All this is already happening and has been for a while before the whole AI hype even started.

I will take your question as a more general “What can happen”, not focusing too much on LLMs. Although arguably it was their precursors who started the more nefarious ways of aquiring & perusing ever more esp. behavioral data.

So the question is: what are the real-life harms of private online data collection everybody warns about? The answer is as long winded as explaining the mechanism of the aquisition itself.

It’s pervasive. “They” can tweak almost every manner of interaction with their customers/subjects. It affects younger people (and I mean younger than me, and I still remember the time when there was no internet for the people) constantly and in ways they aren’t even aware of. It allows the creation of data sets that are being sold on - now including DNA thanks to millions of useful idiots who went to 23andme -

out of breath. maybe somebody else can continue this

TIL! Or should I say TILL! (Today I learned (more about) Linux)

Before any commenter rushes to condemn the Chaos That Is Linux, please check out OP’s posting history to get a clearer picture of their credibility.

(and like they themselves stated, this is a rant and not a PSA)

That’s kindof the opposite of what the previous commenter said. Have you tried explicitely setting the env var to a value different than what’s in gsettings?

What env var are we talking about btw?

And what freedesktop spec? AFAIK they do not deal much in env vars apart from XDG_*

I think it’s a coincidence and not etymologically related - scandinavian languages use the verb “talar” or variations thereof for “pay” or “tell” and I think it’s more related to the German word “zahlen”: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zahl#Etymologie

We had a smaller version of this in our childhood; the contents were somehow halfway between chocolate and chewing gum.

I can confirm. But a couple years back, there were alternatives to that (none of which privacy-friendly) - if you can find the tiny, easy to overlook link “try something else”.

It doesn’t even have to be a long time. Just changing IPs in a way they find suspicious is enough.

Same for Google btw and probably all large US American platforms.

edit: you never logged in in 10+ years? Unless you know there’s sensitive stuff in there, leave it. You probably won’t even be able to log in without going through major hoops.

I decided to actively delete my account a couple of years back. I did NOT want to scan my ID, as they demanded, but there were always other options. None of which appealed to me since they were clearly designed to get one last bit of valuable info for my shadow profile, but I went with the option to have 3 friends vouch for me.

After that I was told that it would take 30 days or so and trying to log in during that time would be interpreted as canceling my deletion. I never did.

The Arch Wiki used to have some elaborate tricks on Firefox profile syncing, and some software to support it, maybe you should check that out (but the actual software FF uses is or used to be FOSS as well).

I love the name. Sounds like something edible. Maybe it just reminds me of GNUtella. A Taler, btw, is an old currency (mostly present in fairytales these days) and etymologically related to dollar.

deleted by creator

Hm, weird, they have a perfectly working HTML/CSS site yet they fill it up with 3rd party requests for javascript etc.
In this case enabling javascript might actually make things worse.

This curbs my enthusiasm a little.

Meh. ssh<space><tab><tab> does the same.

Also, useless use of cat. And grep.

awk '/Host / {print $2}' ~/.ssh/config | fzf

Shell completion ftw. Once you grok the double-tab you might start using the terminal more than your filemanager.

I had been browsing the site for 5 minutes before I realized that I had not enabled javascript. Everything works: drop-down menus, icon fonts, everything. This is a very rare and skilful thing. I have deep respect and adoration, and it bodes well for the actual software.

Which I’m a little hazy about: can I build a forum with it? Or a blog?

Me. I support this, and I did for over a decade. If you don’t use windows there are more performant general purpose media players than VLC. Anybody who’s been reviving old hardware with Linux knows this.

You sound like you suspect that people want to dis VLC. That is not the case. I’m sure VLC has valid use cases even on Linux, and it certainly is a marvellous piece of software in its own right.

Now go away, you silly person.

Both: ssh config AND your fancy gui. Because most secondary and tertiary apps recognize the ssh config aliases. I know first hand Gigolo does.

Or your file manager: enter sth like sftp://user@host_alias/home/user - after success, create a bookmark.

And most secondary apps, e.g. git and sshfs, even Gigolo, recognize these aliases. It’s the best.

How do you define totalitarian governments in an actionable way? The license is a legal document.

And what if the shitty government doesn’t give a shit about your license because it’s shitty?

What if excluding any group of people in this way is actually illegal?

That said, lots of licenses exist, e.g. non-commercial ones. Check them all out, don’t write a new one.

I want to know only one thing: is it based on mpv?