On your own? Not much. You can stop using certain products, save money, and so on. But that’s mostly going to help make your individual existence a bit better/less bad. The CEO’s aren’t gonna give a flying fuck.
But our strength is in our numbers. Get organized. Maybe in a political party, maybe “just” in some sort of collective that helps in an area you care about. Help others in whatever capacity fits your abilities and your situation. And don’t expect it to be a quick victory. That will only result in disappointment. As a wise man (?) once so succinctly put it: “Apes together strong.”
Halt excess spending. Don’t spend a single dime more than necessary to survive. You are gonna need every penny in your bank account if you hope to make it the next 2 years.
Oh, and don’t count on democratic politicians to do anything about anything. They fear progressives more than a fascist Trump regime because they are all in the pockets of those tech billionaires.
If you’re a person with brown skin, I hope and pray for you and am donating what little I can to organizations who are trying to protect immigrants and non-whites.
Nice
try spray painting a removed and balls onto a Tesla
All billionaires should be required to prove they’re not made of cake.
Stop using and/or buying their products comes to mind.
Adblock, Firefox, don’t buy new phones, etc etc etc
Individually? Nothing. Therefore: Organise, organise, organise
Computer, who is Luigi Mangione?
artillery
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Tomahawk V-1 missilerockets
bazooka Congreve rocketfirearms manual
air gun blowgun blunderbuss carbine Spencer carbine Gatling gun handgun pistol revolver derringer harquebus musket rifle Dreyse rifle Lee-Enfield rifle Mauser rifle Springfield rifle shotgunsemiautomatic
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intermediate-range nuclear weapons tactical nuclear weapon thermonuclear bomb atomic bomb neutron bomb weapon of mass destructionsiege weapons
battering ram Big Bertha cannon French 75 catapult onager culverin German 88 ram Vulcan automatic cannonI refuse to recognize a trebuchet as a form of catapult. Just as you have had to separate handguns and rifles, one should also recognize a trebuchet’s superior siege ability at range
I will send a strongly worded letter to the random website from which I copied and pasted this.
Tie your letter to a rock and trebuchet it at them, or whichever cloud they live in.
Send it with a trebuchet.
Thank you kind person. May every road rise up to meet you, and every building you siege fall hastily
Shit. You said my trigger word.
The solution is simple, but not easy: Stop using their products. A mass exodus of their users will quickly take away their power.
Stop using all Alphabet/Google products. Other search engines, email providers, streaming video, and even cell phone operating systems exist. Switch to them.
Stop using all Meta products. Other social networks and messaging applications exist. Switch to them.
Stop buying from Amazon and watching their streams. Other online stores and streaming media exists. Switch to them.
Keep going for every company who has a billionaire CEO, owner, or shareholder. Their fortunes will evaporate quickly.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0gmsfr3
3 minute scene from planet earth series with seals chasing a great white shark away
People keep answering by trying to tell you to consume your way out of this.
There is only one way, organize, unionize and vote!
Voting? Really? You still think the corrupt system can be fixed using the corrupt system?
Many will believe that forever
The first thing you can do is not buy anything that makes the tech billionaires more money. All they care about is money: don’t give them any if you can help it.
for example:
get off of facebook (easy). don’t buy tesla or use starlink (easy). don’t buy on amazon (difficult but doable). Don’t upgrade your iphone, and don’t buy new apple products (moderate). Don’t use CHATGPT (easy).
Use Linux and open source software. Contribute to open source projects. Buy hardware second hand. Use non corporate social media. Buy local. Get your stuff fixed instead of throwing it away. Avoid data harvesting where possible.
Its as if the linux hardliners were right all along. Almost as if people laughing about our cautionary tales stand there holding the bag now.
I‘m not saying „we told you so“ but…
Richard Stallman is a big reason why I have the political views I have today.
Getting off Amazon was easier than I thought. Has been years now, and I only needed to order through a friend once, when I needed a specialty item I could find nowhere else. Most small shops have comfortable checkout systems now and short delivery times. And there’s eBay, which afaik takes a smaller cut from third parties than Amazon.
