AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

Exactly. AI slop is just that. Slop.

If it’s just an AI doing something useful, we don’t call it slop, we just call it AI.

When Google’s AlphaFold predicted the folding of over 200 million protein structures, and won a nobel prize for it, I don’t think anyone would call all the research using it to make cures to diseases slop.

Fun fact, you can see that this poster is for Seattle.

The police union has used its power to force the city to not allow more than about 24 responders on the “CARE” team, which is a team of non-police responders that are basically just well-equipped social workers with formal training that lets them incredibly effectively handle things like mental health emergencies, drug users, etc.

They then put additional restrictions in place to make it even harder for those people to get dispatched to a scene, such as if any drugs are visible at all, if the person is “confrontational”, if they’re in a building or car, or if there’s an “indication” they’ve committed any form of crime at all.

Dispatchers also can’t send the CARE team alongside police anymore.

The police don’t just do their jobs badly, they force the city to spend money on their high salary and high overtime wages to get worse results, instead of sending in actual professionals.

ACAB.

https://publicola.com/2026/02/24/police-contract-has-prevented-unarmed-crisis-responders-from-doing-their-jobs-care-chief-says/

A combination of CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown so it’s compatible with most markdown formatting people are used to. Also supports LaTeX and HTML. (and of course any custom syntax modifications you make with custom CSS or plugins)

That’s why I use Obsidian! It’s not open source, but all my notes are just… pre-emptively saved as markdown files on disk. If they fuck me over I can just leave and open it in literally any markdown editor 😭

If they used a proprietary format, I probably just wouldn’t have used them in the first place and would have had to use a shittier alternative.

The primary source being cited by most of the articles is U.S. Gov Analytics, (or the less reliable Statcounter, which I wouldn’t rely on.) U.S. Gov Analytics currently places it at around 4.7% over the last 30 days, 4.4% this calendar year, and 5.6% the last calendar year. It was about 6%-ish when most articles were written about the 6% number for the first time.

Steam, so basically just gamers and not regular desktop users, has it more around 2.3%.

I think it’s probably not being pushed because of those things (though they are certainly possible outcomes), and more about the fact that they can just… scrape up a bunch of data about you in general.

Now they know your name, age, race, birthday, and can correlate that all with data brokers if they want more. Ad targeting becomes easier, thus making them more money. Simple as that.

The a series have been great to me so far. The specs are usually more than enough for most use cases you’re gonna have for your phone, and the 9a and 10a both have better battery life than the rest of the 9 and 10 series’ respectively.

The a series is substantially cheaper for what is, in my opinion, a totally justifiable Android experience that isn’t gonna be much different than the other models for most people.

HOWEVER, I will say that if you plan on running a lot of apps that need to operate in the background or be constantly on, especially if you play games at the same time on your phone sometimes, the RAM could be too low for your liking and might occasionally lead to an app’s background process freezing for a bit. (e.g. a timer might freeze if the app isn’t actively open)

Genuinely pretty interesting. It’s one thing to know a shadow library like Anna’s Archive exists, but it’s another to see what goes into it behind the scenes. Most people just see webpages. To many, it’s where the books come out of for free, nothing more.

It’s preemptive for when you DIE. That’s why in the screenshot you sent it says “in the event of my death”, not “if the government comes knocking, violate the law and delete my data first”.

You can delete your data from Proton, too, but the payment information, which was how this person was identified, is stored regardless by their third-party payment provider.

Mailbox only erases your payment info 4 weeks after you’ve last paid, and ended your contract with them, and they use Ayden for payments, which also has no set date at which they’ll delete your payment information.

If you’re worried Proton could identify you to authorities, either just make a new Proton account and pay anonymously (cryptocurrency or cash by mail), since that’s the only way this person was identified, or you could use what I’d consider to be the next-best, which is Tuta.

Nowhere near as slick a UI, less overall offerings (only email and calendar), but it costs less and generally provides similar security and privacy to Proton. Though again, you’d have to pay via private means, otherwise you’re gonna get identified by the same mechanism this person was if the government really decided to come after you by your account.

Proton uses Chargebee for payments, which has its own data retention policy of essentially “as long as we want to”, but Proton does themselves keep limited data like the billing name, and last 4 digits.

Proton’s privacy policy says nothing about a pre-set time delay after which they’d delete that data. They only claim that they “reserve our right” to remove your payment information if they think it’s no longer valid. So theoretically, that might mean if your card’s expiry date has passed, but that’s not a confirmation.

The best way to reliably make sure Proton wouldn’t have any info on you is to not have ever tied any real information about yourself or your payment info to that account.

And Monero.

Yep! It’s not the same experience as F-Droid (e.g. it’s not gonna be you scrolling through a list of apps, picking the one you want, and hitting install. Obtainium is more of a “get the URL to where the app’s releases are, paste it in here, add it, then hit install, plus you might have to do a little config so it selects the right release if there are multiple”, but once it’s set up, it’s set up.

I fully replaced the F-Droid app with Obtainium for actually installing and updating apps, but I still keep the F-Droid app around just because I can go on there, search up apps, do a little browsing, then take the app I want and put it in Obtainium.

Congratulations!

Seconded on Obtainium. Basically any FOSS app is gonna have a repo there with releases regardless, and you can always just use an f-droid repository if they only publish releases there.

Plus, way easier to export a list of installed apps to restore them at a later date!

Depends on which Lemmy app you want. Here’s the ones on F-Droid, and for Obtainium you should be able to get all of those, plus any Lemmy app that only has a code repo but isn’t published elsewhere.

Keep in mind that F-Droid is only gonna have things that are free and open source, with minimal to no tracking or external dependencies outside their primary use case. Apps that are normally paid or have a lot of trackers probably won’t be on there.

If you find something only available on the Google Play Store, either use sandboxed play services (does give Google some information, like your IP address, knowledge of which apps you have installed, and could potentially exfiltrate data if an app is configured to send the data to Google Play Services), or Aurora Store (just a frontend for the Play Store, Google doesn’t really get much info about you from that as long as you pick the Anonymous option when “signing in”, but you have the added risk that the Aurora Store developers could theoretically tamper with app code)

You should always try to find apps available in this order, based on their chance of having code tampered at any point, and privacy concerns: Obtainium > F-Droid > Aurora Store > Sandboxed Play Store

Rumble is pretty bad. There’s not very many good alternatives to YouTube, but if you at least want a more privacy-preserving mobile app frontend for it, I’d recommend NewPipe or GrayJay (which, if you really want it, also supports Rumble, among very much lesser used federated alternatives like Peertube.)

I wouldn’t recommend alternative decentralized video hosting platforms like Odysee either, as they are also very much heavily focused on conspiracy theories and random BS political topics with no merit. Kick funds destructive gambling behaviors and also funds fascists, so don’t use them either.

If you’re willing to pay, and your main priority is just deGoogling over specifically maximizing privacy as much as possible, you could pay for a Nebula subscription. They’ve got a lot of the creators you might be used to seeing on YouTube, with all their content on YouTube also on Nebula, along with some Nebula exclusive stuff. Normally it’s 60 bucks a year, but I believe if you use creator codes from the sponsor reads creators will do on YouTube, you can get it for about $30-$36. Imo it’s a pretty reasonable price if you just don’t want to have to deal with YouTube. (and it is also supported by the GrayJay app)