I've never stumbled across Apple Insider before, it's quite the apologist for the company. Here's some tone deaf quotes from the article that made me laugh:

"It's true that the buck stops at the CEO, but without Tim Cook, Apple would not have so many bucks."

I guess if you make a lot of money you get a pass for allowing misleading and anti-consumer marketing campaigns?

"If billions and trillions are hard numbers to imagine, here's another one. Apple could, if its valuation could be converted to cash without loss, give every person living in the continental USA a free iPhone 16e — and then 13 spare ones. Each."

I love how they chose to illustrate Apple's obscene level of wealth with how much it could benefit people if they ever distributed that wealth through altruistic giving 😂

• Audile: offline, trackerless music recognition.
• Keepassdx + Heliboard: both excellent apps in their own right that create a smoother experience of mundane phone use, but they also integrate rather well together and Heliboard will often pop Keepassdx in to its suggestion bar when you enter a log in page. It's been really nice for me.
• FUTO voice input: speech to text for those who don't want to use Google speech services. Frankly, the FUTO app works better than googles app anyways, it always handles grammar correctly as long as you speak relatively clearly, and integrates with Heliboard nicely.
• Tailscale: for those who need VPN access to their other devices.
• Thunder : a Lemmy client with compatibility with Lemmy's recent server side changes and also has a decent UI/UX
• tasks.org: fantastic, customizable to do app with various syncing options.
• Magic Earth: privacy respecting maps/directions for those who don't want google maps. (NOTE: closed source. Here is the privacy policy, terms of use and description of their business model at the bottom of their FAQ)
• Myne: e-book downloader.
• Markdownr: convert webpages to markdown. Great option for mobile, if I'm on desktop I use the Joplin web clipper plug in for Firefox.

Seconding Newpipe, excellent app.

EDIT: added links to the terms, policies and FAQ of Magic Earth, as it is not open source.

Meme goodness aside, if you want an analytical look at the psychology of Anakin, check out this video.

If you want a super deep dive on the philosophy behind Jedi thought (which is at the core of Star Wars as George Lucas framed a lot it from his experience as a Buddhist) take a look at this YouTube video. I've never heard a more complete explanation of the star wars universe and it addresses a lot of the superficial criticisms people direct towards the Jedi and general stance the movies take on good and bad.

As a secondary plug, for any who played the RPG Knights of the Old Republic II, here is an awesome breakdown of the Kreia character by the same creator. Not just interesting from the perspective of fans of the game, but philosophy in general.

I do see a mention in that post about instead supporting the jellyfin client developers. They give this page as a reference for who to support based on which client you use.

Futo Keyboard has built in Swype functionality.

Heliboard also has it, but I believe you do have to download Google's swype libraries to use the functionality. Whether that affects privacy, I don't know.

Edit: (See calm.like.a.bomb's comment below)

EDIT: realized this was for desktop, so removed the original list of mostly android apps. Here's my go to desktop apps:

Lollypop - music player
Invoiceninja - open source invoicing service
Meld - file/folder comparison
Librewolf - hardened Firefox
Joplin - notes
QEMU/Virt-Manager - virtualization for that one windows app you still need
KeepassXC - password management
Element-desktop - Matrix client
Gparted - no fuss partition management
Lutris - game launcher that works with epic games (among many others)
PDFarranger - best PDF management I've found on Linux Soundconverter - easy to use file converter
Restic - backups
Fdupes - duplicate file finder
Freetube - privacy respecting YouTube client
Paperless-ngx - very well built electronic document storage. Must be run as a server.

Yeah, functionally it's the same. However I think it is a big perceptual change to be in line with the FUTO principle of "we want to make good software that is open and accessible, but we would also like you to pay us for it so we can continue this project sustainably." That's a bit of a contrast with the general open source approach of "I'm writing this software as a service to others, make a donation if you'd like to support my work."

Personally I think the move towards a more structured buy it if you can mindset is great. I've seen too many projects get abandoned because of lack of time and resources and then shift from developer to developer, sometimes getting better, sometimes worse.

