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  • As far as possible I try to avoid:

    • All things from big tech because privacy, see Schrems II and their terms on use of personal information for own purposes
    • Non Open Source tech because privacy or other malicious functions
    • Tech that are prone to planned obsolescence because of special batteries etc. and can't be fixed with for example a custom ROM on Android
  • Anything "smart" exepct smartphone.
    I dont want more stuff collect my data, and I am lazy to selfhost it.

  • Smart Watches.

    1. I don't want to take care of charging for yet another device. Plus, analog watches are beautiful!
    2. Already trying to limit my screen time, no reason to check notifications the instant they pop.
    3. Don't want to be conscious of my heart rate and sleep schedule all the time. Also have some privacy concerns about real time data associated with me making its way into big tech's servers.
  • Home smart devices in general. I'm avoiding Alexa, Siri or any other thing like that. Besides the obvious privacy issues I see about them, I can only imagine being alone at home, Alexa thinking something talked to her and responding in a distorted voice. No, thanks.

    I'm considering a home assistant at some point, by setting up a proper network for the smart devices alone, but that's as far as I'll go.

    • Look for devices that support Zigbee or Z-wave, as they're guaranteed to be local-only and not depend on any cloud service. Pair them with Home Assistant and you'll have a smart home that doesn't require anything in "the cloud".

  • Generative AI. Dall-E just produces dumb images. ChatGPT is absolutely useless, nothing more than some kind of novelty toy. The fact that people are asking it questions and believing it is just so plain stupid. And if i need to do research to be able if it just talks bullshit again - why bother asking it in the first place?

    • To be fair, I've written plenty of useful code as a hobbyist with the help of Chat GPT. Not good for writing anything factual or creative, but it's a decent assistant at my level.

    • IMO the use case for ChatGPT is stuff that's not important but still tedious to write. For example, I'm applying for engineering work and my resumé "looks" like shit, so I'm going to need to write a shitload of cover letters. I don't want to write them, like literally at all. It's boring and stupid. But ChatGPT will happily write them. Sure there might be factual errors, but I'll read the output and correct errors by hand. I still save time not having to write boilerplate or structure sentences.

      Also, ChatGPT can work with programming languages. For example, I had ChatGPT write me a matrix algebra class in C++ just for fun. The first iteration didn't compile, but it had the jist of how to represent a matrix and matrix multiplication. The second iteration compiled and worked on what I tried it on. Would I use it in production? Probably not while Boost exists. However, I probably could have used it to start writing a matrix algebra library if I really wanted to.

      The fact that people are asking it questions and believing it is just so plain stupid.

      The fact of the matter is that people are more gullible than they think. People have been encouraged to blindly trust authority figures since the dawn of civilization. We are simply reaping the consequences of our continued complacency.

      It's not unreasonable to ask ChatGPT (or anyone/thing) else questions. The issue is when they are treated as all-seeing oracles. ChatGPT in particular makes for a poor search engine because it is particularly likely to output convincing-sounding lies, because it is designed to optimize the convincing-sounding-ness of outputted text.

      And if i need to do research to be able if it just talks bullshit again - why bother asking it in the first place?

      Well, it can point you in a direction to begin your own research. However, the main use case is really when you don't want to do the work and you don't care about the quality of the work. I don't think people fully realize that workers generally don't want to do their work (would you do your job for free?), because that would contradict the assumption that work under capitalism is natural, voluntary, and not imposed upon the world.

  • Smart home products where I can't replace the OS with an open source one.

  • the "cloud". I try to selfhost as much as possible

248 comments