When I was a teen it wasn’t the government I was afraid of, but digital devices were just as likely to be read as paper. What I did was keep anything I needed to be private at school, work, a friend’s. Is any of that an option? Would a super old laptop with a fresh OS that you never connect to the internet be safe in your home?

Your question was a good one, but still rude. You’re more likely to get a satisfying answer if you don’t pose the premise that the person you’re replying to must be dumb if they’re not rich.

That sucks, didnt know charging by the minute was still a thing at all in some places.

Anyone who uses Facebook messenger as their only messenging app will need to text or call me. Fuck that. I do, however, use WhatsApp and discord for work and uni group chats. If or when that’s no longer the case, people who only use those will need to text me, too.

You seem like a great parent! I’m personally leaning towards giving them dumb phones once they have to take public transport to school, for the convenience of them being able to inform me when they miss the bus or want to have lunch at a friend’s. But who knows if or when I’ll even have kids, lol. Maybe things will change in that time.

When I was kind of strapped on cash, the 2016 iphone SE was the most best choice by far. The android phones I’d had before that usually cost a similar amount and they all broke in less than three years. But that 290€ bad boy lasted until I lost it in 2023. Shame they’re no longer making those. But I guess the silver lining is that people don’t make fun of me for having an iPhone anymore.

My highschool PCs had XP for as long as at all possible. They switched them to some beginner friendly Linux after. Way to go.

You could literally just save a copy to your desktop before you’re going to do something sensitive.

Not a solution to all your problems of course, but the only way to buy something and preserve your privacy is to pay cash. Everything else will get your info to someone. Lots of good suggestions for lesser evils here for when you have no choice but to shop online.

What about the libre office version?

I’m currently working with some code that partly was written in the punch card era.

We’re almost like coding siblings lol

That’s the first time I’m hearing this experience, thanks for the input! Changed my mind

While that’s true, there are objectively different levels of ‘just working’ though.

I’ve never spent so little time googling how to fix things as I do with Ubuntu or Mint. It’s much more frequently needed and time consuming on other Linux OSs, iOS, Windows, Android. Haven’t personally used Mac.

Also, I’ve always found a fix on Ubuntu. The same can’t be said for other OSs.

That’s just personal examples, but the general idea still stands: different systems have a different amount of bugs, (or worse, ‘features’) and the difficulty of fixing them isn’t the same for everything either.

How dare you. I’m a physicist, not an engineer.

That’s pretty helpful for when I need to look at older stuff, thank you!

Thank you so much!!

This is soo much more than I could’ve ever asked for, thank you so much!

It’s legal if they irreversibly anonymise it.

So the content you created will still be used to train AI with no consent from or payment to you.

I used to play this game with Google translate when it was newish