Haha well done! 😄

I apologize for a serious response to a funny meme, but for any who are interested in the philosophy of the star wars universe and the unique pressures presented by the existence of the force, check out this video. The whole "danger of attachment" concept is actually linked to the religious beliefs of George Lucas and is an interesting part of the story telling of the relationship of living beings to the force itself in the fabric of star wars. That is, Lucas star wars. Disney seems more ambivalent to the philosophical aspects of the franchise, but it's always been pretty fascinating to me.

Try these two apps out. They'll help you remove deeply integrated stuff. If you don't need the Google Play store you can outright firewall it from internet access.

1. Universal Android Debloater. It'll guide you through removing whatever extra stuff the manufacturer put on that you don't want. It's great.
2. Netguard. This will let you see all the apps and services that are making calls out, and what they are calling. Then you can simply block what you want and deny access to the internet for any proprietary app.

Thanks for the TL;DR, I figured it would be a uneducated take, you saved me the time of watching it 🫡

Trusted to do their job? Personally, I think so, and would go as far as to say the main contenders are not doing anything fishy with your data.

I think the trouble comes in with the fact that they become a high-value target to hackers because of how much information they have on their customers. I'm sure that they take a lot of technical precautions to safeguard user data, but for me personally, the risk is not worth the value proposition.

Hmm, I'm subscribed to their RSS feed and I get full articles out of each post 🤷 I use Feeder in case that's helpful for context.

Heres a summary of the predictions made, from never all the way up to within the year. It seems to me the closer you get to the dollar bill the sooner the projections become.

"Some experts predict it will never happen..."

"Some experts argue that human intelligence is more multifaceted than what the current definition of AGI describes." (That AGI is not possible.)

"Most agree that AGI will arrive before the end of the 21st century."

"Some researchers who’ve studied the emergence of machine intelligence think that the singularity could occur within decades."

Current surveys of AI researchers are predicting AGI around 2040"

"Entrepreneurs are even more bullish, predicting it around ~2030"

"The CEO of Anthropic, who thinks we’re right on the threshold—give it about 12 more months or so."

I've been following Techlore from the early days Go Incognito, and I've definitely noticed a change in his content too. He seems to have lost some of his idealism and is more focused on convenience and the just works mentality. The shift started to happen around the time he started collaborating with the admin team from Privacy guides more often.

I get it that a person may get to a place where their approach to privacy takes on a more general and unfocused approach, but his videos do seem a little tone deaf to the specific audience he spent years creating 😕

EDIT: they've adjusted the language and integration of buying the Immich software. It's much clearer and balanced now. You can find the new info on their github announcements page, or likely in the notes of their next immich release.

ORIGINAL COMMENT
I was really looking forward to them opening a compensation option as I got in after they had taken down donation links, but this is all a bit weird. There is some good discussion happening on the github announcement page. I'll probably hold at version 1.108 for awhile until the dust settles.

I've gone through quite a few FUTO videos since they started sponsoring Immich, and it seems like the issue is that they are essentially an organization of engineers that don't have a strong background in the legalese of licensing (thus the lack of attention to the wording of the original FUTO temporary license). Their intentions and goals are solid from my perspective and the software they promote is fantastic, but it feels very much like an org run by idealistic engineers without much of a PR presence. The best PR they have is Louis Rossman, take that as you will 😄

All that being said, I have paid for a few of their other pieces of software that are single user. The part I'm not overly fond of is that it seems to be a payment for each individual user, and not a payment to be able to run the server itself. I'm sure there is rational behind it, but it just feels like this whole licensing element isn't fully baked yet.

"Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me."

The consensus seems to be that this is a propaganda piece (or at least heavily opinionated by the writer) but I just don't understand how they could write this with a positive frame of mind. The article is a strange mixture of perspectives that don't seem consistent. Bizarre.

I feel your pain 😅🫠

Yeah, just to add another confirmation to the other comments, if you have a separate home partition you can reuse it with a new / partition and expect it to work fine. The only stuff that gets saved in your home folder is comfiguration files for your apps, along with whatever actual files you have stored. You can even swap distros (Ubuntu/Arch) and keep your home folder, though sometimes the config files and settings don't translate perfectly.

I've never had NewPipe present me with a sign in prompt or any bot challenges, that's a very strange scenario to be facing.

EndeavourOS. I like the simplicity and minimalism of stock Arch, bloated distros bother me. I have been thinking of trying out Linux Mint again though, I used it for years and it was really good.