Irdial

It helps to be accustomed to cognitive dissonance

Here’s my take. Companies must comply with the laws of the countries they operate in, so there’s always a chance that your data will be made accessible to authorities. If that’s your concern, your best bet is to only use services which offer end-to-end encryption. If you’re more worried about being tracked or profiled by corporations, the good news is that most cloud storage and email providers besides Google don’t sell your data anyway.

As long as you’re using an encrypted service, the choice of provider comes down to price and preference. If you’ve got multiple Apple devices and/or a Windows computer, I’d go with iCloud+. If you use Android and/or Linux and don’t want to use the Google Suite, then I’d defer to the suggestions of others on this thread.

And to your point on Private Relay, this is true. It’s not a bona fide VPN, but it definitely gets the job done if you use it on Apple devices to mask system-wide DNS requests and hide traffic in Safari.

I think $0.99 is extremely competitive for cloud storage, contacts & calendar, a VPN, and advanced email capabilities

This might be an unpopular opinion, but you should consider sticking with iCloud+. If you have Advanced Data Protection enabled, your data is end-to-end encrypted and Apple does not have access to the keys. You also get features like Hide My Mail (like you mentioned) and iCloud Private Relay included in the plan. I only pay 99 cents per month for 50 GB!

On my Mac mini running LM Studio, it managed 1702 tokens at 17.19 tok/sec and thought for 1 minute. If accurate, high-performance models were more able to run on consumer hardware, I would use my 3060 as a dedicated inference device

the Chinese AI lab also released a smaller, “distilled” version of its new R1, DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B, that DeepSeek claims beats comparably sized models on certain benchmarks

Most models come in 1B, 7-8B, 12-14B, and 27+B parameter variants. According to the docs, they benchmarked the 8B model using an NVIDIA H20 (96 GB VRAM) and got between 144-1198 tokens/sec. Most consumer GPUs probably aren’t going to be able to keep up with

On one hand, it’s inane how hard Anthropic is trying to anthropomorphize Claude with these experiments and scenarios. It’s still just a chatbot. On the other hand, as these products inch closer to demonstrating true intelligence, we’ll be glad someone was at least thinking about the implications during the early stages of development.

You can easily sync your personal music collection to your iOS device using the macOS “Music” app in tandem with the Finder, or using iTunes on Windows. I’ve not explored the options on Linux, but I suspect they’re out there.

I’ve got a personal collection that’s growing steadily, mostly from CDs and digital purchases. I do not use steaming services, and my iPhone is my primarily listening device.

I am generally opposed to the integration of generative AI in consumer hardware, since it doesn’t have much practical utility at this point.

However, the features described in this article mostly have to do with extracting information from images. This is actually quite useful! For example, macOS allows users to select text and automatically mask objects from images. It’s a feature I use heavily and wish other operating systems had good support for.

It depends on what you’re studying. Some majors like accounting might require you to use Excel, for example. On the other hand, when I was getting my BS+MS in computer engineering, running Linux was actually advantageous

In a world where unfettered Internet access has completely eroded our ability to form connections with others, the solution to loneliness couldn’t possibly be anything but more screen time 🤦🏽‍♂️

Timshift is to Linux what Time Machine is to Macs. It’s a snapshot tool that lets you roll back a certain file or your entire filesystem to an earlier state

ElementaryOS does it this way

It works for images as well. Another useful macOS feature I use every day is the OCR built into the system apps, including QuickLook

Human innovation scales up quite well. Some people were lucky enough to have a say on the design of this systems that changed the world. It’s unfortunate that they let greed erode their humanity.

Yeah. Maybe, in this fantasy world, you can port your address to different branches the same way you might transfer your phone number between carriers. My phone number area code reflects where I lived when I got my first phone. It does not correspond with where I currently live. The same could be true of email addresses in this scenario.

I sometimes like to imagine a future where your local library provides email addresses to card holders

AGI apparently doesn’t mean anything anymore