I recently spent like $170 giving a new lease on life to a 15-year-old Lenovo S10-3 Ideapad with a 1-core Intel Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM, a WiFi card, and a 250GB SSD running AntiX Linux in TTY/Command Line mode.

So far, I've turned it into a picture/frame + vision board running Tailscale so I could SSH in and/or rsync stuff.

I am also attempting to run a no-AI version of Pwnagotchi to pwn WiFi networks.

I am also using it as an always-on appliance that does stuff like rsync/backup my entire server, run lightweight Python scripts to check the uptime and days until domain expiration, etc., on a set of websites I own and would like to own, etc.

I have all of this stuff connected to a Telegram bot that reports to me.

It's an interesting set of constraints, and you can surprisingly do a lot of cool stuff.

LOL Bruh... this has a 1.7 rating on Android based on 42k reviews

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.generalmag...

PREACH!

I hate this.

Most banking apps work, but Google Pay/NFC payments won't work.

Today, data systems and algorithms can be deployed at unprecedented scale and speed. Unintended consequences will affect people with that same scale and speed

—Michael Chapman

My mom still uses a 2019 Macbook Air with 8GB of RAM. The battery requires servicing, but she's unaware and still using it just fine. I asked her to go to the Apple Store and get the battery replaced along with her iPhone 12 Pro Max battery, and she'll easily get 10 years out of each device.

TBF, the reason Apple removed "Apple Intelligence" is that they failed to deliver on its promises.

So much so that they just settled their false advertising in a class action lawsuit for $250M:

https://archive.is/efWkb

Also, P.S: Not to say that clothing/shopping is the primary use case, but I know plenty of women who use AI for clothes/fashion/interior decoration etc related tasks.

Is the 20.9GB GGUF version better or negligible in comparison?

Yes, I'm also wondering!

Currently I'm testing out gemma4:26b and qwen3.6:35b-a3b-q4_K_M locally on my M2 Max Macbook Pro.

Not the fastest, but reasonable.

However, I am also interested in getting as close as possible in performance to Opus 4.6 while minimizing my costs.

https://archive.org/details/BlackICE_Defender

I get "Our tests indicate that you have some protection against Web tracking, but it has some gaps." but nothing of too much importance I think.

I use a VPN and NextDNS.io.

"Kindly let me help you, or you will drown, said the monkey as it put the fish safely up a tree"

—Alan Watts

Self-deception is actually the root of all evil, not money nor convenience.

I beat it, I think... nothing much there. I use a VPN and NextDNS.io.

100% correct.

I have many non-technical friends who want to De-Google but lack the knowledge and/or find the switch intimidating.

> Do not use a personal virtual private network (VPN). Personal VPNs simply shift residual risks from your internet service provider (ISP) to the VPN provider, often increasing the attack surface. Many free and commercial VPN providers have questionable security and privacy policies. However, if your organization requires a VPN client to access its data, that is a different use case.

Cloudflare has a toggle switch to automatically block LLM's + scrapers etc:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...