The average computer should run for at least 25 years, just stop running bloated shit and it'll be fine. NetBSD/Alpine Linux, suckless-like programs, and making webdevs face the wall should do the trick. Heck, I'll argue technological progress should have ended with the Pentium 3, computers can just do the stuff we do today (just with less fancy graphics boohoo, don't need anymore than software rendering at 640x480) anyway.
Yes. Old computers are noisy bastards and eat much more electricity than they should, but at least they don't have backdoors built in right into hardware.
Modern youtube is a laggy piece of shit, but with yt-dlp and K-Lite Codec Pack it is a good enough source of entertainment.
Guys, do you remember how that command line downloader from mega was called? It saved my ass quite a few times. Something like mega utils, I forgot.
>don't need anymore than software rendering at 640x480
I like my 1280x1024 monitors, than you very much >v<.
>do you remember how that command line downloader from mega was called?
This is unrelated to the thread, but I'm pretty sure it was a verson of the mega program that ran from the terminal emulator, megacmd maybe. But maybe you're thinking of MegaBasterd
>>4
It is very fucking related to the thread, it is about how to have fun with outdated hardware.
I guess nes emulators is the best way for this. You can watch youtube even with shit hardware, thanks to youtube downscaling videos to 480p. The browser itself will lag, but if you use yt-dlp instead, it is pretty enjoyable.
Also irc clients and older sites like this are good for hardware like this. Email/news groups probably should work, but good luck finding email provider that doesn't ask for phone number these days, those motherfuckers.
>but good luck finding email provider that doesn't ask for phone number these days
Or just by a VPS & make your own mail server.
However, if you do this then there is danger that you'll be marked by gmail as spam from next time on; it's a double-edged sword.
I can't recommend it to amateurs.
What this all really means, though, is that you, >>6, should just stick with snail mail.
>>6
Use a VOIP number. If that doesn't work for your chosen provider, there are services which you can pay for in crypto that provide you with a one time use phone number associated with a sim card, so the provider will think you're a normie with a cell phone. Easier, cheaper, and potentially more secure than buying a burner phone. There are email providers that don't require a phone number, though. Proton (sometimes) and cock.li (requires invite) come to mind. All email providers basically glow though, and email is a generally insecure mode of communication unless you're using GPG, and good luck to get your dumb friends and family to start using that.
>>7
This is basically correct.
>good luck to get your dumb friends and family to start using that
Exactly why I don't talk to any of them anymore. I refuse to talk to brainlets such as them.
>>9
No joke, it's a comfort to me knowing that people like you exist. Things have become so, so bad with regard to tech literacy. Nobody cares about privacy. Nobody cares to know how computers or the internet works, even at a basic level. Hell, people don't event want real computers anymore, they're completely comfortable with their 24/7 spy device mobile phones. What I find truly discomforting is that I'm personally not an expert by any means and I'm still leaps and bounds ahead of the average 'normie' in terms of my understanding of how technology is used (against you).
Setting up an email server isn't worth it especially with how shitty its design is. I can't recall a time when I actually used email to talk, but its better to use XMPP when chatting.
I still need email for accounts however so I just use guerilla mail or tutanota since Proton is more annoying to use and cock.li is blocked by many websites.
