Cash it is! Hell, if I try hard enough I might even ditch the cash too and only do transactions with private individuals who accept precious metals. 99% of my spending is for groceries, which I can honestly just grow myself or barter with neighbouring farms. I'm so fucking sick of this fake money and surveillance bullshit.
@toiletpaper Sorry to hear that, but I fully support you and hope you'll find a solution!
Maybe you could get a kind of lawyerly "client account" if you know a small town layer? That way, for a modest fee, they could help with any transactions you might need.
Or are there any credit unions around?
The last easy solution I can think of is if you know someone with a small business who could just sit on your money justifying it by having you as their customer.
I've bought stuff, and
@toiletpaper produced the odd, fake invoice in my own business. It is not a perfect solution, and it has severe limitations, but small stuff (depending on the size of the business and benevolence of the owner) should work.
The only half decent credit union I know of (from past experience + research) is a couple hours drive from me. Unfortunately not an option at the moment. All the ones nearby are just as shit as the big banks. In the mean time I'm looking into how I can circumvent the web-access issue by running waydroid in a VM or such like, and connecting to play store without an account via the aurora store proxy app, so I can log in via the banks android app. Not sure how that'll work out, but it's the easiest thing I can do from behind my keyboard at the moment. In the long term though, I'm utterly unwilling to support any business that does this kind of shit.
@toiletpaper Might work if the banks programmers are not very security conscious. I used the same method to print boardingcars at ryanair, when they stopped offering them to people without smartphones.
There are apps though, that detect that you do not run them on a phone, and then they refuse to cooperate.
I'll keep my fingers crossed!
*nods*
Right now the hurdle is getting F-Droid or Neo_Store to install on waydroid. But I have a recent version of waydroid which requires adb, so now I'm wrestling with postmarketos installed in qemu to figure out how to get adb compiled and running so I can side-load shit into waydroid, so I can install Aurora Store, so I can install my banking app. Pain in the ass. But at least if I can get that figured out in the next couple days I can use it to help with a handful of other issues I've been having related to needing access to android apps w/o a smartphone.
Otherwise I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and spend the shekels to buy a used Pixel phone and throw GrapheneOS onto it, etc. So fucking convoluted. I hate that this is the kind of absolute waste of time dumpster fire of bullshit that's required to do the most basic shit without having a surveillance camp continuously jackhammered into my anus.
@toiletpaper I've successfully used the plain Android dev environment in the past. Maybe it will be easier for you to get things to run on that one?
https://developer.android.com/studio
It is a huge java monster, but at least it installed painlessly on a modern linux distribution.
Thanks. If all else fails I'll reconsider that, maybe in a dedicated VM or something. But off hand my priority isn't really to make it easy, but to make it anonymous & private. Letting google crap run on my machine is inherently contrary to that aim. The point is to not use google while still being able to carefully and strategically use a small subset of applications from the same ecosystem of software.
Back when I did android app development I used to accept not having any privacy, but that's now 15+ years in the rear view. I don't have a google account anymore, IME can't even if I try, and have no intention of ever having one, especially after the huge pain in the ass it created to go through their convoluted and obfuscated process to try and delete my accounts and data the first time.
If things end up being that big a pain in the ass, I'm just gonna pull the plug on the whole fucking situation and accept being a luddite. It will be far more productive to figure out how to manage that then it will to subject myself to the anal rape involved in dealing with the current status quo of big tech enshittification.
@toiletpaper Makes perfect sense. I hope I can last for about 10 more years without too much selling out. Then I should be able to retire quite happily.
Speaking of balance of power, I had a funny experience today.
I have a big customer, who buys a lot from me. They got acquired, and I get a complaint from their finance department.
They say they won't pay my invoice, unless I create an account in their invoice system, and restructure my invoices to suit them.
Sounds like a job for `pretend intelligence` tbh. If the customer is worth the $, then it might not hurt to just give them what they want so they'll stfu and pay you, considering the trade-off and hassle involved in contrary.
You can probably get qwen code (alibaba's coding assistant) to write a converter app for you with very little supervision. That's the tool I've been using most lately and with some caveats (it's still just a stochastic parrot), it's pretty good all things considered. Especially given the price is right ($0) and requires no personally identifying information to use. In my case inside a VM to isolate it from my main system, and so I can comfortably give it enough rope to hang me without any real risk.
