Mostly I’m scared I’ll write a firewall rule incorrectly and suddenly expose a bunch of internal infrastructure I thought wasn’t exposed.

I’m probably thinking about this in a naive way. I’d love to see proprietary models, if trained using public information, be required to become public and free via legislation. AI companies can compete on selling GPU time, on ease of use.

And, if AI companies are required to figure out attribution in order to be able to use their work commercially, research will accelerate in that area because money. No I don’t know how that would work either.

Still probably a bad idea but I haven’t figured out why yet.

Thank you for your well written reply.

Are you sure? Maybe I’m using the wrong word. What is it called when, in an academic paper, the author states findings or conclusions the author got from some other source, in the author’s own words, but doesn’t cite their source?

Broadly this is preventing plagiarism. We don’t want someone to scrape all our knowledge, remove the human connection and reference back to experts and people, and serve the information itself, uncredited.

But if a human can read something, so can a bot. I think ultimately we need legislation.

Advice from most to least certain: If you want very long standby time (a reliably perfect first print after literally months of inactivity) and you have the space for an ugly cube of a printer, laser is the only option. Ink tank printers have unexpected wear parts, like internal ink sponges.

Black and white laser is stupid simple. Color laser “prints” four times in series onto an intermediate transfer belt (ITB) and then puts that onto the paper, still super reliable but bulkier, and your prints get watermarked with yellow dots because FBI or something. I’d go color.

Toner lock-in is becoming more common, not just for HP. If your page count is going to be low, just pay full price for name brand toner. If you don’t want to do that, like your use case could involve printing a single page or entire binders of paper between months of inactivity, read on.

Start your printer research by shopping for cheap off brand toner, get a sense for what they’re selling the most of and what that’s compatible with, and see what printers they support.

Some aftermarket toner just works, out of the box, because the printer isn’t crazy locked down. Those cartridges have normal sounding instructions. Some aftermarket toner requires you to transplant a chip from a first party cartridge, and their instructions include this. Avoid those printers.

And consider used printers. I have a used HP LaserJet Pro MFP M477fdw that I love, but I would never ever buy another HP printer, especially not one made later than this one. Be very careful before buying any HP printer, especially one made in the past 6-8 years. Even wear items (like the ITB) have modules with firmware and compatibility requirements, and I’m worried I could be one replacement component away from suddenly having a locked down printer.

I self host, on a personal domain I registered in June 2000. Mostly followed a 13?-part tutorial at I think linuxbabe dot com, was the first one that seemed to genuinely be trying to help you set up a good environment, not just as a way to say “doesn’t this sound difficult? Impossible even? Coincidentally you can pay us to do this instead.” Except I put everything on its own VM instead of all on one. (Even a VM for just opendkim, which was maybe not necessary.)

Mostly iPhone mail app and/or Roundcube webmail.

Yes highly recommend it, for receiving email. Greylist blocks like 99.8% of spam. Sending works fine for me, because it’s an old domain with history. I don’t think brand new domains have the same experience.

Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.

Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.

Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.

Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?

What? Did I turn it off and on again? I’m a very smart technology person, of course my big brain already thought of that. I develop software for a living. It couldn’t be that simple or I wouldn’t be calling you.

. . .

Turning it off and on again worked. My shame is immense and I have wasted everybody’s time.

(And that is how I learned to embrace my own idiocy and do the recommended, simple troubleshooting tasks without questioning them.)

So I’m curious . . . what reference am I missing that helps me understand what menu settings cause exactly which pieces of personal data to be shared with which Apple services? I want to RTFM, and while I appreciate people wanting to be helpful, comment replies are not themselves documentation.

(I switched from Android to ios in 2020 and haven’t really figured out details beyond turning icloud sync off for specific apps. I’d like to add more devices and learn to trust that sync method but I don’t understand where crypto is used and how the keys are handled.)

I use Due on iOS for repeating timers/reminders where I need it to be persistent and annoying because the task is important. Like paying rent, or physical therapy “homework” I kept forgetting. The persistence might be good if you’re worried you’ll just dismiss a normal alarm or forget to start the next timer.

Really great ideas. I read up a bit on Fediblock and I think you’re absolutely right.

If I could riff off of your ideas a bit: instance-blocking recommendation lists bundle an entire stack of things together:

• statements of fact or intent: this is wrong, this is right, this is insulting and harmful, this is insulting but not harmful if you can laugh at it

• value judgements about those statements: I care about this issue but not that issue, this wrong statement is easily disproven, that wrong statement takes paragraphs to disprove, etc.

• actions to take based on those value judgements: block, tag with a statement, link to an article, etc.

With things bundled, the whole stack has to be a pretty close match for a user’s own values, or else there’s friction. The user can just tolerate the friction, maybe miss out on some content, or they can decide to switch to a whole new list.

Suppose we could unbundle those from each other. Subscribe to the work of a group of volunteers that recommends safe defaults but lets you customize things when you encounter friction points.

I feel like we need different ways to share and learn things about harmful posts and comments. Like, sure maybe your server aggregates the posts, and because you own the server you can remove or edit things if you really want to. But I should be able to say “this is objectively wrong in a dangerous way, and here’s proof” in a side channel that the server owner can’t block.

And for it to have any point at all, clients should be able to subscribe to feeds. Like, a science educator I respect can say “I trust this foundation that fights harmful disinformation” and I should be able to click a button and see their stuff. Without the server owner banning me for some weird reason.

A 20 lb (or so) sealed lead acid battery and an inverter, at U Nebraska at Omaha around 2003-2004. I had imported a Sharp SL-C700 and it was very power hungry. Smart phones were barely a thing (blackberries) at the time.

I think I was vaguely aware of the possibility of some unexpected metal shorting the battery and getting hot enough to start fires, so I bought a green rubber bath mat (which I remember had little sucker feet on one side) and wrapped it around the battery.

I finished my undergrad in 2004 with no incidents.