>>11
I set up an email address years ago for them to write me if they actually wanted to. That was, "too hard" for them and they tried to insist to just write them on Facebook. But, I'm the bad guy for ignoring all of them. I also have a landline that they could easily just call me on. They further complain that I'm just too hard to get a hold of because I don't have a cell phone. I gave up and just simply refuse to talk to them if they want act like retards. I started to even get demonized because I didn't want in "family photos". I told them, "If you want a real family photo, that's fine. I'm not against that at all. It's only when you decide to take that photo on a cell phone then decide to upload it onto social media that it's not okay with me. I actually care about privacy and don't come to visit to be masqueraded on your shitty social media feed to the rest of the idiotic people you are in contact with that I simply don't even want to associate with in the first place.". They decided to upload old pictures of me on there without my permission and that was the final straw. I don't even bother with them at all now. Fucking all of them are just simply braindead. I give them a way to talk to me, I try to express myself and how I feel about what they try to do without my consent. No respect at all towards me. Instead I just get trash talked about because I'm not like them. Friends, it's pretty much the same story. They just simply didn't want to take an extra step to stay in contact with me. Despite again, giving them my home phone number, an email address to reach me at, and the fact I told them they could stop by my house any time they wanted to hang out or needed me. Half of them have to pass by my house whenever they go anywhere and head back home. They wasn't self-aware in the least towards privacy. I tried and tried with them for years until it just was a dwindling domino effect with me only having one friend left. I was hopeful to a degree because he didn't have a cell phone either and was a "PC elitist" type. Talking about how shitty mobile devices were. We'd still get in our rebuttals because he didn't want to drop using Windows because of "muh games". Ignoring any attempts at discussing WINE as an example. Even still getting him to talk to each other through emails was tough as well. We were at the point where we were talking to each other on a small forum that I had helped with until the person running it gave up on it. I couldn't get him to use IRC and he just always tried to get me to use Discord. So, I tried to get him to use Riot/Matrix before the change to Element. I was willing to give that a try at the time. Nope... He refused to try something that he wasn't familiar with just for the sake of not wanting to learn a new platform. It was then that I just gave up trying. Told him flat out, if he wanted to get a hold of me he can just call my phone or stop by the house. He went batshit crazy in 2020 and refused to even hang out with me if I wasn't wearing a mask and then in 2021 didn't want to be around me because I was against getting the vaccine. Ultimately that ended our friendship. Plus he ended up selling his PC and started becoming a retarded slave to a phone. Now just being a happy little naive waggie thinking he's doing something good for the world full on embracing his normalfaggotry NPC lifestyle. I do get sad sometimes thinking about how I'm the only one out of everyone I've ever known that chose not to sellout who I truly am with them set embarking on the path to technological and just general slavery to the system that's against all of us.
>>13
Wow, man. Thanks for telling your story. I don't know how much of a consolation this is, but you're not alone. You really aren't. I can relate to the things you said very strongly. So much so that I don't even know where to begin. You'll have to forgive me if this response is a bit 'stream of consciousness'.
A little about me: Linux only user, no social media, I encrypt everything, I don't use a smartphone, and I try to be aware of how the technology I use works on at least a basic level. For context, I'm not terribly old, let's say more than 30 less than 40.
I'll quickly touch on 2020 and the events that ensued. I never wore a mask or got the vaccine. A strip of cloth over your mouth is ineffective; this shouldn't be a hot-button political opinion. From my perspective, mask-wearing was simply a statement people wanted to make (the statement being that they are cattle) and I didn't want to participate. And injecting myself with a rushed, government-approved vaccine for a disease that wouldn't put my life at risk (under 40 and healthy) seemed completely unnecessary; this shouldn't be a political opinion either.
I encrypt everything not because I have "something to hide" but because I have a right to privacy; if I died tomorrow I don't want someone reading my private work, looking at my browser history, etc). I technically own a cell phone, but it permanently sits in my vehicle with the battery removed to be used for emergencies only (back in the day when you could find a payphone every 12 feet this wouldn't have been necessary, but payphones don't exist anymore).
I also refuse to be in photos. I don't use social media and want no part of it. A close family member of mine asked for a picture once, so I sent them one via email with the condition that it was for them only, not to be shared or distributed anywhere. You can guess what happened next. I've never sent that person a picture again and never will. It also changed the way I view them permanently; I wasn't vague at all about my desire for privacy. Your "family photos" story really got to me. I get it.
Continued in next post...
Continued from...
>>14
I've played the game of trying to teach people why most of the technology in popular use is bad. Windows, Facebook, pretty much anything to do with cell phones, Discord, you name it, I've tried explaining it. The result, from 99.9% of people, will be one of two things: (1) "I know! These companies are bad. :( Sooo creepy. But I'm not going to stop using these products because I don't care and I have nothing to hide. (2) "I didn't know that, but I still don't care and I'm not going to stop."
If one more motherfucker tries to get me to join Discord I'm going to lose my mind. Discord is garbage, spyware, yadda yadda you already know all of this. Have you noticed that even "professionals" and companies are using it now? It sickens me. People have no idea how the technology works (against them), and even if they do know, they don't care.
As a brief aside, "muh games" isn't an excuse anymore; if you must gayme you can do so easily on Linux these days, or at the very least have a dedicated gaymer machine that you only use for games and nothing else. Compartmentalize.
