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submitted 2 days ago by bleustenns@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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.

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[-] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 16 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

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.

[-] distal@lemmy.ml 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

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

[-] pineapple@lemmy.ml 1 points 18 hours ago

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.

[-] hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 3 points 17 hours ago

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.

[-] pineapple@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

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.

[-] electric_nan@lemmy.ml 3 points 14 hours ago

Nvidia just bought huggingface.

[-] pineapple@lemmy.ml 1 points 19 hours ago

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.

[-] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 5 points 18 hours ago

Very true, but it's better to use and support a fully FOSS platform if possible.

this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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