I also setup some extra tools that help a bit in some cases (eg. agency agents). If you have enough coding experience, particularly in the target language, to do a bit of project management and code review, then it can be a pretty useful tool. Use git also, so you can keep track of changes in each dev iteration and roll back snafu's as they come up. Anyway I've been using LLMs to knock off a bunch of projects I've had collecting dust in the back corners of my hard-drive for years (not just code either), and it's nice to finally see some of those things grow some legs. That said, they do need a lot of babysitting, particularly until you get the hang of prompt engineering.
https://qwenlm.github.io/qwen-code-docs/en/users/overview/
https://github.com/msitarzewski/agency-agents
@toiletpaper Yes... sadly this makes a lot of sense. I'll argue a bit, on the lighter side, and then we'll see. After all, the preson on the other side is a retarded, minor employee in the finance department, and hit has never been a problem before. But it is my biggest customer, so I do need to tread lightly.
> the person on the other side is a retarded
We all have to deal with those... Comes with the territory unfortunately.
> biggest customer, so I do need to tread lightly
Relatable. I took a hiatus from running my minuscule sole-proprietor software dev/consulting business for about a year and change because of too many customers like that, and often also people who want to argue over every nickle and dime of work that gets done. Past a certain point it stops being worth the hassle.
But I'm thinking now with LLM assistance, that could potentially become slightly more bearable in some cases. I have a couple clients still on the side who just need a little bit of help once in a while, so I'm okay with that. For the time being I'm just pumping out a bunch of passion projects until I get something together that might turn into a viable business in it's own right.
@toiletpaper This is the truth! Strangely enough, the only antidote I have discovered for these types of customers is to charge very high prices. The benefits, if you can pull it off, are two:
1. The cheap customers avoid you, which is great.
2. The customers that do pay for your services, never question you due to the high price. It sends the signal that you know what you are doing, and questioning you would be a waste of their own time and money.
@toiletpaper It is sad, because sometimes you do feel like helping a customer out by lowering your price, but it almost always leads to them complaining, so I stopped doing that.
If I want to be nice, I pay for lunch or beers, but I never lower my price.
Interesting. In the past several years the majority of clients I've had have been referred to me through friend networks rather than professionals/colleagues, so I've tended to try to work things out to be more affordable. Also given I have particular sticking points about cash-only and maintaining my anonymity/privacy, so I'm willing to be a bit more flexible in that trade-off. But you're quite right about that. I think if I want to be serious about launching a new business, I'm gonna have to be a bit more cut-throat when it comes to how I price out my work, especially if I make any concessions about personal information and payment type. There's a sort of Pareto optimum kind of trade-off that has to be made in my lifestyle when it comes to my privacy/anonimity and monenetary sticking points, vs the need to be attractive to customers and actually still have a viable business.
@toiletpaper Yes... I agree. One possible way is to hire a "manager" who is the customer facaing part, and he would also take care of payments, admin etc. You'll lose a percentage of your income, but you will be able to get a kind of privacy shield.
I've done that twice. One time I deeply regret, because the guy was completely crazy and borderline criminal. He came through a personal recommendation, and needless to say, that person I no longer have any relationship with.
@toiletpaper
The other time was an american guy who worked for the airforce and wanted to switch careers to programming. We discovered that it was very difficult to pay him through regular banks, so in the end I paid him with crypto. This would however, not be possible for me again, because I refuse to open an account with any of the major crypto exchanges since they are almost more privacy invasive than banks, and I also do not earn any crypto out of which I could pay. If I
@toiletpaper did, this would be an excellent way.
I was sad to learn that qwen ended their free tier today. :( But at least ollama is super cheap, and if you don't mind adding a few bucks to get started, openrouter has a lot of free models to toy around with. Both usable via opencode. Anyway...
@toiletpaper
Wtf? _You_ are buying from _me_, and refuse to pay me because you have stupid systems?
Will be a very interesting discussion.
Right now I'm thinking about just ignoring their email and to just keep sending them invoices.