what you’d call efficient, but it was a start. I think the next presidency took them down.

but your techiest uncle could host the entire family in a privacy cooperative, for instance

Oh no doubt. I’ve long since been a promoter of the notion of a server in every home. We live in a digital society. We have digital assets. These need to be centrally housed on a very secure server and backed up.

However, self hosters and homelabbers make up <2% of the world’s population. It gets even less if you differentiate between consistent homelab/self hosters and those who were just experimenting. Yeah, we do it, but not on a massive scale to even make a ding. Again, I like where your head’s at, but it’s not us we need to convince, it’s them. And they like their crack. Corporate likes their money.

I mean, I’m not saying give up. Keep pushing. But realistically, we’re in a script.

This whole internet could run on a tiny fraction of what it current consumes, with no drop in service levels

But it doesn’t.

… if the extraction of profit from every single interaction was not prioritized.

But it is.

So, now what are we going to do? Give me real world solutions that will actually fix the issue, which would be implemented by real world corporations and real world data centers. I’m not problem hampered, I’m solution based. So let’s fix it.

Listen, everything that they are doing by scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown, could be achieved on CPU or much smaller GPUs on local machines

Didn’t downvote you however, are you saying if I ran an AI model local, that scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown is ok with you, just because it’s local?. Because that’s exactly what we’re are doing when we access the internet. Throw AI out of the scope, and we’re still pumping massive amounts of carbon in to the air, still turning the water brown. There are 8.4 billion people on this planet. Approximately 6.3 billion of them are online. That’s just individual humans. That doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of data centers that aren’t even connected with AI and all the energy production to make them run.

So, who will be the first to actually practice what you preach and shut down your servers and internet devices? C’mon…make the first step towards a cleaner planet.

A friend of mine a while back was showing me some drums he was thinking about getting, and he had a YT video pulled up on his phone to show me of the drum kit in action. Two unskipable pre-rolls, one skippable pre-roll, the actual video, halfway through the video, another skippable ad. Jebus, how does anyone even put up with that? The ads were absolute bullshit too. One, as I remember, was this nurse advocating the use of Vicks Vapor Rub on your member to enhance the girth and length. I shit you not. I was like, who sees this and slathers Vicks Vapo Rub on your twigs n’ berries? Wow! That’s gotta burn. Damn sure would make mine run hide.

Thanks for bringing it back to my attention.

You’re welcome. I think they’ve made pretty decent strides especially with the companion app and the fact that YT is relentless in trying to circumvent frontends.

Regardless, widespread burnout

If I were a dev, that would be the number one reason I would not publish any app I created. The constant demands from users, the constant integrations, et al, nah…pass. I am grateful for who do, but that’s just not my bag.

Dell Optiplexe

Picked up a 7020 with the i7-4790 for $125 + an additional $50 USD for 32 GB RAM. I’m running 52 containers on it, and it doesn’t break a sweat. Plus, it costs about $8 USD in electricity. Winner Winner Chicken Dinner.

I still have some IOMEGA Zip drives. LOL Man, I remember when those seemed inexhaustible.

Interesting artwork selections.

BookOrbit

That was mentioned here the other day in another thread. I’m going to have to check it out. It looks so much more polished than Calibre, which is not bad, just blah.

I want to be in control of my data and own it. Closed software is the antithesis of that

So, please do share how your homelab has indexed the entire global internet, so you can use your 100% selfhosted, 100% open source search engine? I’m very interested. I’ve always wanted to run a search engine that is not tied to someone else’s.

home assistant

One of these days I’m going to have to spin up HA and see what it’s all about.

What’s up with arr stack tho?

I have no qualms with the software itself. In fact, from what I’ve read, it’s pretty amazing as to how it all fits together. Some good software engineering there. However, my problem arises in what most people use the 'arr stack for. I don’t police your usage, and I don’t preach at those who use the 'arr stack to pirate content, I don’t leave castigating comments and down votes. I figure you are all autonomous adults capable of making your own decisions and living with them. I’ve heard all the pros and all the cons and everything in between, so no need to rehash all of that. Nothing I could possibly post would convince anyone to disband their 'arr stack, so why bother? What would I gain except some faux sense of superiority? I don’t know what people get out of slamming others for using AI. What does it do for you? Does it make you feel better to trash someone’s project? Let the end user decide if the project is worthy of them running on their server, not a consensus of AI haters.

It all gets down to how you interpret Rule 1: ‘Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated.’ Everybody was all chatty about Rule 3, but Rule 1 seems to be a hit or miss. Like I said, it’s 2026 and AI isn’t going away. It is probably a good assumption that any project within the last 5 years is going to be using AI in some form or fashion.