Another good option is Arcane. Its project structure gives you a good place to put bind mounts which you can edit the contents of in app (like configs and such). It’s pretty handy. I am in the process of switching to it from komodo for all of my stacks

Nah not everyone

lol, yeah that tends to happen when someone comes around claiming to understand what is happening yet displays the contrary. Good luck out there

Competitors still exist chief, it is not an effective monopoly yet.

Legal monopoly, no, effective, yes. The US government has even sued them to that effect, alleging they have been using anti-competitor and unfair strategies to maintain its monopolistic power. It may not technically / legally yet be a monopoly, but that is not what an effective monopoly is.

Also yes I do feel you are not educated enough on the matter, as your example clearly shows. It is not “oh no, they know I am out of toilet paper” it is more about “they have location tracking, search habits, purchase history, and more, and now they model predictive algorithms on what variables they need to push to influence you in a specific way”. They can extrapolate that some advertisement on your route caused you to speak about X, and the online ad Y afterward pushed you to searching the web for Z, which comes up with specific products or messaging they want you seeing. Now imagine all this data at scale with billions of people and billions of dollars of compute to crunch massive amounts of patterns they can use to push you and others.

It doesn’t have to only be about purchases either, this same information can be used to get some political message in front of you, as well as misinformation that you may never properly vet the truth of to sway your decision making over tens, hundreds, thousands or more instances of this.

You can hide behind “But I have autonomy!” all you want, if it didn’t work for them they wouldn’t be doing it. You will never free yourself of it completely, but why not start reducing your data footprint by not letting your TV record your conversations and viewing habits? Every little snip of their web reduces your vulnerability to it, even if only a little.

But yes, I do agree with your last point. Not really part of this conversation though.

If they increase their prices they will lose to their competitors?

What competitors? Shopping is nearly an effective monopoly. People just don’t go elsewhere to check for better prices anymore, amazon is too convenient.

They can sway an opinion with or without tracking people, you seem to be taking away peoples autonomy on this point.

And you seem to be ignoring how predictable the human brain is. There are reasons people consider all these algorithms to be evil, they take advantage of emotional weaknesses to influence people to do things they normally wouldn’t have. Saying it has always been that way doesn’t make this more effective way any less of a problem. With all this personal information being harvested, these companies can ramp up the manipulation and sell it to the highest bidder. That information is something worth hiding so you can still interact with the world and be targeted a bit less.

You folks aren’t special enough to be this paranoid about targeted ads

You dont need to be special lol. They are targeting everyone all at once. I really suggest to read into the situation a bit more as you seem to underestimate the scope of this issue.

You are right, it is a false equivalence, the stranger standing there isn’t automatically processing, tagging, then sending off the data to thousands of customers so those customers can increase your prices for things they know you’ll buy anyways, use the data to flood your algorithmic feeds with something that will actually sway your opinions their way… But yeah… You have nothing to hide right?