Pick up as many uncensored models as you can store ASAP. Those will absolutely be the first to go.

Very true, but it’s better to use and support a fully FOSS platform if possible.

Buy a Fully FOSS 3D printer. It’s pointless to purchase any peice of tech to “avoid future regulation” if it still runs proprietary software you don’t control. I would highly recommend checking out Voron printers. Fully FOSS at every level, firmware, hardware, schematics, etc. Voron Design

The catch is that you have to build it from scratch yourself. However, there are many places online to buy high quality premade kits, and the community is massive and thriving, you’ll be able to follow guides easily.

I would also buy some bulk, long term digital storage if you don’t have it already, and build yourself a simple NAS. The digital crackdowns are coming soon, and you’re going to thank yourself for having terabytes of digital media and software that is impossible to get down the line.

ServerMonkey currently has 6TB refurbished enterprise HDDs for $175, and 24TB Seagate Exos CMR HDDs for $625 (even cheaper per TB.) if you don’t need crazy performance, you can throw a few of those in an old PC with a few hundred bucks of hardware and be totally fine using it as a NAS/home media server.

Learn how to securely torrent if you don’t already. If you’re into LLMs at all, download current LLM models that are good at different sizes, even if you can’t currently run them on your hardware, they will likely be banned in the near future because they represent a “threat” to the USA’s corporate power and influence.

Download a local copy of Wikipedia and other online sites with something like Kiwix. Purchase pre-LLM era physical books on foraging, cooking, home and auto repair, electronics, child care, etc. Highly practical skills that will be useful to know as the general population becomes further dumbed down and reliant on proprietary, corporate slopware.

For those on a very tight budget, used is your friend. Old computer equipment is still quite affordable. You can pick up used t480 Thinkpads on Ebay for $175-$300. If you’ve got kids who need a laptop for school, pick one of those up and throw Linux on it.

If you’re willing to swap, haggle, and hunt locally, you can get even better deals. Check if your area has a government surplus warehouse. When I was a kid, my family lived 15 minutes from one. They had literal pallets of government mini-pcs you could buy, 40 towers for a few hundred bucks. You could buy individual machines for $40-$75 there. Yeah they were old, beat up, janky, but they worked. And as a 14 year old kid who’s only money came from doing random yard work for friends and family, it was a gold mine.

Check with your local businesses and schools and ask somebody there if they have “e-waste computers” they are looking to get rid of. Often times they do, and they will happily give you them for free. Normally, they have to pay a company to take those off their hands, so they will have no issue with you just taking them for nothing. I’ve gotten a bunch of old computers this way over the years. Don’t be afraid to even ask the IT department where you work too. Some places have strict e-waste policies, but most don’t. As long as there’s no storage installed that could contain company/organizational data, they usually couldn’t care less if an employee wants to take an old “junk” PC home with them.

I agree with Stallman and others on this sort of thing, it should be illegal for any public institution to use proprietary, corporate software in any capacity.

Public institutions are supposed to serve and benefit the public good first and foremost. The idea that they can do that equally well or better by partnering with mega-corps who’s only fundamental drive is to generate as much profit as possible for their shareholders, is idiotic.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo flatpak update -y

Was this the guy who had that blog post about Europe being “ruined” by immigrants?

Get mad, bro. 😌

Get mad, bro. 😌

I once worked as a sysadmin at a Windows-only small business (a few dozen employees total.)

I never had an issue switching to Linux on my laptop. I used Reminnia to RDP into all our Windows servers. I used the browser versions of Outlook, Teams, and Word. All our network devices and VMWare host had web interfaces that I accessed from my browser. Our Entra permissions for email and our cloud-side stuff was all in the browser too.

I used some FOSS PDF reader/editor for PDFs, printing worked without any tweaking. I had a basic Windows VM on my system for the one Windows-only program that I occasionally needed to test.

But of course, being the entire IT department by myself meant that I could do that without getting approval from anybody other than the owner, and he said he didn’t care what OS I used on my laptop, as long as it didn’t hurt my ability to keep everything up to date, secure, and our users happy.

Dang, I keep forgetting that suckers still pay for this…

There’s a bunch of dirty corporate boots that need a good licking, I’ve heard you’re just the person for the job!

Hey, there’s some corporate boots that need licking, get to it.

Sorry, I’m having trouble understanding what you’re saying with those boots in your mouth.

Absolutely correct, Capitalism will incentivize innovation only as long as it’s profitable to do so. Once a company becomes a dominant player in their industry, innovation actually becomes largely unprofitable.

We can see this play out all the time, this is why industry giants almost never try to outcompete smaller start ups by innovating their products and services, instead, they either crush them out of the market via a bunch of different methods. Or they just buy them out, kill off their IP, or if it’s way better, they just brand it as their own, and usually fire most of the old staff.

In a Capitalist system, this actually creates a whole new incentive structure where start ups will try to grow as fast as possible with the sole intention of getting bought out by an industry titan, making the founders of the start up filthy rich.

Don’t let this nut sully your views on actual leftists, most of us are pretty sensible. ❤️

They are very likely a bot anyways lol

If you’re using a 30+ year old computer in the modern day, you’ve already sacrificed security.

The price and availability of a 15 year old computer is almost the same as a 30 year old computer, you can get a fully functional 1st gen i5 PC that will sprint circles around the highest end 90’s PC for $40. Honestly, most people are just e-wasting computers that old, I’m sure you could easily get them for free, hell, lots of people would pay you to take them off their hands.

You’re right, it’s way better.

No prob. Most of these things won’t take long, a few mins each. I tried to order them roughly by easy to difficult/time consuming.

Good luck!

Check out Neocities, it’s a revamp of the old Geocities platform.

All individual small sites, in the style of the late 90’s-early 2000’s web. Tons of animated gifs, sparkling cursors, hand-crafted HTML and CSS, web rings, shrines and fan pages, etc.

Very fun to just click random pages and explore, just like back in the day before search engines and algos curated our feeds and content for us.