This is wild. Another problem with fudging what used to be a trail is what that means for fingerprinting people online. Especially given recent attempts to take down the Internet Archive. I’m not saying forum histories are/were iron-clad “paper”/e-trails, but they can and do get used for cross-platform profiling.

Anecdotal, but I can see this. Last year, I took a 2-3 months off of what I now call recreational internet use (e.g. keeping up with the news, forums, etc.), because my mental health and cognitive abilities have deteriorated a lot. The result wasn’t just improved mood but also regaining cognitive skills that I thought I had lost forever. Brain fog also lessened. A year later now, and the improvements are stable and still there, even though I do use the internet recreationally again. It’s still not where I used to be before, but it’s a work-in-progress anyway.

It’s not far-fetched, infinite growth and all.

Since Kobo e-readers have public library integration where I live and I no longer have an Amazon account, the Kindle I bought is just sitting there. If it pans out into a subscription model and Amazon also cans other forms of side-loading, honestly Kobo + physical books would be my only go-tos: why pay extra to borrow from Amazon when my taxes already go to a library system from which I can also borrow books? I’ve transferred the books I had on the Kindle. Maybe it can be reused with a pi should it come to.

Thanks, I’ll take a look!

Why would it be bad idea to use both? According to Tor+VPN, provided you connect to VPN first, it should be fine.

I used to use Tor to surf surface + deep webs, but not the dark web — basically a substitute for the common browsers but without the incessant tracking and attempts at personalization.

I do agree that a VPN + Tor, disabling JS, and avoiding identifying forms are up there in terms of safety measures. I’d add that using Tor on Android is also iffy, but I’m still looking into it.

While happiness might need reason, life doesn’t. I find that, in a way, we live in a probabilistic universe with enough attractors that allowed things to form. Among them were humans, now also building some things with/against the odds, and subsequent self-image/sense of importance.

You can still suspend thinking about the inevitability of death and inherent lack of meaning to feel or create something. It does require one to choose and get comfortable making choices that are beyond right and wrong (not in a moral sense), however.

I don’t know if there is one answer for why people can still feel happy despite it all, and I suspect there will be different reasons. One reason could be that they’ve just accepted the futility, focusing on what makes them happy. Or maybe they’ve accepted that pursuing universality/objectivism when it comes to subjective things is impossible. Or maybe even that no matter which option one takes to view life, one cannot escape delusions.

True, though, we do need a quicker solution with a lower barrier to adoption ASAP. Carbon capture could be a good long-term approach to augment CO2 management, provided we figure out the details of CO2 solution “loads”/proportions, costs, maintenance, and capture locations.