I don’t even want to imagine the environmental studies and hurdles they’ll have to jump through to artificially alter an areas day/night cycle. There’s a laundry list of environmental concerns that I’m sure any homeowner or eco-activist worth their salt would jump on. Not to mention glare and impacts to air traffic, on and on.

Would make my solar panels pretty darn effective though. Would probably be great for SAD in winter too. Clever idea. Not sure I can get behind it though.

Whenever I have to brave the Google abyss, I usually use Startpage. Obviously uBlock Origin but if I can avoid being bombarded by devious and distracting ads altogether, I’d rather that.

True but I see this more as a critical thinking problem - which is pervasive in our society and worsened by the tech bubbles. People should want to seek out information that both argues for and against a topic.

The way our education systems work now, at least in the US, that method of thinking only begins around college and varies widely by academic pedigree.

I don’t run VPNs at the router level. The speed and latency hit, plus the spambot triggers aren’t worth it for me. This is purely a non-privacy minded preference, mind you, and I’m totally not an expert.

You bring up a good point though. Regardless of what’s running upstream, if my device is running private relay, it all gets bypassed. So I have to disable private relay.

My preference is to run nextdns over DoH, AdGuard locally on iOS + Stop the Madness, and a VPN when I’m feeling sheepish.

On iOS, I’ve tried quite a few combinations and I’ve gotten feedback from users with others.

When I ran pi-hole or AdGuard home, I also used AdGuard on all my iOS devices - both the DNS pseudo-VPN and safari extensions cause otherwise ads would sneak in. The Adguard app removes the annoying ads from Apple News and NYT apps.

Now I just use NextDNS and the same AdGuard iOS app setup.

The few people on ours are local real estate agents and severe weather alerts lol

Oh! I’ll have to watch that. Hadn’t realized Apple toys with this theme quite a bit. Constellation had so much promise but it flamed out for me. Severance might be tangentially related with the theme, compartmentalized lives, being equally fascinating.

Mr. Robot and Counterpart did things to my brain questioning reality.

Yup. I quit everything but Reddit several years back without a second thought in all that time because I lived in a big metropolitan city.

Now I live in a small suburb where all the towns and businesses post to FB, neighbors have tradeposts and active interest groups on there, the schools and Police post info there too. My wife has connected to “friends” we otherwise wouldn’t exchange info with.

All that has had me wanting to create a new account - just to connect. I was completely ignorant to the role it plays outside of big cities beforehand. Nextdoor is a really crappy alternative.

This is both a terrifying and astonishing thought.

This introduces the possibility that we’re experiencing 2 universes and creating a third within ourselves.

Wait! Have we come full circle? Is Orbs the end before we come back to Beans?

Just like my Harbor Freight paint sprayer!

I ruined so many games that way. Once or twice was me bumping the Ps2. Other than that it was just being a petty fuck.

Pffft food coupons. It’s $5 off the purchase of your next device within 15 days of issue.

I used perplexity pretty exclusively for a while. Especially for work. Both have their place and use cases but when I’m looking for something truly specific or nuanced, it’s DDG and a manual search.

Excuse me! What about the psychological trauma? Do you know what it’s like to be vulnerably taking care of natures business and have one of these demons scurry across your feet?

Y’know! I’ve liked their articles but I’m put off by their membership model and pricing.

Ars ropes me in pretty often. It has more good content than not. The Atlantic has snuck its way into my reading lists - though it’s pretty heavily opinionated more often than not.

It really is getting harder to find quality fact-based reporting. I rely on sources like Allsides and Straight Arrow News but even then it’s still just rehashing (course correcting) the flavor of the day reporting.

3:15 is the one. The spooky one.

I’m going to retract that claim. I think it came in one of my tech newsletters but since I can’t find it, I don’t want to mislead anyone. Maybe I’m mixing it up with another tech product.