Anybody know of anything else that would be quite wise to purchase sooner than later, due to potential (or incoming) regulation that would be regarded as privacy-infringing to enforce? I was thinking about this because I’ve been pondering a high-quality 3D printer purchase for this reason.
Advice for varying levels of budget would be quite nice, too; I partially intend on this being a post people may want to revisit.
Standalone devices. MP3 players. Cameras. GPS units. Fitness electronics. All disconnected, except a local USB port. No wifi, no network of any kind.
None of them seem likely to disappear tomorrow. But given the push to put everything from your toothbrush to your vacuum cleaner online and harvest data from it, IDK how long until offline standalone electronics are no longer made.
Buy a Fully FOSS 3D printer. It’s pointless to purchase any peice of tech to “avoid future regulation” if it still runs proprietary software you don’t control. I would highly recommend checking out Voron printers. Fully FOSS at every level, firmware, hardware, schematics, etc. Voron Design
The catch is that you have to build it from scratch yourself. However, there are many places online to buy high quality premade kits, and the community is massive and thriving, you’ll be able to follow guides easily.
I would also buy some bulk, long term digital storage if you don’t have it already, and build yourself a simple NAS. The digital crackdowns are coming soon, and you’re going to thank yourself for having terabytes of digital media and software that is impossible to get down the line.
ServerMonkey currently has 6TB refurbished enterprise HDDs for $175, and 24TB Seagate Exos CMR HDDs for $625 (even cheaper per TB.) if you don’t need crazy performance, you can throw a few of those in an old PC with a few hundred bucks of hardware and be totally fine using it as a NAS/home media server.
Learn how to securely torrent if you don’t already. If you’re into LLMs at all, download current LLM models that are good at different sizes, even if you can’t currently run them on your hardware, they will likely be banned in the near future because they represent a “threat” to the USA’s corporate power and influence.
Download a local copy of Wikipedia and other online sites with something like Kiwix. Purchase pre-LLM era physical books on foraging, cooking, home and auto repair, electronics, child care, etc. Highly practical skills that will be useful to know as the general population becomes further dumbed down and reliant on proprietary, corporate slopware.
For those on a very tight budget, used is your friend. Old computer equipment is still quite affordable. You can pick up used t480 Thinkpads on Ebay for $175-$300. If you’ve got kids who need a laptop for school, pick one of those up and throw Linux on it.
If you’re willing to swap, haggle, and hunt locally, you can get even better deals. Check if your area has a government surplus warehouse. When I was a kid, my family lived 15 minutes from one. They had literal pallets of government mini-pcs you could buy, 40 towers for a few hundred bucks. You could buy individual machines for $40-$75 there. Yeah they were old, beat up, janky, but they worked. And as a 14 year old kid who’s only money came from doing random yard work for friends and family, it was a gold mine.
Check with your local businesses and schools and ask somebody there if they have “e-waste computers” they are looking to get rid of. Often times they do, and they will happily give you them for free. Normally, they have to pay a company to take those off their hands, so they will have no issue with you just taking them for nothing. I’ve gotten a bunch of old computers this way over the years. Don’t be afraid to even ask the IT department where you work too. Some places have strict e-waste policies, but most don’t. As long as there’s no storage installed that could contain company/organizational data, they usually couldn’t care less if an employee wants to take an old “junk” PC home with them.
Purchase pre-LLM era physical books on foraging, cooking, home and auto repair, electronics, child care, etc.
Get E-books released right around 2022 (but not after) on Anna’s Archive if your money is low. It’s important that the info is somewhat fresh. A lot has changed since the 1980s
If your car is from the 90s then a book on car repair from the 90s will do.
True, but books about nutrition absolutely should cite the best available science.
Downloading LLM’s because the US will censor them seams unlikely. Censorship will pretty much always be bypassable with vpn’s or tor.
Maybe I just don’t have the same threat model as you.
