Agree. I also use Unhook/Brave to remove all recommendations plus my DeCasino to grayscale social media and put a clock over. I only watch subscriptions - clicking from subscriptions bar, not the feed. My phone is fully grayscale, no notifications and only has Brave with custom content filter that removes the main feed as well. It's almost impossible to watch anything on my phone but a video from a direct link. Sounds kind of crazy, but it's finally sustainable.
As a result, I have zero curated feeds, and I only follow people that I chose and started taking more word-of-mouth suggestions. I've noticed that I got much more interested in politics and my internet time is now all meaningful. Algorithms do steer us, they aren't neutral.
From what I know, most modern devices have hardware backdoors, and most TOR nodes are compromised. If you're working on a sensitive story, you'd likely need to physically remove access to internet, bluetooth or any other signal, and not bring any other devices to that place.
Hi eterm, this is very relevant to me as I'm building a self-hosted open-source tool for legacy code comprehension (AI/ML final project).
You mentioned "navigation and babysitting", could you share what that looks like in practice? Do you have to spend time reconstructing context or correcting Claude's misunderstandings? Do you still need to interrupt colleagues for some tacit knowledge, or has that changed?