Here's the reality that I think people like us need to come to accept: people are stupid. Very, very stupid. I mean borderline literally-not-figuratively retarded.
Whoever reads this, don't just pass that line over. If you're one of the few that "gets it" like the guy I'm replying to here, this is a key "blackpill" to understand. And I know, I understand that you might be thinking, "Well, they just don't know. We need to educate them."
You cannot educate them. You cannot help them. They are too stupid. Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or any of these people could piss on their face and they would ask for more.
What's the solution? Well, there isn't one. At least not for the greater swathes of humanity. I believe that there will always be pockets of people like us. People who work on and share free, privacy respecting software. People willing to create and maintain anonymization networks, or untraceable, fungible cryptocurrencies, or decentralized E2E communication platforms.
But we will always be in the minority.
If you crave human interaction, well, you'd better start looking for it in small online communities, because unless you find someone IRL with half a brain that's willing to listen to you AND actually change their behavior, online is probably going to be the only way to meet people that "get it". (And even here it's tough.)
To the man behind post 13, I just want you to know that you're not alone. I'm so pleased to have encountered someone with such strong convictions about what they know to be true and right. You will NEVER be a slave.
you can leave 640x480 behind and enjoy the computing power of today without splurging on the bullshit that ruins computers now ...
>>13
Pretty accurate.
>>14
I've always found "blackpills" to be quite silly.
"Blackpilled" people who say they give up its hopeless against to try and resist Microsoft and use Linux so they just decided to stay on Windows and socialize with other people on soical media.
When it comes to services people just weld themselves to a proprietary service mostly because of conveninence and "all the people I know are on here!".
Once the shitty service dies another one just comes to replace it or another company just purchases it.
I run my own messaging and voice service that isn't hard to use, but no one uses it because "Discord is better, Mumble sucks!" or "I don't want to click multiple buttons in Mumble! I just want to click one button in Discord!", etc.
As with software I have always found Linux to be quite unusable, but have found that Valve has made gaming quite do-able on Linux recently than the last time I tried a couple years ago.
So in an effort to potentially remove Windows from some computers i've been working on my "own" Linux distribution that doesn't need a handbook or constant maintaince from breaking.
So far I am quite pleased with it and know it could work since most people use all their software through Google Chrome since the age of using actual software is (somewhat) long gone.
The only issue I see is that some games may not work perfectly and some programs may not work correctly in Wine.
All in all, wheather or not my services or Linux is used or not I still think it was worth the time spent since there could be that one person why doesn't want to use Windows or Discord and may want to use something else and also because I use my own services.
>>14 >>15
I'm glad that sharing that in this thread moved you so. As well as that there are others here that at the very least believe in some type of principals with understanding just how "off" everything is now days. I'm only sorry that I'm just now replying back to you as it's been a little while.
That's really good, also encryption is an absolute must. The more people that refuse a smartphone the better, sadly there will never be enough of us to really validate a "movement" of sorts. But hopefully at the very least the idea will seed itself to another possibly reading this now or in the future along with any other information that they have come across online to take even further initiative for digital privacy awareness. I do the same with learning how things work on the very least a basic level. Ironically knowing more about the functionalities of a smartphone than a hefty majority of users. To hate or avoid something you need to at the very least understand exactly why you are doing so. Sometimes I feel like being interested in technology is a gift and a curse simultaneously. On the subject of your age, that seems to me that it's really the last age group that got to experience life before everything was warped as to understand fundamentally what was going on around them as well.
It was just so ridiculous at the sheer reaction that people had over everything and still continue to in many places with the politicization of covid. There was times I'll admit I thought about wearing a mask just for the privacy. I just didn't want to legitimize things further even appearing to be as you put it part of the cattle farm going along with it. I was already hesitant over vaccines once they were forcing new vaccines to high school students threatening them with not being able to graduate if they didn't receive them. Thinking how fucked up that was and if I had still been in school during all of that I would have just dropped out. Nobody should have the right to force any type of injection of anything inside of you especially with intimidating, threatening, and/or demonizing someone along with it.
