The best advice I have for new nerds: Refuse to pay rent.
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The best advice I have for new nerds: Refuse to pay rent.
Don't subscribe. Don't lease. Don't use their cloud. Don't slip down the freemium slope. Don't create accounts on their services.
Buy it once. Run it local. Avoid commercial software.
It'll be a huge pain and you'll be an outsider but it'll be endless, interesting, and hard fun that'll pay you back with a curious mind and an understanding of the fabric of our intellectual infrastructure that will make you light-years more capable, useful, and healthy than the "AI" zombies.
@trevorflowers landlord free! Cage free!
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The best advice I have for new nerds: Refuse to pay rent.
Don't subscribe. Don't lease. Don't use their cloud. Don't slip down the freemium slope. Don't create accounts on their services.
Buy it once. Run it local. Avoid commercial software.
It'll be a huge pain and you'll be an outsider but it'll be endless, interesting, and hard fun that'll pay you back with a curious mind and an understanding of the fabric of our intellectual infrastructure that will make you light-years more capable, useful, and healthy than the "AI" zombies.
I genuinely don't understand those who'll happily sell their soul despite being under no real, direct pressure to do so.
I have co-workers who do all the things you describe. Happily.
I ask them why. Half of the things they subscribe to are actively trying to harm them (and those close to them). Or have free replacements of better quality.
And - the root cause seems to be mere conformism. Not doing the "normal" thing is simply unthinkable.
Conformism sells
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The best advice I have for new nerds: Refuse to pay rent.
Don't subscribe. Don't lease. Don't use their cloud. Don't slip down the freemium slope. Don't create accounts on their services.
Buy it once. Run it local. Avoid commercial software.
It'll be a huge pain and you'll be an outsider but it'll be endless, interesting, and hard fun that'll pay you back with a curious mind and an understanding of the fabric of our intellectual infrastructure that will make you light-years more capable, useful, and healthy than the "AI" zombies.
@trevorflowers I second this. It will also be a good filter, selecting for those with a good mix of curiosity and love of problem solving, attention to detail and ability to focus, that is being selected against. Qualities which need nurturing and exercise, and which will only grow in value, and in usefulness against life's challenges.
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@trevorflowers If you refuse to pay rent as far as your home goes, you're eventually going to be evicted, though, or worse, you could get taken to court by the landlord over it.
@dfx4509b @trevorflowers I don't think OP was talking about housing
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The best advice I have for new nerds: Refuse to pay rent.
Don't subscribe. Don't lease. Don't use their cloud. Don't slip down the freemium slope. Don't create accounts on their services.
Buy it once. Run it local. Avoid commercial software.
It'll be a huge pain and you'll be an outsider but it'll be endless, interesting, and hard fun that'll pay you back with a curious mind and an understanding of the fabric of our intellectual infrastructure that will make you light-years more capable, useful, and healthy than the "AI" zombies.
Forever confused why such an approach isn’t the default. Why would anyone pay rent for short-term convenience at the expense of long-term critical dependencies?
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The best advice I have for new nerds: Refuse to pay rent.
Don't subscribe. Don't lease. Don't use their cloud. Don't slip down the freemium slope. Don't create accounts on their services.
Buy it once. Run it local. Avoid commercial software.
It'll be a huge pain and you'll be an outsider but it'll be endless, interesting, and hard fun that'll pay you back with a curious mind and an understanding of the fabric of our intellectual infrastructure that will make you light-years more capable, useful, and healthy than the "AI" zombies.
@trevorflowers Also, don't rent your tech.
Buy one that's a few generations old. Learn how to build, fix, or rent it yourself.
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The best advice I have for new nerds: Refuse to pay rent.
Don't subscribe. Don't lease. Don't use their cloud. Don't slip down the freemium slope. Don't create accounts on their services.
Buy it once. Run it local. Avoid commercial software.
It'll be a huge pain and you'll be an outsider but it'll be endless, interesting, and hard fun that'll pay you back with a curious mind and an understanding of the fabric of our intellectual infrastructure that will make you light-years more capable, useful, and healthy than the "AI" zombies.
@trevorflowers Thanks for the supportive message. As someone on the margins of nerd culture, the challenge is huge and daunting. Thankfully there are those like you who call us in with resources and encouragement. So far, I'm in the process of switching to LibreOffice on my desktop and have an idea of a tiny Linux distro that will fit on my old Asus notebook (my stars, I love that little machine). Once I figure that out, I hope to be able to convert my desktop machine too. Take heart, nerds everywhere, we're trying.
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@trevorflowers If you refuse to pay rent as far as your home goes, you're eventually going to be evicted, though, or worse, you could get taken to court by the landlord over it.
@dfx4509b @trevorflowers
If you read more than the headline, you would know that the point was to buy, not rent. If you buy a house, there is no landlord.That being said, if you work a job where you don't expect to stay for decades, and jobs can be far between and commuting is not how you wish to spend a large chunk of your life, moving from one apartment to another is way easier than selling a house and buying one in a different city.
And that's without even getting into the price of buying your home.
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@trevorflowers@hachyderm.io 100% except if you dont have a good internet connection, then a vps is warranted, I've spent too many hours fighting my isp
@nu @trevorflowers The thing with renting a VPS or a bare-metal machine in a data centre somewhere is that it's not difficult to move it to a different hosting provider. Or even to move it to a different country.
