Jul (they/she)

I wish there were more games that were fully complete single player offline games with online multiplayer being an afterthought. I miss a good story and experience that isn’t grind for years or pay to continue.

My company (near the top of the fortune 500 companies) has been doing this for a while. They track every file change, intercept all http web connections using MitM attacks, etc.

It causes tons of issues for software development and the production application operations including extreme slowdown of both laptops and servers as it thrashes disks and pauses things when the buffers fill up. It can’t keep up with applications that use lots of disk caching or make many small file modifications, like merging a large git repo. So things crash and generally run very poorly all the time. Plus all http connections end up with invalid certificates after the MitM attacks, and they block a lot of connections even to places like GitHub which we use. So things break constantly.

They laid off most technical people with any experience (should say with any moderately higher salaries) as part of their push for AI to take over those jobs. So, most of the people dealing with these issues don’t understand the technology.

I can’t imagine what they could use all pf that data for which includes tons of employee and customer private data. It would take years to sort through for some specific breach, so it’s useless for it’s stated purpose. It’s just ripe for hackers to steal tons of data on tens of millions of people around the world, though.

When executives and middle managers are put on charge of technical decisions utilizing “AI” and short term, junior level technical contractors, it’s no wonder they make tons of bad decisions and don’t recognize how much it’s costing them. If only there was competition to drive innovation rather than easy cost cutting like laying off experienced employees, maybe things would change. But that’s impossible in the modern late-stage capitalist economy they’ve created. So we just have to wait for the whole system to collapse. But by then we may have reached a point where it’s no longer possible to prevent extinction from climate change (water and food shortages, pandemics, and all the other things were seeing). We just need to wait and see what collapses first I suppose. If only democracy hadn’t been turned into this farce and media hadn’t been coopted and consolidated to not allow enough people to see what’s really going on, maybe we could change it.

If it’s closed source but can be self hosted, what is the business model? I think it would be hard to fight piracy in that case. If it requires connecting to a service periodically for licenses and has no free version that doesn’t require that, then I believe it should be banned. I don’t consider that self-hosted. If the company disappears and the served goes down, its dead. That’s just running on your hardware, but not under your control. If the application is open or can be run locally without connecting to their servers and the paid portion is an add on like working as a proxy or something, then I have no real issue with that.

That said, there definitely should be a higher standard for users who are only marketing here. They should be making posts specifically for this group, not just sharing generic ads. The post should specifically state why it’s useful to self-hosters and thus relevant to the group.

Yeah, email isn’t private, but for me it’s usually that I don’t like my host reading all of my mail to build an profile on me and selling that data. Individual emails in isolation aren’t a big deal, but seeing every email and what company or agency sent it is as problematic as the content even if you encrypt the mail content itself. Emails that I sends I always assume are not private, but that’s a separate issue, IMHO. There’s a lot of private information like what protected classes I am part of, political leanings, places I shop, etc., that can be gathered simply from who sends mail to you and who you send mail to. This is why I self host for most of my email.

That being said I still use gmail as I need a backup option and I use it for things where I don’t want the junk sender to know my domain and spam all of my accounts.

But Proton is really not much more private than Google in several scenarios given their CEO’s stance on several sensitive subjects and willingness to give data on protected classes, journalists, etc., to hostile governments, as an example. They do say they don’t sell your data to ad companies, at least. I don’t know Fastmail at all. And self-hosting is not something I’d recommend if you don’t want to put a lot of time and effort into it. Lots of issues come up like blacklisted VPS IP addresses in addition to the setup itself.

They think LLMs are more intelligent than people because the LLMs tell them they are. So of course most companies who bought into “AI” have laid off staff, especially the most experienced and thus expensive ones, and have handed responsibilities to untrained contractors armed with “AI”. So yeah, most companies who did that are going to be falling apart over the next few years, including the one I work for. I was only safe, so far, because I’m grossly underpaid already.

ISP: $75/month for symmetrical 1Gbit fiber and unlimited data. This is the biggest expense. All other options are 1-25 Mbps up with cable or dsl and most are just as expensive.

VPSs: around $40/month, though I’m planning to cut back a bit as I’m moving some stuff local.

2 Domains: < $30/year

The rest is purchased with no future subscription costs. This covers everything except for the security cams that I need to migrate off of corporate services one of these days.