Seeing as you seem knowledgeable what’s up with the ‘ring the bells’ bit?

Don’t interrupt your enemy while they’re making a mistake…

Is a VPN needed to keep your ip from being exposed ?

No more so than using any search engine directly, it’s a nice to have. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Is just using an existing searxng instance just less secure then?

By the time you’ve investigated it, you could have stood up your own instance…

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again.

Oz gov yet again doing something unfathomably stupid with tech privacy, shocked I tell ya. Might have to point my SearxNG instance VPN endpoint somewhere else, maybe, see how it pans out…

Sounds like a them problem then.

Big if true!

podman exists and doesn’t force root…

It’s yours, no issues trusting a public instance with your searches. Pages full of settings to tweak as you like. Less problems with an algorithm ‘helping’ you. It averages searches over multiple search engines that you choose, you can set up your own (or a curated) block list of crappy AI slop sites, don’t like fandom.com or something, gone. Manage your own bangs, e.g. !aa for annas-archive. Pipe it through a VPN with gluetun for better isolation. If you have your head around docker already it’s more like half an hour to set up, so why not?

Can hook it up to perplexica and a local LLM for a fully local AI search that you define, use it as a MCP server, do deep research with it…

yup, or https://owntracks.org/

You’ll be fine, make sure it’s a x16 card (vasty majority are), stick it in your x16 slot. Make sure you have enough power, some are pretty thirsty these days (it’s usually on the specs sheet for the card and on your power supply in the case)

You can also upgrade the CPU to AMD Ryzen 3000 series (e.g. 3900X, pretty cheap second hand) by upgrading the BIOS here for a nice performance uplift. Get to at least 16Gb RAM (DDR4, also cheap).

Later, you can recycle this as a home sever or swap to a motherboard that supports Ryzen 5000 series (also cheap these days), which will take all your present hardware and enable CPU upgrade to say 5800X3D to make it a gaming beast (at least for a couple of years).

Dammit, negative results are gold, pretty close to the essence of science and it’s just ‘not enough clickbait, fuck your career’

Jokes on you, keto whole foods means just going around the outside (the aisles are all full of carbs).

Like they won’t be selling to all the insurance companies… One would’ve been better.

Yarr !, my experience has been stellar ;) (Gaben: It’s a service problem…)

know truth from fiction.

You jest, but…

You are aware that Netflix et.al. put compression on their streams (usually quite a bit in regards to bitrate) ? It is often the case that BluRay rips etc. are available better on the high seas…

While I generally agree and consider this insightful, it behooves us to remember the (actual, 1930s) Nazis did it with newspapers, radio and rallies (… in a cave, with a box of scraps).

Not sure I’d use either, but may I suggest both, with a clear caveat that one or both may disappear or change ? Throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks…

Yeah, that’s some bullshit, but the trend away from the duopoly has been ongoing for what, this century ?. That’s just patching a leaky bucket with sand. They scared.

If that’s all you’re after (Contact, Calender, Drive) you may well be able to just plug a hard drive into your OpenWRT router (it has https://openwrt.org/packages/pkgdata/radicale2 which does caldav and carddav), work out sharing (apparently at least samba works) work out how to back up the drive (plug in two, mirror and unplug one, RAID is not a backup) and call it a day. I don’t have one, but it seems likely doable… Tailscale in when you’re out and about…