They’ve been at it since like 2012. He’s been fighting it that long to not be extradited, and then if he gets to the United States that’s another decade of court cases to see. NZ needs to stop being a puppet, and just say they won’t extradite him and move on.
He had that kind of money before they seized it. I believe he had to get rid of the mansion which he once had.
Movies? Just owning a dvd or bluray. It was filled with a bunch of trailers and other junk when I just wanted the movie itself to start and didn’t care for all of the other.
TV Shows?
Right when it releases, so I don’t have to see the between ads and I couldn’t actually buy it until the full season released. Even then, now they moved to streaming only, where even now you can’t buy the optical media if you want leaving you with only the option to download it. Even if you wanted to pay, they won’t let you buy it.
Music?
Instead of a bunch of music at the time, on MP3 player, I could just rip my discs or download them. If my disc was damaged, I could download. Instead of just having all of these crappy songs, I could select just the ones I want and put on cd at the time.
Software?
When I couldn’t afford it, and still refuse to pay for subscription. I usually try to use open source now other than gaming. I will buy games, on sale, on gog or steam. Provided it’s on sale, and not $60 or $80. $20 or $30? Sure.
Now? One time license? Sure.
I specifically own a computer, for dedicated cracked software and cracked games that doesn’t ever connect to the internet. So, no issue if it’s infected. For those games, I will buy them, when they’re not $80 dollars. I’ll wait until it’s $30. I only install trusted sources, but you never know.
Never will I pay $80 for a new game. Even if I want it bad. That’s beyond ridiculous.
For self-hosted, I’ll recommend Ollama and there’s several different models you can try out. Locally on your computer. It keeps the data in a file like history or something. I forgot, it has the ability to use the cloud for like ‘kim’ or something, but anything local afaik doesn’t send. You’ll have to use the 4 to 8b models, and usually they’re not as accurate, a few are ‘uncensored’ nevertheless. It lacks it.
I am not well versed in Duck.ai. I believe it doesn’t host all of its own instances, and sends some of the conversations off via API to OpenAI or even Claude. I wouldn’t trust it.
Proton Lumo is supposedly private. It’s decent “if you pay” I think their models are self-hosted, but again, their models do ‘web search’ which send your text to the web I believe. Brave, has it built in. It’s supposedly private, but as Duck.ai, it likely uses OpenAI models on some of the picks you make.
Even Gemini isn’t save. If you read, you’ll see it talk about ‘human reviewers’ so nothing is truly private. There was something in Canada, like a shooting. Where the team was flagged about a specific somebody, and decided not to contact law enforcement.
You cannot trust AI except local. I do mine differently. I try to only ask it certain questions and put a bunch of garbage in between. Like, I’ll make something up about myself, my age or whatever, ask something random, or whatever I need then add other garbage to it and delete.
I don’t like to recommend Reddit specifically. Look up /r/PoisonFountain/ it’s interesting. They try to find ways to poison AI’s database.