KeepFlying

Definitely. And theres also the ability to use it to "hide in the crowd" if you have decent OPSEC and are being anonymous in other ways.

+1

A lot of the VPN hype is sort of left over from before we had "https" everywhere. Most of your Internet traffic is encrypted these days.

I guess there's a slight advantage with VPNs (vs ISPs) having your data is you can at least choose your VPN provider more freely than you can choose your ISP so in theory you can pick one you can trust.

But this is chasing a pretty small amount of anonymity for most people. It's not worth it most of the time.

And tbh, you're most likely worried about the Ad companies and social media giants, not your ISP.

Having reliable and cheap lighting at all hours of the day.

Light was very expensive for a lot of human history.

For anything like this, start with your threat model. Are you trying to protect yourself from Microsoft, from your ISP, from the Ad agencies, or from the government? Depending on which you're most worried about it will change the actions you'd need to take pretty drastically.

Trying to chase "maximum" anonymity without deciding who you are anonymous to is too vague.

It sounds like you're at least worried about Microsoft though. At minimum, turn off all the settings you reasonably can to limit what is collected about you. "Windows Privacy Dashboard" used to be a good third party app that made that easy, not sure if it's still relevant (it's been a few years for me).

Next level of effort would probably be switching to Linux. Realistically any distribution would be loads better than Windows for privacy.

Using a VPN stops your ISP from seeing (most of) your behavior online, but the VPN company would see it instead, so it's just trading one adversary for another if you're focused on privacy. (Not saying it's useless, but it's not the panacea that people make it out to be.)

Next most beneficial step would probably be moving your data (emails, photo backups, chat messages, etc) to trustworthy locations.

Anything beyond that depends on who you're protecting yourself from.

I think they might be able to guess that you're watching a video based on the traffic patterns, but unlikely they can tell what site it's coming from.

I don't support mass deportations but I understand why people do. Id prefer amnesty (especially for children and families who have been here for years) followed by eased legal immigration processes to make it easier to come here legally.

What bothers me recently though isn't mass deportations themselves, it's the way they are being done. Unmarked officers, no oversight, sketchy warrants that prey on people's lack of knowledge of their rights, strong arming local organizations and governments to hand over info, punishing people who are trying to fix their status or lost it on a technicality, etc.

If you're hosting static content it's a lot easier. If you've only opened ports 80/443 and don't have any kind of user input or scripting you're (probably) fine. Most likely you'd get DOS'd before someone would hack you. Assuming you're keeping your software up to date.

In general though limit what is exposed to the Internet. In this case don't open any extra ports.

If you want to be more secure (likely overkill for most threat models), treat your webserver like it's always infected. Don't do anything else important on it, and keep it segmented from your other computers with firewall rules.

Realistically no one is going to bother to hack you unless you're posting shit that makes people angry. You're mostly going to get prodded by bots looking for known vulnerabilities in Apache or the like, and you can stay protected with frequent updates.

If you're hosting something dynamic or with code like PHP or something with user accounts and the like, then it's slightly more complicated.

That argument only works to explain and support the existence of millionaires and multimillionaires. With millions of dollars you can hire out most menial tasks easily. Especially if you're still living in a reasonable home.

It falls apart when you reach excessive levels of wealth. Your first few million buys you a lot of time to specialize, but your $101st million buys you less. Even moreso when you get to billions.

On top of everything else people mentioned, it's so profoundly stupid to me that AI is being pushed to take my summary of a message and turn it into an email, only for AI to then take those emails and spit out a summary again.

At that point just let me ditch the formality and send over the summary in the first place.

But more generally, I don't have an issue with "AI" just generative AI. And I have a huge issue with it being touted as this Oracle of knowledge when it isn't. It's dangerous to view it that way. Right now we're "okay" at differentiating real information from hallucinations, but so many people aren't and it will just get worse as people get complacent and AI gets better at hiding.

Part of this is the natural evolution of techology and I'm sure the situation will improve, but it's being pushed so hard in the meantime and making the problem worse.

The first Chat GPT models were kept private for being too dangerous, and they weren't even as "good" as the modern ones. I wish we could go back to those days.

This is my very loose, shower thought level description of my personal belief.

Okay cool.

OP asked for reasons, and I gave one of mine. I didn't intend or expect it to be convincing to anyone. If I wanted to give a formal argument for the existence of a higher power I would, but that's not the point of this thread.

If you look at it very very loosely, many major religions are reaching toward the same general concepts and have enough similarities to suggest a consensus that there's a "something" up there.

We probably all have an imperfect idea of what that "something" is, but there are enough similarities (or echos of the same ideas) across many religions to suggest they're looking at the same indivisible thing and interpreting it differently.