Exactly, and I don't believe the whole "I don't have anything to hide" concept is even a matter of anything. It shouldn't even exist. It's just common sense at least to me that everyone is entitled to their own personal privacy. It shouldn't have any type of stigma towards it with people thinking they are "hiding something". Even if someone were hiding something, who cares? That's their privacy to do so. I guess at the very least you do that. I still couldn't personally do it. Where I live there's still a ton of payphones everywhere that are working. There's actually two of them right near my home at each end of my street. I haven't had to use a payphone personally since around 2009 when I had a real emergency a few towns over and was stranded. I will often carry a bit of change on the odd chance I do actually need to use one. But, that hasn't been the case since back then. I also haven't seen anyone using them for a very long time as anyone could guess.
>>14 >>15 Cont. 2/3
Happens every single time with pictures, I'll simply never understand their mentality in sharing everything especially personal family photos with a bunch of fake "friends" on their shitty Facebook accounts or any other social media platform. Perhaps that's the real virus and "pandemic" that people should have been worrying about for all of these years. It's just sad and disheartening that people can't see how controlled they really are. You can only imagine the confused looks that I get when I tell people in public that I don't even own a cell phone. Which is another thing, it's so frustrating that almost every single purchase for anything they want to ask you for a phone number and an email address. I always say, I don't have one to both. Like I'm going to give them that kind of information. Even in the 90s anyone with half a brain should have been able to deduce what these sleazy corporations were up to.
That's simply the reality of it. They just don't care. People don't care about anything anymore. Not a fucking thing! Can't accept the reality that is crumbling all around them. And again, I despise the whole "I have nothing to hide" mentality that mostly is associated with it. I've tried for years myself with people I one time really cared about and wanted to help them. I tried to show others that there was other ways to use the internet. The internet is a lot bigger than just a few "apps on a phone". People have also lost the drive to explore the web as they once did. I still come across a ton of new interesting websites every single time I sit down at my computer. It's not this extremely hard thing to do. Just like with a lot of other mediums the internet and true hobbyists of it are a dying breed. You just can't relate with the userbase anymore. Same goes with anime and video games as two more prime examples. It's to no surprise that everyone suffers depression constantly obsessing over nostalgia of "the good old days". What's even more sad is the fact nobody wants to take action to attempt to make anything like "the good old days". Like I had mentioned I used to help run a few small forums and I've hosted a bit of my own personal webpages over the years. Plan on working on a couple of new ones here soon. Would like to make an updated webring page since I took my other one down a few years ago.
Discord is terrible, I get really annoyed that so many people bridge IRC with Discord. It's like I'm on IRC and I don't want my shit showing up on Discord's servers. If I did, I'd be over there on that trash platform. I knew that some start ups and smaller companies used it that was more "trendy" but I wasn't aware that bigger companies were on it if that's what you're referring to.
>>14 >>15 Cont. 3/3
Compartmentalizing is a very good practice, combining it with a good threat model, and proper OPSEC naturally. Having specific VMs for specific tasks along with anonymizing network protocols. Getting some decent hardware to help you. OpenWRT or OPNsense compatible routers would be a nice touch as well. I'm not against VPNs but that's another mistake a lot of people make in thinking it completely protects them. I could go on and on about other measures to take. Something I have been wondering for a while is since the internet has been getting completely assblasted with censorship and most people being completely retarded, will people like us eventually just move over to fully staying on something such as Tor or i2p for an example?
YES, YES, and ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY YES!!! That's what all of these fucking moronic dumbass people are already doing each and everyday. Getting pissed on, shit on, and fucked in their loose gaping assholes leaking nasty shit and cum from these technocratic overlord elites.
I really hope our pocket communities can survive and that we can maintain some sense of progress with continuing our work even if it's just small things such as our convictions that we uphold and share our knowledge to attempt to enlighten the next group of drifters who stumble upon our corners of the web. It does make me quite sad about not being able to find people IRL to connect with who really understands. Almost a cruel fate that we can't escape from. You're right though, smaller communities is the last bastion of hope. Thank you, for those kind words and taking the time to write back to me. I'm glad that I'm also not alone in seeing things the way that they are knowing that there's an alternate way to live online that's not only better but more practical for our "digital" survivial in these weird dystopian do I dare say, cyberpunk times.
Still using decade old hardware daily. Most programs usually have an older version that still work and sometimes you get respectable programmers that still support legacy systems. Only real issue I've had was a government related online ID program that only works on the newer versions of wangblows or the latest dumbphones, but there's usually some alternative ID method that is a bit more inconvenient. I'll probably get a new computer when those new mega cache CPUs specifically made for AI computations become more afforable.