The harm isn't so much the fact that you're paying monthly. The danger of SaaS is that your data is entirely beholden to the SaaS operator; if you can export it, it's usually in a form you can't immediately continue using elsewhere. And there is no transparency in how they process it. -
@trevorflowers This might be harder to do now, but, considering I've stuck to this approach since the mid-2000's and continue to - it is still -possible-, at least. In spite of the best efforts of the tech industry & their pet governments.
Creates extra headaches (I spent multiple days to get lineageOS running on a phone they do not support, but I got for free and needed to degoogle, for example), but, those et easier to navigate the more of them you have to navigate.Same here! Probably longer 🫣
I shared this photo the other day, it's not everything, far from it, eg. still have all my vinyl from the 80s and a record deck, but it is the result of ditching the iPhone hardware subscription almost 12 months now!
I already had most of this stuff, the Punkt was a gift, I recently repaired the iRiver, and the X4 is the only new (and very awesome) purchase.
The relief is astonishing! I am never going back to smart phones - nope!
️
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Same here! Probably longer 🫣
I shared this photo the other day, it's not everything, far from it, eg. still have all my vinyl from the 80s and a record deck, but it is the result of ditching the iPhone hardware subscription almost 12 months now!
I already had most of this stuff, the Punkt was a gift, I recently repaired the iRiver, and the X4 is the only new (and very awesome) purchase.
The relief is astonishing! I am never going back to smart phones - nope!
️@kel I still use a smartphone, but ripped out the original OS to put an open degoogled OS on it, so, none of the usual spyware and uninstallable oem apps, none of google's nonsense, etc.
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The best advice I have for new nerds: Refuse to pay rent.
Don't subscribe. Don't lease. Don't use their cloud. Don't slip down the freemium slope. Don't create accounts on their services.
Buy it once. Run it local. Avoid commercial software.
It'll be a huge pain and you'll be an outsider but it'll be endless, interesting, and hard fun that'll pay you back with a curious mind and an understanding of the fabric of our intellectual infrastructure that will make you light-years more capable, useful, and healthy than the "AI" zombies.
@trevorflowers "hard fun" is a great phrase. Fun is not easy just like work is not easy. The only difference is: it's fun!
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@trevorflowers I'm not sure my land lord is going to like that advice
@the_moep @trevorflowers there's nothing your Spotify landlord can do about you buying music and cancelling your subscription except cry over the lost revenue.
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@the_moep @trevorflowers there's nothing your Spotify landlord can do about you buying music and cancelling your subscription except cry over the lost revenue.
@ktneely I don't have (and never had) spotify. Bandcamp is bae
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@trevorflowers the only "rent" I pay is to my ISP (monthly) and IANA (yearly)
good advice
@ben @trevorflowers I don’t consider paying for a genuine *service* to be rent. It’s only rent when there’s not really a good reason for it to be a service.
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@ben @trevorflowers I don’t consider paying for a genuine *service* to be rent. It’s only rent when there’s not really a good reason for it to be a service.
@calcifer @ben @trevorflowers Agree with this take. Obviously a lot of SaaS is bad (Adobe for example), but I seriously doubt something like a VPN falls under this.
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The best advice I have for new nerds: Refuse to pay rent.
Don't subscribe. Don't lease. Don't use their cloud. Don't slip down the freemium slope. Don't create accounts on their services.
Buy it once. Run it local. Avoid commercial software.
It'll be a huge pain and you'll be an outsider but it'll be endless, interesting, and hard fun that'll pay you back with a curious mind and an understanding of the fabric of our intellectual infrastructure that will make you light-years more capable, useful, and healthy than the "AI" zombies.
@trevorflowers I hope that nerds make things /easier to run/ locally.
So many things seem "fine" for a sysadmin who likes the hobby of undocumented software constantly breaking or not being configured securely out of the gate.
a dentist in a rural town does not have time to set this stuff up. it needs to be simpler, safer, and quicker than the /commercial competition/, because time is money
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Same here! Probably longer 🫣
I shared this photo the other day, it's not everything, far from it, eg. still have all my vinyl from the 80s and a record deck, but it is the result of ditching the iPhone hardware subscription almost 12 months now!
I already had most of this stuff, the Punkt was a gift, I recently repaired the iRiver, and the X4 is the only new (and very awesome) purchase.
The relief is astonishing! I am never going back to smart phones - nope!
️@kel @miss_rodent @trevorflowers well hello, fellow iRiver H120 owner! I see you also installed Rockbox.
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@trevorflowers I hope that nerds make things /easier to run/ locally.
So many things seem "fine" for a sysadmin who likes the hobby of undocumented software constantly breaking or not being configured securely out of the gate.
a dentist in a rural town does not have time to set this stuff up. it needs to be simpler, safer, and quicker than the /commercial competition/, because time is money
@risottobias I think that's why he said it was advice for nerds.
But there needs to be an addendum. PAY RENT ANYWAY, just not to the corporations who want to own everything you do. Pay it to FOSS non-profits, pay the admins for their server costs, support the people who make it all possible however you can.
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@risottobias I think that's why he said it was advice for nerds.
But there needs to be an addendum. PAY RENT ANYWAY, just not to the corporations who want to own everything you do. Pay it to FOSS non-profits, pay the admins for their server costs, support the people who make it all possible however you can.
@sysop408 @risottobias @trevorflowers so... is this exclusively aimed at computer nerds?
