I’ve seen my niece and her friends get incredibly sexual ads on their YT before. Taught them both how to install adblock even on an iPhone and managed to make them not see that shit anymore. Mind you, my niece and her friends are FOURTEEN!
I felt like such an adult when they were getting excited that Fandom didn’t have ads anymore when I showed them what a DNS sinkhole is. This is what it means to be an adult. To use your wisdom to help the new generation navigate theirs.
It’s fucking shit. I went that “building your own router” thing but had no idea how to do it. I had an old Mac Mini lying around and so turned that into my router by flashing OPNsense on it and ran into issue after issue.
Here’s the biggest issue I had that I know some of you were thinking but I wasn’t at the time. OPNsense is built on FreeBSD, which lacks proper support for Apple shit, so the Mac got mad at me every time I tried to flash it. So then I got an idea. Built the router inside a VM in the Mac Mini!
Believe it or not, this actually all went pretty well of getting a vRouter inside of a mac computer and having the Local LLM, I uses Google Gemma tuned to Hermes running Ollama on it, but ran into an issue of the AI agent being painfully, agonizingly slow and revving up my tormented Mac Mini every fucking time I asked it to do anything.
This is because Apple bullshit. I am not qualified enough to answer that, I’m a help desk guy so 50% of the time I talk about IT stuff, I’m confidently bullshitting. Anyways, I got oLMX, gave the local AI agent my API kets to my Mac Mini vRouter, and any time I need anything I can just go into the Mac itself as a computer and talk to it.
I am still trying to find out how to do that thing where you like message the agent through some messaging app as that I have 0 idea how to do. Talking to it through Signal would make my life a lot easier, but sometimes you grow as a person when you reject convenience and make your own life harder.
Having dicked around with Local LLMs, they do get better the more they learn about you. But going through what these things figure out is kind of horrifying.
Like looking into the training data they find out, they can infer a lot about you and your methodology and it is creepy. Like really creepy.
I’m not anti-AI by any means. I have a Local LLM Agent in my router to keep an eye on things in case anything fucks up and it’s pretty good as my little administrator, but still. It knows a lot about me to the point I had to catch myself to not fucking call it “he” or “they.” It’s an object but it’s an object with a frightening amount of info on me. I just wish the average populace had this level of think of what you are giving up.
If you’re not that techy… well first one, what the fuck are you doing on Lemmy and on the Tech server? But then I want you to think about this. If someone stalked you for a week, what could they find out about you? How much do you think they would learn?
That is how these huge companies are and especially AI. They’re stalkers who manage to learn a lot about you by just observing you.
Hold on guys, I need to ask the AI what my opinion about this is.
Is Sable worth getting into? My friends and I have been using Element for a hot second now and it works good enough for us. Like if it does everything we need, so how is Sable better?
Element.
Moved onto Matrix a while ago because of this. Gonna be real, Discord is better but all Matrix asked me for was hardware verification. I fucking hate this ID verification thing. Like we are going to see a sharp spark in identity theft going forward.
…and shit, I might be part of it. I had to verify with an ID to get my CompTIA tests, which I passed. I am still arguing with Pearson to delete my personal data, but I might be in the shitter with all the others getting their identity stolen.
Ublock Origin Lite still works on Ungoogled Chromium for me, at least.
Nah man, we gotta get the cameras RIGHT in his house. What if someone gets in we couldn’t see from the outside?
Oh no! This guy is in danger! We should set up a ton of security camers around his house so we can all keep an eye on him and make sure he’s safe!
Probably a good thing, honestly. We all need to be more offline anyways.
It’s why I moved onto Lemmy. I can’t stand new Reddit.
Is it really praxis tho? Like it is just being a good guardian to my niece and her friends. I get it to an extent that ‘ads are the price you pay for using a service for free’ but to what end? Google is a massive company and should vet the advertisements they allow a lot more.
The fact children are getting highly sexual ads is a failure on their part and I see blocking ads as a fair reprisal to them until they can sort themselves out. It’s my civil disobedience as a consumer. Like especially these days with how massively invasive ads have become.