You say there's a hierarchy. By that you probably also mean a ranking order among the women in terms of interactions that don't involve your father?

I assume that your mother being the "chosen one" seems fulfilled in this arrangement? What about the main and secondary girlfriends?

My solution is basically what @mojolobo mentions with Nextcloud behind it and I love the concept. Because Obsidian (via a WebDAV plugin on the phone) just syncs with the "Notes" folder in my Nextcloud root it really is just a bunch of .md (markdown) files. It gives me an added sense of security (on top of the self-hosting aspect) because I can see those files everywhere I have Nextcloud installed, I can edit them manually if I wanted to. On the PC you just point the Obsidian app to the folder, on phones you do it via a WebDAV plugin.

Society just needs to get over this AI fad atm. By which I'm not trying to say that AI won't revolutionize pretty much everything in our lives eventually, but first we need to figure out what it can actually be useful for. Or rather non-tech people need to be fully introduced to both its benefits and its pitfalls before tech companies will have a clear picture of where the red lines are for people ideologically speaking. We the nerds have our moral compass figured out but we're a minority when it comes to who these products are made for.

Leave it to Microsoft to come up with the most dystopian AI concept yet. But to be honest I'd be way more wary of a company like Alphabet for whom data collection is much more central to their business model and who know how to package their spyware neatly. Microsoft announcing this as a feature from a podium shows how tonedeaf they are but I'd argue it also shows that they're not following some self-serving plan behind the scenes to take advantage of that thing they're so proud of publically (a mass espionage at which I firmly believe they wouldn't be anywhere near efficient enough if they tried). They really must've thought that this is what can get Windows back into the limelight. It is Microsoft's problem of our time that with everyone being on smartphones and tablets now they are losing traction in the consumer market by the day.

Point being (as far as the valid privacy concerns go) that Microsoft were never in the data business. They're just really really bad at understanding what consumers want out of an operating system. I got my first own PC in 2001 right when XP came out. They've always been bad at making things work for the user. And since Vista all they've really been doing is copying Apple's eyecandy. First off of macOS (then OS X), now with Windows 11 they basically want to look like a tablet OS with app icons once again after that idea failed spectacularly under Windows 8. I'm basically just rambling at this point but it should go to illustrate their lacklustre corporate decisionmaking. I wouldn't be worried about their potential desire much less their ability to compromise that Recall data. Yes it's a hugely concerning concept from a privacy standpoint and every step to circumvent its analysis should and arguably must be taken, but I also wouldn't lose sleep over the data it is collecting on other people's machines.

I bought a used old gen Sonos Connect about a year ago to integrate my Logitech Z906 into an existing pair of Sonos speakers. They made it deliberately tedious to downgrade those speakers (who had gotten the S2 "blessing") back to S1 to make them work with the Sonos Connect. I'm an IT repair shop guy and I cursed all the way through this downgrade process.

I would have gladly bought current hardware from them again if their prices were anywhere within the realm of plausibility. Credit where it's due, that Sonos Connect hookup with the 2 wall-mounted 1st party speakers works absolutely reliably. That company just seriously lost its bearings since they engineered those parts.

How easy would it be for you to find (natural) laxatives? ChatGPT names Prunes and Kiwis, Broccoli, Almonds and Walnuts, Yogurt (the white non-sweet kind would be best)

Basically the above is just a who's who of healthy dieting if you ask me lol. If you need high caloric density for the "eating as much as possible" part just go for anything high in fat and or sugar. Nutella would check both boxes but this is really not recommendable from a health perspective obviously.

Competitive eaters like Beard Meats Food would just chug on double cream if they wanted to get as many calories down as possible. The only "problem" there is that it doesn't make for a very entertaining video.

Besides what others have said basically asking "what is it that you're trying to protect (from)?" I would say the main questions in terms of usage are, are you on a degoogled Android phone and are you using Linux on your Desktop yet?

Yea sure VPNs are nice but I personally often feel like I don't want to have to hide behind someone else's IP-Address just to add a layer of obfuscation to the data-collectors. If your browser is clean and working for you there is no need for a VPN (unless you need it for the sake of coming from a different geolocation). If your Operating System isn't Open Source it can be assumed to be tracking you with or without a VPN.

There are definitely downsides (especially in terms of convenience) to using Android without Google on it. If those inconveniences are too much for you (as you are alluding to in your described hassles) then it's probably just a question of which desire is stronger. That for certain privacy or that for ease of use.

Absolutely loving this comment-chain.

don't owe OP an answer

Exactly. Since its dawn forums on the internet have been full of people countering legitimate questions with "why would you even ask that?". Not only is nobody owed your "contribution", it is of zero value.

because something exists doesn't mean it should be installed

Elitist much. Why would you rather assume that a tech-savvy person is asking for tech guidance than the infinitely more likely opposite case? The answer is because you (elitist) think what works for you is the only valid path and all must be guided to your subjective treasure. Your intentions may be benign but your methods are not.

It's understandable that you want to take your virtualization-capabilities to the next level but I also don't see the appeal of containerizing unraid like many others here. I started using unraid last autumn and to me it really is about being able to mix drive sizes. It's a backup to my main server's ZFS pool so (fingers crossed) I don't even really worry about drive failures on unraid. (I have double parity on ZFS and single parity on unraid.)

Anyways my point is I started out with 8 SATA slots plus an old USB-based enclosure with i set to JBOD mode and that was a pretty stupid idea. unraid couldn't read SMART data from those USB drives. Every once in a while one of the drives would suddenly show up as having an unsupported partition layout. Couple weeks ago all 5 drives in the enclosure started showing up as unusable. So as you can imagine I dropped that enclosure and now am working solely off the 8 internal slots. I'd imagine that virtualizing unraid's disk access might potentially yield similar issues. At least the comments of people here remind me of my own janky setup.

You can inject nationalism into pretty much everything.

Serious question: How could ANY economy possibly grow when it is spending so much on something that only means death and destruction? The P in GDP stands for something that's produced. Currently the main product of Russia is annihilation, something that should be pretty hard to sell at a profit. (And the rest would probably mostly be cheap oil and natural gas for those who still trade with Russia.)

By the logic of that graphic (and please bear with me here): If Russia wasn't currently killing its (former) UA brothers it would be growing even more because all that bloodmoney could be spent on productive things. No? Am I missing something here? Point being that if that was the case, that growth could have been achieved before 2022 and 2014 when there were no external conflicts.

This. Also unless you have raw BluRay sources recompressing already compressed video isn't exactly a great idea either way. The space savings will never be worth the loss in visual quality. If you were to retain the quality the space used would probably be similar even with a more efficient / newer codec.