I’d add not using Amazon Prime, Amazon Web Services and other Amazon services. Not using X, being critical of SpaceX. Also, stop advertising these things, stop telling your friends about them, maybe even stop talking about them altogether. I think for some strange reason sometimes bad press is better than no press.
My company: “we’re going all in on the cloud! Specifically AWS” proceeds to pay them millions per year.
or use starlinkI don’t know if I’d call that easy for some people in very remote areas. Easy for me, easy for you, but not necessarily easy in some cases. Here’s hoping a good competitor can get to those places.The thread is not called “Do this one thing, or give up if you can’t”
I use chatgpt a lot, what is the best non-billionaire funded llm? I really need to change to one that doesn’t worsen the world…
That may be hard, seeing as all AIs use ungodly amounts of electricity. So I’d say they all worsen the world.
While deepseek is billionaire funded it still should be better if run locally I don’t think Foss llms are at that level yet
Thanks, another person mentioned it, I’m trying it now, hopefully it suits my needs.
Try hosting locally DeepSync R1, for me the results are similar to ChatGPT without needing to send any into on the internet.
LM Studio is a good start.
Don’t you need a fast GPU to do so?
Any relatively new gaming PC from the last, what, 4? Years has enough power to run local LLMs. Maybe not the ginormous 70GB behemoth models, but the toned down ones are pretty damn good and if you don’t mind waiting a few seconds while it thinks, you can run it completely locally as much as you want, and whenever you want.
You would benefit from it with some GPU offloading, this would considerably accelerate the speed of the answers. But you only need enough RAM to load the model at the bare minimum.
Thanks I’m trying it now!
But it will make me mildly uncomfortable! /s
Instead of spending 200$ a month on subscriptions, spend 300$ on a used PC, take a weekend to learn how to selfhost/pirate and then pay 5$ for a trustworthy vpn like mullvad. If you’re in the EU, send data deletion requests to every big company you’ve had an account with. Start buying things off local retailers, not Amazon. Buy computers/phones either second hand or from smaller/more trustworthy manufacturers…
And most importantly. NEVER. STOP. COMPLAINING. ABOUT. IT. The moment the complaints stop is the moment that bullshit is accepted…
Not sure if this is really accessible for everyone.
It’s probably easy to underestimate how difficult setting up and managing services can be.
I set up a Jellyfin server on a 10 year old laptop that sits closed in the corner and I have access to play the content from my TV in the living room and bedroom, and any other device that I connect to my network and it was fairly simple. Finding content is likely the hinge that holds more people back. My lazy ass didn’t want to have to go to the corner to acquire content so I set up rustdesk on my phone so I can remote to the laptop from my phone, turn the VPN on to hop to Madrid or so, and acquire what is wanted then remote to it later on to take it back off the VPN. (Allows me to do such when out and about, say someone mentions a movie or show when at work)
Was going to see if I could punch a hole with tailscale so I could leave the Jellyfin server local and just share the drive so I could write to it from “Spain” while read from it on the TV without having to switch the VPN on and off but haven’t had a a few hours to spend on that yet. The shared drive is an old 5400rpm drive and it’ll play movies at 1080p in 2 rooms without issue. (I don’t bother with 4k, my eyes really aren’t good enough to find the storage space use worth it)
I’m not really sure what you’re getting at?
I’ve been self hosting for many years. Including mission critical data for my consultancy.
It’s a great hobby and I’d encourage anyone who’s interested to get involved.
That said, for people looking for a way to “fight against tech billionaires”, migrating their google drive to a self hosted nextcloud instance from a cold start with no experience in self hosting is inadvisable.
They were talking about cutting down on $200 worth of subscriptions every month. I figured they were referring to Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Paramount or whatever other steaming services charge monthly.
I was getting at it isn’t that hard to do. Could knock it down to ~20 a month pretty manageably.
You don’t need to do everything I mentioned, doing one of those things is more than enough… You don’t need to self host, I know it’s hard, I’m just putting it out there as an option :>
There are IPTV options out there too. Their apps usually work with whatever device you have. Just sign up and get the app.
It’s not hard and there’s plenty of people, like myself, that are willing to help you. Let’s work together.
