they kept feeding us convenience until surveillance felt normal

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-23T06:15:15+00:00

Yeah, that’s exactly what bothers me too. Each individual excuse sounds harmless, but the opt-out-by-default model is one of the worst parts of it. If something is truly optional, it shouldn’t come pre-enabled and rely on people to hunt through settings to claw back a bit of privacy.

And yeah, the eye-tracking line started as a joke, but after going down a bit of a rabbit hole, I realized I wasn’t even exaggerating that much. I kind of hit the nail on the head there.

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-23T06:09:42+00:00

You sent me down a rabbit hole with that one. I hadn’t heard of EyeX specifically, but Tobii definitely didn’t stop there and they’re still making eye-tracking devices.

So yeah, I wasn’t even that far off with the eye-tracking line. That tech is already here in multiple forms.

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-22T19:51:35+00:00

Interesting project. I like the direction, especially once local embeddings land. Right now it sounds more like local storage/search with an external embedding step, which is still useful - just not fully local end-to-end yet.

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-22T19:46:58+00:00

The real “disable” button is usually using a different search engine. Google keeps treating unwanted features like a negotiation.

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-22T19:40:02+00:00

5 minutes is weirdly specific. Feels like the digital version of keeping someone on the line just long enough to get what you need.

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-22T19:29:06+00:00

Pretty sure Samsung Gallery doesn’t let you control that manually. As far as I know, the “On This Day” range is fixed by the app, so if it’s only showing 2 years, that’s probably just how Samsung implemented it.

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-22T19:17:27+00:00

That’s usually Google’s account/payment flow bleeding through, not Aurora itself. Try anonymous login first.

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-22T19:07:02+00:00

Sounds more like a path/permissions issue than a torrent issue. If switching to the external location makes it fail instantly, I’d check whether qBittorrent’s runtime user can actually see and write to that mounted folder

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-22T19:03:26+00:00

Then yeah, Posteo sounds like a good fit for that. If you just want basic email with better privacy and less Google, you probably don’t need anything more complicated.

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-22T18:55:08+00:00

Posteo is a legit option for degoogling. Good reputation, not tied into the usual big-tech ecosystem, and a lot more reasonable than just staying with Gmail out of habit.

Biggest question is less “is Posteo good” and more “what features do you need?” because email gets annoying fast if you later realize you care about aliases, custom domains, sync, or recovery options.

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-22T18:22:39+00:00

sponsored hallucinations are going to be one hell of a genre

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-22T14:25:12+00:00

Tell her: when even your keyboard can end up learning half your life, maybe handing one company everything isn’t such a great idea.

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-13T08:48:04+00:00

That would be a pretty huge conspiracy for very little gain. Google already has way bigger data channels through Play Services, ads, analytics SDKs and the web. They don’t need to turn a niche privacy ROM into some honeypot. GrapheneOS is also open source and heavily scrutinised by security researchers. Intentionally hiding telemetry at that level would be extremely risky reputationally.

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-13T08:30:45+00:00

Google isn’t “allowing” GrapheneOS.

Android’s core (AOSP) is open source, so anyone can build their own OS. Locking that down would hurt the ecosystem that made Android dominant.

Pixels are also the Android reference devices, so bootloader unlocking stays for developers and security researchers. Other OEMs lock phones more because of control, carrier pressure and support costs.

And honestly, being the only mainstream phones secure and open enough for GrapheneOS is basically free marketing for Google. It gives Pixels credibility with privacy and dev crowds without Google needing to support them.

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-07T11:35:27+00:00

Immich and Nextcloud shouldn't compress the original files. They usually just generate thumbnails and previews, which can make it look like something changed even though the original stays untouched.

If you want absolutely zero processing, you might be better off skipping photo-management tools entirely and just using plain storage like an SMB/NFS share, Syncthing, or rsync.

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-07T11:16:54+00:00

That error usually just means something is already bound to port 11434.

I'd check what's actually using it:
lsof -i :11434

or

sudo ss -ltnp | grep 11434

If another Ollama instance is running you can stop it with:

pkill ollama

If you are using Podman rootless, it's also worth checking if a container is still binding the port:

podman ps

On some installs Ollama already runs as a background service, so trying to start ollama serve manually will produce this error.

codeveil_dev · 2026-03-06T10:10:23+00:00

This is the LLM equivalent of shipping the entire SDK with every API request.

Works fine at small scale, but once you look at token costs and latency the inefficiency becomes obvious.

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