The government could force Huggingface to implement KYC. This would probably push people to start uploading torrents of models, but the problem is that there are dozens of quants for each model. Depending on what GPU you have, how much VRAM and RAM you have, the perfect quant for your machine might not be available on these third party download sites. So might as well grab them now while you can.
Nvidia just bought huggingface.
I suppose so. And by downloading more rare models you could be the one seeding torrents to others who didn’t!
I’ve just found out a lot of Chinese models are published to modelscope which seems to be a Chinese version of hugging face.
Closed source printers can still be flashed with open source firmware. Creality printers can be flashed with octoprint. Also since they aren’t connected to the internet they can’t force a bad update.
Very true, but it’s better to use and support a fully FOSS platform if possible.
You can’t consume your way out of this
Nobody can, dw, I’m aware. I certainly don’t like spending money personally. Just making sure I can obtain things that’ll be a PITA to get later on, y’know?
I know your hearts in the right place but this thread is worthless.
What will be useful or necessary to one person will be a waste to another. Without understanding what each persons needs are nothing even approaching good advice can come out of the question.
The availability of stuff and the regulatory frameworks that stuff and its users exist under are super variable. The thread staying up for longer than a week means it’s gonna be outdated advice that amounts to consumption churn.
Plus it’s a really bad format to be asking in because the upvote/downvote system means that old outdated input will have the most votes and therefore rise to the top and be what people see and act on.
Even if all that weren’t true, the general quality of the responses on lemmy as judged by a combination of replies and downvotes is dogshit. There’s a front page thread where someone says we should just get rid of blackrock and the reply explaining that their etfs are widely held by retirement funds and getting rid of that company would have serious knock on effects for the average person has a 1:30 ratio and someone directly replying saying “you have lots of downvotes so you’re wrong”.
You would be literally better off making purchasing decisions by flipping a coin.
I actually respectfully disagree! I think that if someone is to make any significant purchase in their life, they should take the time and do some research about what’s viable in the current moment. Having a thread like this already indexed and everything is important for people to start looking for things they might want to own sooner than later; hell that’s literally why Reddit is so popular.
I do agree, though, that some replies on Lemmy are simply complete ass. However, if you take everyone’s words as the absolute truth, you may not be ready to participate in forums, so I don’t think this is a big issue.
I agree with you that some understanding can be helpful (I actually 100% disagree and at the moment people should just rely on the input of others they physically pay for their experience and expertise to give them purchasing advice but that’s neither here nor there. The thread is predicated on the assumption that a person can become informed enough to make a good decision so me undermining the premise isnt helpful to people who already accept it. I’m basically in future perfect tense damage control.), but the thread can’t meet that need.
Like I said and you agreed, the replies are ass. If a person knows so little they will buy something on the input of a public Internet forum with awful reply quality then how can you reasonably expect them to sus out the wheat from the chaff?
There’s a person in this thread suggesting people buy voron 3d printers. Those are good printers but you need a 123 block and a surface plate to put one together right and it’s ~$700 for the kit. To what end? That’s an absurd suggestion for even a person who’s interested in 3d printing or who has dipped their toes in already.
Someone said guns and ammunition. Which guns and what ammunition? There’s a wild variation in laws, availability and best buying practices from county to county and that doesn’t even touch on accessories and use cases.
I could probably rip into every reply making an actual suggestion itt because without useful background information they are all just no context suggestions to panic buy.
The point isn’t to make you feel bad but to make it clear that this is really just an undirected consumptive message akin to what the bush administration said explicitly to the American people after 9/11.
Where you’re coming from actually makes a ton of sense. My intention with posting this was to get a starting point to see what would be wise to buy now that would actually apply to my personal life, with which I would actually be sensible about purchases for. I have hobbies that benefit greatly from tools like 3D printers and mechanical tools, as well as a sizeable interest in self-sufficiency (with the physical space to practice this!), so I figured mass opinions might point out something I’m missing.