Ask yourselves, do we really need any more computing power to just browse the web, listen to music, watch videos in 1080p, and play some graphically good enough games between now and 10, 20, or even 50 years time? Not really. A computer should serve a lifetime, programs considered complete, and hardware fixable. The benchmarkers are really just an extension of the marketing arm of the computing industrial complex.
>>13
I get you dude. I've felt the same way, I used to be on Discord only to stay in touch with my old friends, I thought that maybe they'd make an effort to email me so I gave them my address and left. I never got any email from them. And that's not even the first time this has happened where I lost a whole cluster of friends because they wouldnt bother to stay in contact through other mediums.
The most concerning thing to me isn't that normal people are dumbfucks, that's pretty normal. What really swept me off my feet was entering a CS course this year thinking that I'd meet other people like myself or even better than I, then finding out that nobody has anything more than a year of python experience, or playing with ubuntu, if they've even done either of that.
It fucks me off to no end, and makes me feel more alone because I cannot find a single person who I can maintain a conversation with where I'm not spoonfeeding them basic programming concepts.
maybe next year will be better?
Seriously though... these are meant to be the people who will be my work peers? who will have massive influence on software into the future? That makes me uneasy, because they are so disinterested and so ignorant.
>>24
Sometimes it feels like being the last one left on Earth after a horrible apocalypse. Aside from the brief moment of fresh air you might get reading posts here, you're probably only likely to find hypersexual furries with 6-figure incomes writing "blazingly fast" terminal emulators in Rust that only work properly on computers made after ~2009 with OpenGL ES 2.0 support or whatever (even though more capable terminal emulator programs have been a thing since the 1980s).
I think it's probably because most of the people "interested" in computers at the moment are actually much better at (and happier knowing about) business studies and sleazy marketing tricks than knowing how to design your own Arithmetic Logic Unit or program microcontrollers with a variety of different ISAs or anything like that. They don't really like or care about what a computer actually is and does, so they create countless marketable abstractions on top of it, which also conveniently helps fuel the infinite cycle of throwing away older computers that can't handle those abstractions and buying newer ones with even more pointless computational power.
That's probably why one of their favorite marketing buzzwords is "scalability," because they often only ever know how to scale up, not down. The complexity required to manage the kind of distributed computing used by vast data collection businesses like Google doesn't really work anywhere near as efficiently on a simpler, older computer even with smaller datasets, yet "scalability" is all people really seem to care about. It's great for business, and "computer scientists" -- at least nowadays -- are just fancier businessmen.
you've got to be retarded to use suckless
harmful.neocities.org
harmful.cat-v.org
>>26
I think the people who use Suckless are just gullible. They think minimalism is when you use a program that is only 5 lines of code long, but just so happens to depend on a thousand-gigabyte library that does all of the work instead. (See Suckless Surf, and the thousands of clones that all do the same thing poorly)
They like their convenient "truths," so calling configuration files "bloat" is fine but the moment they're confronted with an actual gigantic source of bloat that would require actual effort and thought to replace, they'll just shrug their shoulders and go back to complaining about how scrollbars are the real source of all evil or something. To make matters worse, a lot of them think they're special computer geniuses because Suckless taught them how to run a compiler every time they edit a file, as if changing an integer value in the source code is some kind of monumental cognitive load.
Good luck getting their programs to run on an old Pentium II, let alone configuring them when you have to run the whole compiler over and over again. Having a lower LoC figure to flaunt is apparently far more important to them than programs that actually work. There's a term for this I think, "Chickenshit Minimalism."
> Old computers are noisy bastards and eat much more electricity than they should
I got a power usage meter a while back and ran a bunch of tests with the various hardware I have around, and while there's a fair bit of variation that seems unrelated to age / processor power my finding was that the notion that older computers are power hogs is largely not true, at least not if you're using flatscreen monitors instead of CRTs.
Maybe the watts per MHz aren't as efficient (I didn't calculate out anything as deep as that) or the comparative consumption is worse if you're one of those people who doesn't shut the machine off when you're done with it, but for the most part, using a system that's just powerful enough to do the task is going to cost you less in power was my conclusion.
I think what pisses me off the most about modern tech is how hard it is to recycle into something useful. Think about it; Android phones are perfectly good ARM computers but you can't install any OS you want on them.