I’m interested in this a bit. I worry about setting up some sort of server that is going to be facing the Internet though. Is there a good guide or starting place for something like this? If I just want an easy or approachable solution with some limitations as a trade off for easy and safe setup? I feel like I’ve heard of Plex servers before, but no clue if that’s the best way to go or not. Where would one start to learn more?
Are you just looking to share files or swap to Linux? If it’s just Linux you can dip your toes in the water first: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install
That method does not get you a GUI though. You will be using the terminal. I recommend pairing it with MobaXTerm, an enhanced terminal, as Moba presents the file system in a windows like way. It’s great for learning and you don’t have to have the paid version, though it is a perpetual license.
I’d always recommend Ubuntu for beginners. It’s not necessary the easiest, but it’s pretty simple and where you’d struggle prepares you well for other Linux Distributions, or distros. It often comes with a windows like GUI.
There’s also an option to “Try Ubuntu” by running it off a USB. It won’t persist, or remember anything, between reboots, but that can be an advantage. I personally carry a drive with my own Live USB on my keychain.
When you’re ready you can try setting up Dual Boot, where you choose to enter Windows or Linux on startup or jump in all the way.
You can run Linux off an old laptop, a raspberry/orange/banana pi or build something dedicated. I’m happy to help with any of them.
Oh no need to sell me on Linux, I’m a fan of Linux Mint and Ubuntu, but my current laptop is an Apple M2 Pro, so if I can keep using that as my daily driver, I think I will. I’m most interested in more of a file sharing server type of service perhaps. Some way I could decouple from Google Drive for file storage is probably a good entry spot I’d think. I have an Ubuntu laptop with a dead battery I’ve not turned on in years I could repurpose as a server I’d think. It started it’s life as an MSI “gaming” Windows laptop, so it should have enough horsepower to be a file server if I knew what software to use and how to safely configure it and what software to use on my other devices to safely access it.
Have you tried just using a fileshare if it’s just your other devices? You can VPN into a cheap Edge Router Lite and be able to access it remotely. I think you’ll need a Dynamic DNS subscription for most residential locations. Your ISP may let you set a static one. May.
You’d need to secure the VPN, but it is a pretty solid setup. You can even get the Edge Router to act as a firewall or split up the network so you can only VPN into a specific segment of your network. It sounds complicated, but it’s not too bad. A whole lot of I can guide you through it if that’s what you want.
Tailscale may be easier from a setup perspective. I’ve never done a deep dive into the company and I’m more of a “do it myself” kinda guy, but I did like it when I tried it out for a while. It was definitely easy and effective. There’s also HeadScale and NetMaker, but I don’t have personal experience I can speak from on either. I wouldn’t mind learning if you want to try it.
Tailscale does sound pretty cool, and could be an option. It sounds super easy to setup which I like. I have Comcast as my service provider, so I’d have to see what they offer DNS and Static IP addresses.
I have not looked at what all my fileshare options are but doing a bit of digging it sounds like maybe I should look at Samba and see if that would work. They don’t mention mobile device support, but it is free open source software, which I love. I wonder if having a Samba service just for local network file sharing is a security issue. I would assume it is not, but I could be wrong. I’m willing to bet I’d need to be cautious with the configuration of Samba.
It may not be “hard”, yet it’s just not practically possible for most people.
It is practically possible. You just have to put in a small amount of effort. Anyone saying it’s too hard has given up without trying.
I work in IT. Trust me, it’s well beyond a lot of people.
I’m a software engineer and I had to quit self-hosting due to simply not having the time nor the ability to research and keep up with security, products that were going away, new ones, etc. I have a job, run a farm, and do housework and other work. It’s just not in the cards for me.
I work in tech and I promise it’s not. I worked my way through support and engineering and then did development. I promise people aren’t as bad at tech as they appear to you. The only thing stopping people is laziness.
It’s not “too hard”, it just completely unreasonable to expect people in general to self host as a way to “fight against tech billionaires”.
I can assure you that most people would find the amount of effort required to learn, implement, and maintain self hosted services to be unpractical.
It’s not impractical. It requires effort and Americans are too busy watching Netflix and spanking the monkey to do much of anything.
Removed by mod
Pull a Luigi
