Yeah, piracy is illegal and it's, in practice, stealing IRL but digital piracy ain't stealing for sure. You're not subtracting anything...
They can and do claim that they lost revenue but they can never claim you stole the movie - they still have it, you just didn't pay them for an extra copy. Rip a friend's DVD, same thing.
Now if you were to hack them and steal all the movie raw material... but then again, Hollywood just spews out garbage nowadays,
The difference is that i don't give two shits about not enriching multi-billion-dollar media conglomerates that hoard all profits and leave pennies for the actual creators. Hollywood, the music industry and YT fit the bill.
Which is why i buy merch of local bands and/or buy their digital music if it's available as downloadable media i can keep on my devices (i won't buy into subscription crap), that way i'm indeed benefiting the actual artist and not some fat middle-man. Bandcamp and hdtracks have served me well lately, other suggestions welcome.
As a rule of thumb i buy high-end to last me for ages.
I prefer Asus motherboards, the last one lasted 10 years and i only replaced it 'cos of bad diagnostics on my end.
I prefer AMD CPUs because, so far, AMD has stuck to socket upgradeability - that board came with an AM+ Athlon which i replaced with a Phenom. Current one's Ryzen 5 and i can upgrade to Ruzen 9 if so desired. I'd say Threadripper is overkill, stay on Ryzen.
32 GiB RAM is nice, more is nicer, especially if you play with virtualization. You may want to remount your /tmp as an in RAM tmpfs (otherwise you won't be able to compile firefox on gentoo).
I don't care about graphics cards (beware some CPUs don't support your mobo's on-board graphics) but you mentioned LLMs... so... go gamer on that, can't help you there.
Storage... really depends on your projects... 1TB HDD is more than enough for most stuff, find good brands within your budget/needs. I prefer SSDs because they're quiet and curently have 3 Crucial MX500s on a ZRAID6 2 TB pool.
Same for fans: Noctua or be Quiet.
PSU's probably.. 400W? Dunno, always buy more than you need and you're gonna need to feed that external GPU...
Decentralization is, by definition, censorship-resistant, just hop to another instance.
There is censorship, but i think it's on par with reddit. Were i to post some of the stuff i post here on lemmy on mastodon instead i'd have my account banned. Speaking from experience.
There's a light side?