Honestly, I prefer someone else’s untrustworthy.

I don’t trust China at all, but I trust them over the US, if only because they have no stake in me as a foreigner.

Watching all the new laws spew out in Europe I don’t trust them, either.

I’m down to Romania and Iceland, now.

Been dumping German stuff like a plague lately, and already pulled all data out of Canada.

I have one thing in Amsterdam, but their laws have been getting worse and worse, and they’re… Nine, I think it is, eyes which is bad for trusting them with your data. Even Switzerland is getting sus af.

An institution uses a local model to help organize massive amounts of data, not crawl the whole web stealing everything in sight while being anthropomorphized by a corporations trying to sell you a friend or a waifu…

Which you won’t be able to run because RAM is $500 now.

There are valid uses for LLMs, but I think everyone who calls it “AI” is definitely a scam.

I refer to it as “Boomer Social” as it is the exclusive form of communication for family members over 60. When I purged my Meta accounts, finally, I completely lost contact with my sister.

Seems that old people who were around for email being the norm can’t manage to use it anymore…

Yeah, it makes things a lot harder as I want one that will let me lug my TTRPG library around with me.

Hundreds of books over four systems, all in PDF, takes up a pretty big chunk of storage.

I keep them on my tablet, now, which works. The thing is power hungry, though, so I need to plug it in or it dies in like two hours.

I’d really like a nice eInk (hopefully color, but I can deal with grayscale) reader to manage all that, as well as my books, and my collection of Alan Moore graphic novels and the Neil Gaiman stuff that I still have.

Cards are their own issue…

I had a bank that would always deny my purchase of a game with fraud detection, though I suspect it was because GOG was still banking in Gibraltar then, but then my card was actually stolen and they just let them spend $5 at every store in town until I was overdrawn by the maximum they allowed.

Definitely an adult account, I have kids who are adults, and I had been on Google since I used to use it at the public library. I seem to remember there being a different version of mail from them, before GMail, that was converted when they did the big release. I could be wrong, it’s been nearly thirty years, but I was very relieved to be able to get off Yahoo which only released one good product (Answers, by the way) in the history of ever.

I also started with Android using my account long enough ago to be “adult” as I was using a HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) running Android 1.0 released in 2008, moving from my brief foray into Blackberry from Palm to them and staying through the Galaxy Note 8. Now I use WayDroid to run a few Android apps, Google has just gotten too creepy, and they do derpy things like make me need to fiddle with workarounds to access my files on my device and now they’re pushing the signing for Android trying to kill (or at least data harvest) alternative stores.

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They finally lost me completely when I loaded a music video marked “adult” for language and it demanded I upload ID on an account that was legally an adult.

I made that account in 1999, it’s not even from this millennium, and they still derp out on it. I’m getting close to 50, at this point, and the only thing ads, age verification, and extreme right wing content on top of state sponsored disinformation campaigns will get you is a blacklist.

We should have seen it coming, I mean they used to have the “Don’t be evil” motto, removing that was a declaration of intent.

I scrape from the command line, Google doesn’t even tough a web browser, leech the webm/webp/whatever content and transcode it into mkv/mp3 to watch locally, offline, with no ads or tracking.

They do this after they stop letting download what you paid for and transfer via USB.

I downloaded my whole library, cracked all the DRM and dumped the AZWs to ePubs as soon as they announced that, and sent in an account deletion request. When they made it a requirement to use their “cloud” to do anything with your Kindle I knew it was over.

We all knew it was coming, any way to screw us they’ll do it, they don’t need customer service anymore since they killed most competition and people are stuck with Amazon or Piracy.

Personally I’ll send an author a donation if I can’t buy direct from them in DRM-Free formats.

I was looking at a Boox Go Color to add in support for my manga and comics as well as my library of novels but with Android getting really creepy I’m not so sure I want to be tied to what I see as a dying ecosystem again because Boox uses it as their OS.

The Pine64 stuff looks like a good option, but it has no expansion, which was always a problem with Kindle since even their 128GB internal flash of the PineNote (that si much larger than any Kindle version) isn’t enough to load my manuals. That’s actually why I have the 1st Gen Kindle Keyboard, and not the DX, with so little storage and no expansion option the PDF support and a screen large enough to make things locked to formatting for 8 1/2 x 11 readable was pretty pointless.