u/AlexNeverBlue

I'm after a proxy service I can actually trust, and I'd rather ask real people than go off review sites that are mostly affiliate spam.

The thing I care about most is where the IPs come from. With all the stuff this year about pools made from hijacked devices, I don't want to end up on something like that. I'll happily pay a fair price for something clean instead of grabbing the cheapest option. Support and reliability matter too, but that's the main one.

For context, it's for a personal project where I pull public web data at a steady rate, so a normal VPN doesn't really work for it. Nothing shady, I just need stable IPs so my own connection doesn't get blocked.

So who would you recommend, and is there anyone worth avoiding?

AI keeps getting better at more things, and I use it for plenty. But there are a few tasks we still want to do ourselves, even if AI could do them faster or better. So what's the one task you'll always keep for yourself? And what makes that one different from everything you're happy to let AI handle?

Some days AI clearly saves me time. It drafts something in seconds that would have taken me half an hour. But then I read it over, catch a few things that are wrong or off, fix them, and by the end I wonder if I actually saved anything at all.

Do you feel like AI genuinely gives you time back, or does the checking and correcting eat up most of what you saved?

I install new apps and sign up for new sites all the time, and I don't always know if I can trust them. There's no official test that tells you a service is safe. I usually check a few things before I install something: check what permissions it asks for and whether they make sense for what the app actually does and read reviews, but I skip the five star ones and start with the one and two star ones, because that's usually where people explain what went wrong.

What do you check before you trust a new app or website? Do you have a rule you always follow, or do you just decide based on how it feels?

I install new apps and sign up for new sites all the time, and I don't always know if I can trust them. There's no official test that tells you a service is safe. I usually check a few things before I install something: check what permissions it asks for and whether they make sense for what the app actually does and read reviews, but I skip the five star ones and start with the one and two star ones, because that's usually where people explain what went wrong.

What do you check before you trust a new app or website? Do you have a rule you always follow, or do you just decide based on how it feels?

I assumed most of it was hype and that the results would need heavy fixing before they were useful. Some of that turned out to be true, but a few things worked much better than I thought they would. For exapmple, using AI to explain confusing documents in plain language. I pasted in a dense contract expecting a rough summary, and it broke the whole thing down clearly and caught details I had missed.

What did you expect AI to be bad at, but it turned out good enough that you kept using it?