I did some research into what Voron sells, and yeah, that’s not a committment I can dip my toes into right now even if I have the means (couple 123 blocks and don’t mind getting other things) nor is it something I’d ever recommend to someone dissimilar. I really shouldn’t assume people will behave the same as I, 'specially on the internet. Sorry if anyone saw this and thought I was encouraging panic buying! I’m just future conscious and like to be prepared when it comes to what I find pleasure in doing.
Bidet, it’s like 1000 times better and you can worry less about Costco shortages.
I know it’s like a meme, but every time I have to go without a bidet I feel like a Neanderthal. I’m like kinda close to sneaking one onto the work toilet once I’m keyholder.
I can’t tell if you’re serious because it’s super late where I am right now, but this is just lowkey good advice in general. Bidets rule lol
Agree. Italians are the biggest users and use less paper … :-)
Guns and ammunition Physical media and ways of accessing it (usb disc drive for example) Older laptops and vehicles if you’re in the market
Absolutely. Old cars until they ban them because of CC.
Books, vinyl records, CD’s, DVD’s, bluray, hard drives (oké maybe not now now). Tools… Especially battery power tools.
And if you are abble, solar panels and batteries.
This wil make your life pretty low tech and non traceable. Also there commodities that are tradable for goods and services with others in your communitie.
Especially battery power tools.
Ditch the battery tool lock-in and go pneumatic. The tools themselves are more robust, more powerful, typically designed to be repaired, and less expensive when comparing performance.
And noisy and need oil and need an air compressor and need lots of space and an air hose…
TINSTAAFL, buy once cry once, and all that. I can mitigate all of those trade-offs. I can’t mitigate proprietary batteries. Oh, sure, there knockoffs (potentially or actually dangerous) and generic batteries (like CEENR). The performance of the generics just isn’t there yet, but for people messing around at home, it’s gutenuf. The battery is still an expensive consumable.
I have mostly cordless tools and regret having gone down this route. The cost of one 10Ah pack would get me a “throwaway” oil-free compressor that I can repair and rebuild. And once you have the air tools, you have them for life. Dropped you drill in saltwater? Clean it up, lubricate, back in action. For the price of one cordless nail gun, I got my nail gun, a long nose stapler, a drill, extra air line, and an extra tank for additional air volume.
Is pneumatic for everyone? Absolutely not. But that battery lock-in is terrible. Proprietary anything chaps my ass, and I avoid it whenever possible.
As an aside, I often wonder how long before TTI and Stanley Black & Decker start locking out third-party batteries.
Nothing you can buy can save you if a law is passed prohibiting it. They’ll outlaw possession/usage too.
People should start protesting today instead of waiting for things to get worse.
You are absolutely correct about the second part. But the first? Ehh… out of sight out of mind, lol
Maybe flashable routers, phones, SBCs, noise generators if you’re an activist? Sorry if I’m not being concrete enough.
We should also consider tariffs and general inflation, which work (intentionally or not) to deprive people of “privacy-friendly” tech (along with everything else really). This is essential, knowing that basically most tech hardware comes from China, and we’ve seen how the govt can just say “uh actually this will be X bucks more expensive” without explicitly banning it, especially in the US and Europe
Any recs for flashable routers? I’m about to try and build my own but if cheaper pre-built options will suffice I’d love to save a buck. I’m not exactly raking in dough.
I have some GL. iNet routers and I like them a lot. Comes preinstalled with their flavor of OpenWRT but you can flash it to the standard image too. And they’re affordable (at least when I bought in last year they were)
Honestly I have no idea, sorry. I never really took a personal interest, being a broke student sharing apartments and all
You might have luck asking in other coms though
That’s fine, don’t apologize. I am right there with you in the monetary department…
Thankfully I now have a job, good luck to you! 🫡
Thanks! o7
Though a double edged sword, an electric vehicle ic it exists where it doesn’t rely on the manufacturer connectivity. Being able go plug in and charge and get wherever is better than relying on fuel.
Mullvad VPN let’s you buy 10 years in advance IIRC. So if the government bans VPN’s (but Sweden doesn’t) you might still be able to use them for a decade.
I don’t see how this helps anything
