DontTakeMySky

Definitely. And theres also the ability to use it to “hide in the crowd” if you have decent OPSEC and are being anonymous in other ways.

+1

A lot of the VPN hype is sort of left over from before we had “https” everywhere. Most of your Internet traffic is encrypted these days.

I guess there’s a slight advantage with VPNs (vs ISPs) having your data is you can at least choose your VPN provider more freely than you can choose your ISP so in theory you can pick one you can trust.

But this is chasing a pretty small amount of anonymity for most people. It’s not worth it most of the time.

And tbh, you’re most likely worried about the Ad companies and social media giants, not your ISP.

Having reliable and cheap lighting at all hours of the day.

Light was very expensive for a lot of human history.

For anything like this, start with your threat model. Are you trying to protect yourself from Microsoft, from your ISP, from the Ad agencies, or from the government? Depending on which you’re most worried about it will change the actions you’d need to take pretty drastically.

Trying to chase “maximum” anonymity without deciding who you are anonymous to is too vague.

It sounds like you’re at least worried about Microsoft though. At minimum, turn off all the settings you reasonably can to limit what is collected about you. “Windows Privacy Dashboard” used to be a good third party app that made that easy, not sure if it’s still relevant (it’s been a few years for me).

Next level of effort would probably be switching to Linux. Realistically any distribution would be loads better than Windows for privacy.

Using a VPN stops your ISP from seeing (most of) your behavior online, but the VPN company would see it instead, so it’s just trading one adversary for another if you’re focused on privacy. (Not saying it’s useless, but it’s not the panacea that people make it out to be.)

Next most beneficial step would probably be moving your data (emails, photo backups, chat messages, etc) to trustworthy locations.

Anything beyond that depends on who you’re protecting yourself from.

I think they might be able to guess that you’re watching a video based on the traffic patterns, but unlikely they can tell what site it’s coming from.

Medium

If you’re memorizing your password, don’t change it too often because it’ll just confuse you and encourage you to pick easy to remember passwords which are less secure. Change your password if you hear about a hack, or have reason to suspect your password got leaked. Otherwise there’s no need.

If you have a password manager though, go off. Change it as often as you’d like.

(Also 2FA, unique passwords per site, etc etc etc)

A Windows VM running Windows terminal, SSH’d back into the host, obviously.

Honestly I stick with whatever the default is and never had a problem that led me to find anything else.

Finding pockets of self sufficiency, or at least ways to prevent falling down to the bottom.

Universal basic income helps this by making sure everyone has at least enough to live on.

Homesteading and community gardens help this by making sure you at least have some basic amount of food available to you.

Building walkable cities helps.this by allowing you to avoid or reduce the expenses of a car.

Building resilient cities that leverage adaptive reuse help this by making it cheaper to start new small community businesses that keep money local.

The solutions aren’t in the system of money we choose, it’s in building small sustainable ways to provide for basic needs, even in a small way.

AI is decent for writing, but a terrible choice for math.

Not too sure, but when I was younger I wanted to fit in and picking colorful stuff made that harder. Id worry about it being on trend, or masculine enough, etc. Now that I’m in my 30s I said fuck it and am getting more colorful.

Doesn’t help that I grew up with a mother who refuses to paint her walls anything but off-white or pale green for resale value. There was so little character.

Daily: Phone, wallet, car/house keys

Frequently also: bike keys, yubikey, Miyoo Mini (retro handheld), pocket knife (varies, but usually a Leatherman Squirt), and a small flashlight.

I have no desire to change.

I’m sure an iPhone would be a completely acceptable phone for me but I have no problems with android that iOS would solve. My phone already does everything I want it to do and more.

And I don’t want to re-learn what all the best apps are. I already found great ones for what I need and I know many of them would be different on iOS. No need for me to go through that relearning.

More than that though, I love that my android can do USB OTG and allow me to plug in flash drives, SD cards, game controllers, and Ethernet adapters. I love that i can change the home screen app to entirely change the interface. I like that I can root it when it’s getting slow to debloat it a bunch, or do thorough backups, or fuck around with app files. I love that the dev ecosystem doesn’t require a yearly subscription.

Sometimes you have to make a tradeoff and focus on the golden path, which means comprehensive testing has to be skipped or bugs have to be explicitly left in.

Yes it’s bad. Yes it sucks. But it’s that or nothing gets released at all.

(I wish it wasn’t that way. I try hard to make sure it isn’t that way at my job, but for now that’s how it is)

+1.

You’ll get better stories from someone’s deathbed than from someone’s suicide note. At the end of their life what do they regret, what are they happy they did, what advice do they have to give.

I don’t expect suicide notes to be filled with “if only I studied harder, then I wouldn’t have to end it all”.

even though i might indulge in activities that are pleasurable for me now, they add up to nothing

I know this isnt what you’re asking for, but I have to wholeheartedly disagree with this (unless you’re talking about drugs, wanking all day long, or something like that). Creating joy in your life isnt a bad thing and has long term benefits. It helps to overcome burnout and extreme fatigue, it gives you something to live for, it allows you a place to find what matters to you. It can help you be MORE productive tomorrow by letting yourself rest today.

Taking some time away from a problem, from studying, or from work lets your brain work through problems subconsciously that you can’t grasp consciously.

It’s like sleep. Sure, you can’t be productive during sleep, but you still need it to survive and to take on the next day stronger.

Enjoying yourself isn’t wasteful.

℞

Nope it all just worked, it really surprised me honestly. I expected to need to do some weird tethering to a raspi or something to make it work but I didn’t need any of that. (Well, I had issues because it turned out lightning borked my router, but that was a different issue entirely.)

That’s true, but with the Ethernet connection you can tether to a router directly. When my Internet was down I was able to tether my entire home for the time I needed to get some updates finished to get my docker environment back up and running. I had no idea that was possible before that.

Why thank you, Cunningham’s Law in action yet again.