Yes, set the external library bind mount in the docker compose project to :ro (read only).

US Mobile is a good option too, even cheaper than Mint IIRC and you can switch yourself between Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile networks.

The other issue is if you’re offline with no internet service and you come back online, you may not ever see any messages sent during that time.

People like my parents. I feel like I’m explaining in circles here lol.

OMV is not easy for the average person, you have to know how to boot and install an OS, how to access something on your network via IP, how to assign a static IP, what raid type to use (or not use), how to install and configure something like Nextcloud to access and sync files, where to store files on the filesystem, how to install and configure backups to remote storage… I could go on.

Something as common as having a Google drive type interface on a NAS is very complex with OMV and other open source options.

Photoshop I can mostly replace with Photopea and Penpot, but Lightroom alternatives are not easy to use (or are RAW editors only and don’t do photo management) and I haven’t figure out what to do there yet.

Fusion 360 is the real sticking point, there’s no replacement for that or anything that even comes close.

The biggest downside with P2P on a mobile device is it needs to run in the background all the time, and constantly uses small amounts of data making connections.

They are significantly easier to use.

That’s fine for us techy people, but my parents would not be able to do that.

Is that much of a big deal though? Running old GPU drivers is fine, other than maybe if you like playing the latest AAA games down the road.

I mean eventually it will be an issue, but for a long time I imagine they will work just fine.

Windows only applications mostly. The ones I use are Fusion 360, Photoshop, Lightroom, and NI Labview. Unfortunately CAD/Graphic design software also often really struggles to run in WINE, especially with updates happening fairly often.

I’ve thought of a windows VM, but that’s just not worth the extra effort of dealing with hardware passthrough to get proper GPU acceleration.

I really like Linux, all my servers and VMs run Debian or Alpine. But it’s just a lot of work for desktop use in my experience (yes I know some of you have never had a single thing break), stuff just randomly breaks for no reason, I’ll do a system update and just get a black screen from botched GPU drivers, or back when I ran GNOME my extensions would randomly break after an update and never work again, sometimes installing a simple application like steam would nuke my package manager.

As much as people complain about windows and some do have poor experiences, for me it’s pretty much set and forget, I installed W11 on my desktop maybe 4 years ago shortly after release and it’s just… there. It works fine, it doesn’t break, all my apps, games, and drivers still work after updates.

For me it’s too much time investment, I don’t want to tinker with my OS. The fact that it’s so common to screw up a system that atomic distros are becoming much more popular is a good example, I want an OS that doesn’t get screwed up in the first place.

It feels like the general consensus is VPN=malicious rather than "VPN=“this guy is just trying to protect his privacy”.

VPNs are used for malicious purposes. After all if a VPN keeps no logs, doesn’t track usage, and lets one pay with alternate currency, why wouldn’t someone use one if they were wanting to commit a crime?

For any service it’s a battle between avoiding blocking actual users, and keeping out the bots and malicious users.

A VPN with a paid dedicated IP may help, or a DIY VPN hosted on a VPS somewhere, but I’d argue it’s not really any better than just using your ISP at that point since all your traffic comes from your own unique VPN IP.

Cryptomator is the easiest to use option IMO, and it supports windows, linux, macos, android, and ios.

It also doesn’t use a giant blob of a single file like Veracrypt does so it can be used on cloud storage easily.

The more techy alternative that’s harder to use is rclone mount + crypt.

Bluesky already has domain based verification which solves that perfectly, I guess people just don’t want to use it.

Sure, but until it actually gets used significantly in that way, we might as well just say it’s centralized.

It’s the username so already quite visible.

For example someone at say, NPR, could use a name like @bob.npr.org which is only possible by verifying ownership of the npr.org domain name, so there is no need to vet anything.

How come they don’t use the already built in domain verification? It’s basically fool proof to certify that an account is owned by a specific entity.

It already has domain verification which is better IMO. Its more reliable and safer as you have to own the domain to use it.

Nope, it’s 100% centralized.

Nope, there’s no specific range of IPs that AI scrapers use.