I hate the phrase “X$ in compute” so much. What does that even mean? It could mean a 1.5 million dollar value worth of donated time on one of their servers, or it could mean a hardware donation, or it could be a cash donation that is earmarked for server upgrades/chip purchases. Ever since AI took off it’s become such a common turn of phrase to use “compute” like this. As if the amount of money spent tells you anything useful about the amount of things they can “compute” now. Costs are so variable and spread out across many different areas that it changes day by day, and by which vendor you use, or what part of the world you are in, or all kinds of other things.

Maybe I’m just behind the times and it has some specific meaning now I’m not aware of. Either way it annoys me.

Right? I wish we had the Great Firewall ffs.

If it weren’t in a US jurisdiction this would matter to me, but since it is it’s irrelevant. US law basically makes privacy on any server within the US an illusion. Because they can issue a gag and log order to the server operator and you’d never know as they’d be legally barred from speaking on it.

Agreed if you read through the forum posts of the founder a lot of it is him bending over backwards to justify this very thing. But I figured most people wouldn’t be as convinced by the technical aspect, and I’m not qualified enough on it to like fully break it down myself either so just didn’t speak on it.

I do think that it seems a bit worse than just an extra layer tho. It is literally moving your actual Identifying data (payment info and IP) into the hands of a US based company and out of the hands of Mullvad. It is protecting you from Mullvad, and exposing you to the massive fucking Five Eyes surveillance state, and US jurisdiction which is one of the most draconian in the world in regards to digital privacy.

Is this just a money grab? Maybe. Does the founder believe in what he’s doing? Maybe. But does this also look exactly like what I would expect a US Government backed Honey Pot service to look like? Yes.

Also, if you don’t trust Mullvad, use TOR.

Well there’s a walmart that has electronics stuff but at that point you may as well just buy from Amazon anyway lmao

Mine said “has 2 adults” and I was trying to figure out why because I’m very much by myself, and I realized it is because my mother sends things to my address with her amazon account sometimes. So it thinks she lives here.

Honestly I wish I didn’t. I don’t have a google account. Don’t have any Meta accounts. Don’t have accounts for basically anything I’m not functionally REQUIRED to have (banking for example). But Amazon is hard to avoid. I do a lot of buying in person, but in person shopping is just horrible these days. You need to find something specific and you are screwed. I do try to find other places online to get something when I can but a lot of times I just have to fall back to amazon. Maybe part of it is just the area I’m in though. Tons of the more specialty stores here have closed down. We don’t even have an electronics store anymore after Best Buy closed.

The Latitude 7400 (Non 2-in-one version) is genuinely an amazing laptop if you underclock the CPU a bit so it doesn’t sound like a jet engine. I run Debian on it and the thing gets 12 hours of battery life, and does everything I need. Build quality is pretty good too. I got it for like 200$ refurbished.

Red Star OS

Finally! I can download more RAM!