mac-attack

Wouldn't our treatment/abuse of animals be a better, more obvious example?

"We don't yet have a reasonable model to explain even those of our own or other animals, let alone those of machines, for that matter."

Is in direct conflict with:

"they don't show anything approaching sentience or self awareness."

Waiting for us to figure out sentience before we decide to apply morals is akin to OpenAI being in charge of determining when we have achieved AGI. The people in power have no incentive to declare it even if evidence is available because it destroys their profits indefinitely

> What could they possibly want with the data of a group of people who are by construction not spending money on a VPN? They'd be storing it at a loss.

This is the exact point where our conclusions diverge.

Why are they sending themselves so much "useless" data-intensive logs by default, from their non-paying clients that accounts for roughly ~95% of the userbase and from a profitable business perspective, largely ineligible for troubleshooting support? For me, the only logical conclusion is that the data is valuable to them.

As someone who also cares about privacy, hear are a few things that IMO suggest that free customers' logs are a part of their business model:

* Their documentation has plenty of references to security, but no references to privacy outside of the privacy policy.

* They have all but eliminated any revenue stream from average user when they made an unsolicted announcement that they upgraded their free plan to allow 100 devices and 5 users.

* The content they sponsor for marketing/advertising seems targeted for consumers instead of networking professionals. I don't see Cisco and Palo Alto Networks sponsoring every Linux/self-hosting podcast or YouTube channels for example.

* Even the flag-name for turning off logging is mild deterrent based on what you will lose (`--no-support`) as opposed to being neutral '--no-logging' or truly descriptive like most FOSS companies that are not pushing an ulterior motive such as '--no-analytics'.

* logs cannot be disabled for phones

* In my experience, disabling logs was perhaps the only thing that was not configurable through the GUI

I'm into privacy and still relatively new on the networking scene thanks to setting up OpenWrt on my router. Am I correct that when tailscale updates/hijacked resolv.conf, subsequent DNS resolution is passed onto them on visited websites even when tailscale is not being used? No, they can't "read" your traffic, but if I understand things right, they know every website you visited and for how long, which is more than enough data for a rich marketing profile. That was my takeaway before I jumped ship for a self-hosted solution.

My understanding is that they have the holy grail of data because they are getting all of your LAN, WAN and mobile network traffic. I'm not aware of (m)any companies whose business model allows access to all three? It's like if your ISP and your Mobile Network had a baby on your local server, and that baby reports every website you visit.

Install libredirect extension (https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension/) and select a few working instances. Then you can use the programmable shortcut keys to cycle between instances if one ever goes down.

I use amazfit w/ gadgetbridge as well

Going from tailscale in the cloud -> self-hosting netbird required a richer mental model so I had to learn more about routing, why ZTNA is better, what is OIDC, etc

I do think that netbird's documentation is easier to read than tailscale's, but the tone does still assume a solid foundational networking background in places.

My uneducated guess is that the product is appealing to networking professionals, but a growing number of current/former tailscale users that are otherwise new to networking, but familiar w/ self-hosting. With the latter group, there's a steeper learning curve (that would also be there for headscale or most other self-hosted mesh VPN solution fwiw)

Pennies in front of a steamroller

A deep cut

Licensing talk is confusing to someone not steeped in it. I talked to Claude about it 1-2 weeks ago when it was first announced and it was framed as a reinforcement of FOSS ideals.

I actually made the jump from tailscale -> netbird last month. Definitely more work and learning, but much more aligned w/ my perspective of self-hosting and open-source software. (Yes I thought about headscale but the YouTube reviews of netbird won me over).

I'm a simple man. I see Comcast hate, I upvote

The phrase was coined over 75 years ago if 'the media' isn't your thing.

Curious if there is a threshold/sign that would convince you that the last week of Grok snafus are features instead of a bugs, or warrant Elon no longer getting the benefit of the doubt.

Ignoring the context of the past month where he has repeatedly said he plans on 'fixing' the bot to align with his perspective feels like the LLM world's equivalent of "to me it looked he was waving awkwardly", no?

With all due respect, I don't think customer service interaction are a meaningful rebuttal when discussing the decline in social relations, empathy and care.

The former is an admittedly frustrating aspect in our transactional relationships with companies, while the others are the foundations of a functioning society throughout our civilization. Conflating business interactions with society needs is a familiar trope on HN IMO

To me, this is akin to Google saying that they don't want to follow a court-ordered law because it would be a privacy invasion.. I feel like OpenAI framed the issue as a privacy conversation and some news journalist are going along with it without questioning the source and their current privacy policy re: data retention and data sharing affiliates, vendors, etc.

It takes 30 seconds to save the privacy policy and upload it to an LLM and ask it questions and it quickly becomes clear that their privacy policy allows them to hold onto data indefinitely as is.

I am of the same mind. Desktop for heavy lifting and a mid-range Chromebook (technically a chrultrabook now) for browsing w/ a lightweight yet modern feel.

I do think the plunge to leveraging a desktop/server across devices does require an understanding of ssh/rdp and tailscale/reverse proxies though, which is why it isn't as popular as it could be.

It feels like critical thinking is on the decline, and at the same time, companies are increasing the exposure to more controversial videos and rabbit holes that can radicalize viewers.

Look up tlp's charging thresholds. Just set mines up for debian

Randomly stumbled across this last week when I upgraded my DNS blocklist and saw all the tailscale logs. Definitely unexpected

For a those interested in openness, I definitely suggest gadget bridge as an alternative.

I am running ChromeOS with Debian 'slapped on it' and that also experience sleep related issues.

Big fan of Linux, but saying that Linux works on system76 while they have a tiny sliver of the Linux market share seems like a nonstarter.

This is instantly where my mind went as well.

Good read, I'm going to subscribe to your blog via RSS now.

The government website that was updated 2 days ago while the article itself was published 13 days ago...

I put all of my social media apps on a secondary profile or in Private Spaces. Never got notifications and checked the apps very infrequently. Not a great experience when i would take hours/days to respond to people I'd imagine.

This reads like a celebratory note from the son in Sophie's Choice.

searXNG is a good alternative. As a search engine aggregator, you can hand pick the engines you want to utilize for searches, including GitHub and HuggingFaces and DDG and StartPage etc. It also has bang functionality, active development and public instances if you do not want to spin up one yourself.

Why not just avoid their services instead of pirating their content and matching the ethics of their execs?

> In contrast, this article, i.e., the paper it discusses, is is based on what has happened so far.

What happened in 2023 and 2024 actually

Nitpicky but it's worth noting that last year's AI capabilities are not the April 2025 AI capabilities and definitely won't be the December 2025 capabilities.

It's using deprecated/replaced technology to make a statement, that is not forward projecting. I'm struggling to see the purpose. It's like announcing that the sun is still shining at 7pm, no?

I had a similar experience with GrapheneOS. There is a balance in act between continuing down the privacy rabbit hole versus being able to communicate effectively with your social circle and it is easy to double down on privacy at the cost of relationships if you are not aware of how it is affecting others.

As a Linux user, I do think there's a bit of an echo chamber which leads to groupthink such as this article. And it's ironic because a lot of the underpinnings of AI use Linux as their underpinning.