I recently completely finished completely decoupling my life from Google. My GMail account isn’t used for anything of importance anymore. People really should take a moment and think about what would be the consequences if Google suddenly mistakenly deleted their account like that. A lot of people’s entire lives are connected to their GMail account.
I have self-hosted my own personal email server since the late 90s. It has been a tedious, often unpleasant chore. I hate email. But it’s the one thing I’ve never compromised on, because to this day they try to tie your identity to your email and giving up control of that seems insane to me. Apps that use your phone number are doing the same thing, but you can’t self-host that, so I won’t use them. I’m sure Signal is very nice and people keep recommending it, but my phone is an untrusted device, and my phone number is an untrusted identity I don’t control. I am not going to use it for anything important.
I remember reading Signal got rid of the hard requirement of a phone number. Haven’t tried it as I’ve already got it attached to my number. At least starting a chat with someone new I didn’t have to give them my number, used signal’s internal id.
YouTube is fine by me. I don’t care that they track my activity there because they use it to recommend videos and I usually only go there when I have time to waste, which actually makes sense. My YouTube account is its own thing that I don’t use for anything else too. On top of that I use ad blockers so they can’t even make money off of me. If anything, I cost them money by using YouTube.
If anyone has any suggestions for an alternative to Google Docs for my university essays that can track my writing literally word for word, I would be forever grateful. Getting really tired of having professors flag me for AI use just because I can string sentences together with an em-dash, and also getting tired of feeding all my essays to Gemini.
It’s not word for word, but a git repository with frequent commits with meaningful descriptions is easy to do, and then you can push to codeberg or wherever to have backups. That’s cryptographically signed and therefore strong evidence of what you wrote when, and what you were thinking.
That’s cryptographically signed and therefore strong evidence of what you wrote when, and what you were thinking.
This logic doesn’t work out in the given place.
Cryptographical signatures are used to determine that the thingy was made by the person you trust.
Problem is, in this case, the creator of those commits is the one that is not being trusted.
The professor will just go, “Oh you made it with AI and then used git commit!”.
I have had a similar experience in the past, where I made some MATLAB code for a Mathematics course, which the professor said I had copied from someone else (pre-AI times), because he had given the same assignment to other people in the university. This, he claimed without even looking at what I made and without remembering the specific question he had passed to me.
There’s still the trace left showing the reasoning, which is harder to fake than a complete document. The commits and commit comments would show a human style of building a narrative.
Yeah, that might make it easier when he feels the need to report the professor to the HOD.
Except it doesn’t matter when the HOD just wants to shit on you, because they can just say that you are good at AI-ing and that’s how you did it.
To be fair, you CAN monkey with timestamps and stuff in git. It is cryptographically proven that a given history results in a given commit hash, but you’re free to rewrite that and just have a new commit hash. If you give anyone else your repo, though, then if you rewrite history later they can be like “huh? this doesn’t match!”.
Not that that matters much here. Proving beyond a reasonable doubt is the goal, not Absolute 100% Certainty level proof.
I recently completely finished completely decoupling my life from Google. My GMail account isn’t used for anything of importance anymore. People really should take a moment and think about what would be the consequences if Google suddenly mistakenly deleted their account like that. A lot of people’s entire lives are connected to their GMail account.
I have self-hosted my own personal email server since the late 90s. It has been a tedious, often unpleasant chore. I hate email. But it’s the one thing I’ve never compromised on, because to this day they try to tie your identity to your email and giving up control of that seems insane to me. Apps that use your phone number are doing the same thing, but you can’t self-host that, so I won’t use them. I’m sure Signal is very nice and people keep recommending it, but my phone is an untrusted device, and my phone number is an untrusted identity I don’t control. I am not going to use it for anything important.
I remember reading Signal got rid of the hard requirement of a phone number. Haven’t tried it as I’ve already got it attached to my number. At least starting a chat with someone new I didn’t have to give them my number, used signal’s internal id.
same here, the only google thing i use is youtube
YouTube is fine by me. I don’t care that they track my activity there because they use it to recommend videos and I usually only go there when I have time to waste, which actually makes sense. My YouTube account is its own thing that I don’t use for anything else too. On top of that I use ad blockers so they can’t even make money off of me. If anything, I cost them money by using YouTube.
That’s probably going to be the toughest for me, but I’ll still try.
If anyone has any suggestions for an alternative to Google Docs for my university essays that can track my writing literally word for word, I would be forever grateful. Getting really tired of having professors flag me for AI use just because I can string sentences together with an em-dash, and also getting tired of feeding all my essays to Gemini.
It’s not word for word, but a git repository with frequent commits with meaningful descriptions is easy to do, and then you can push to codeberg or wherever to have backups. That’s cryptographically signed and therefore strong evidence of what you wrote when, and what you were thinking.
This logic doesn’t work out in the given place.
Cryptographical signatures are used to determine that the thingy was made by the person you trust.
Problem is, in this case, the creator of those commits is the one that is not being trusted.
The professor will just go, “Oh you made it with AI and then used
git commit!”.I have had a similar experience in the past, where I made some MATLAB code for a Mathematics course, which the professor said I had copied from someone else (pre-AI times), because he had given the same assignment to other people in the university. This, he claimed without even looking at what I made and without remembering the specific question he had passed to me.
There’s still the trace left showing the reasoning, which is harder to fake than a complete document. The commits and commit comments would show a human style of building a narrative.
Yeah, that might make it easier when he feels the need to report the professor to the HOD.
Except it doesn’t matter when the HOD just wants to shit on you, because they can just say that you are good at AI-ing and that’s how you did it.
shouldve went to the dean or the department head.
The Maths HOD was my professor.
Should’ve *gone
To be fair, you CAN monkey with timestamps and stuff in git. It is cryptographically proven that a given history results in a given commit hash, but you’re free to rewrite that and just have a new commit hash. If you give anyone else your repo, though, then if you rewrite history later they can be like “huh? this doesn’t match!”.
Not that that matters much here. Proving beyond a reasonable doubt is the goal, not Absolute 100% Certainty level proof.
This is really helpful for my CS/mathamatics courses actually, but if you think my English prof is gonna be able to parse a git repository… :/
or to mass transfer stuff from drive to another without too much of a hassle.
What other options are there though? Most non tech people have no idea how to degoogle their info
Proton’s a good one.
Maybe typst.app would work for you, or the likes of a self hosted next loud with only office (which is also an office suite in the browser)