Honestly I think proper search is one of the biggest things holding the fediverse back from mainstream adoption. It needs exposure, and it needs to be easy to find information and communities around obscure topics in order to really replace silos like reddit and facebook. I’m glad to see this exists, and I particularly like that it supports kagi.

Edit: Maybe this should have been obvious when seeing that it uses other search providers as a backend, but all it does is pass a list of fedi websites to filter results for. That’s… not a proper search. It’s a potentially useful tool, but it’s not doing any of its own aggregation and more importantly the list of websites is also painfully small. Color me disappointed.

My dad (in his 50s) spends a lot of his free time playing it. Like, over an hour every day. It takes the worst and most addictive parts of every brainrot game ever made and rolls them all into one thing. Clearly it’s been worth it. 🤦

I clicked the link and immediately thought “wow this is going to be nothing more than an obnoxious load of marketing wank” as soon as I saw the loading bar appear and take 20 seconds to fill.

I was right.

Just because most of the user base is unaffected, that means that it’s okay to defy the expected convention and change something (which does still affect some of the user base) without any justification other than “because we can”?

You’re not just paying for the hardware, you’re paying for a device with certain functionality and compatibility that you expect to not lose as the result of future updates. Just because corpos think it’s ok to abdicate their responsibility to the consumer by separating hardware and software in the legal contract doesn’t mean that they’re not violating the social contract when the device loses functionality as the result of a software change.

How is that relevant? The main issue is corpos like google deliberately making it difficult for people to do things with their open-source software that they don’t want them to, forcing them to rely on their approved downstream version of the software which has built-in “features” that enable them to sell your data (or use your data to sell ad placements) and squeeze more money out of the product.

Human posting of AI-generated content is definitely a problem; but ultimately that’s a moderation problem that can be solved, which is quite different from AI-generated content being put forward by the platform itself. There wasn’t necessarily anything stopping people from doing the same thing pre-GPT, it’s just easier and more prevalent now.

To be fair, it’s entirely reasonable to be able to expect that paying money for something should get you the thing you paid for. It’s just the current dystopia that we live in where corpos can’t be satisfied with anything other than the continuous extraction of money from every possible consumer.

That was beautiful, but I didn’t think it would still hurt this much.

It’ll be two years this month.

Damn, I checked the last of those boxes last year and I’m not even 30.

I’ve always hated that. I feel like I’m seeing it less and less on newer vehicles, though, so maybe manufacturers are also realizing that it’s stupid as hell.

Or maybe it’s just not worth the cost to have two different but mostly identical versions of a very expensive and highly integrated modern taillight housing for different markets.

It wasn’t just the norm for websites, it was the norm for every single kind of established platform that offered “free” content; see TV, radio, and even our goddamn public roadways.

Apple did not create an ad platform for the iPhone when it was introduced. The iAd platform was introduced in 2010 with the iPhone 4 as “mobile ads done right” (well after Google’s acquisition of AdMob in 2009, and certainly after the iPhone launch in 2007). It was subsequently shut down in 2016.

Developers never needed to “hack” ways to put ads in mobile apps. Mobile ad platforms already existed at the time, and developers were happy to use them extensively once they realized that smartphones were becoming a truly mass-market product (just like TV advertising, imagine that).

“I blame RCA for television ads. If they hadn’t made the first mass-market television set, we wouldn’t have TV ads interrupting my morning cartoons!”

that’s how you sound rn

Well, it was the norm for websites, why would anyone expect it to not transfer over to every other conceivable platform like it has today? The fact that Apple made the first device that allowed people to put adware on a device in your pocket is pure happenstance, and I’m not even sure how true that is given the existence of Blackberry and early Windows Mobile devices.

That said, have you ever heard of WildTangent? Because they’ve been around for a loooong time, and were really attractive to poor and stupid kids like me that really started using the internet circa 2005 and wanted to play computer games.

Again, what are you basing that on? Many websites, games, etc. that had traditionally only been accessible on a desktop/laptop were already primarily using ads for monetization at that point (I should know, I was using a lot of them). Blaming Apple for simply making the first handheld devices capable of running similar software makes absolutely zero sense.

How so? I went from Android to iPhone and one of the biggest reasons I kept it was the lack of consumer-hostile intrusive bullshit that seems to be everywhere on Google and Samsung products.

I would love to not let the nazis dictate how the swastika is used, but their perversion of the original meaning has permanently altered how it’s seen by the rest of the world. Claiming the moral high ground by trying to force something to mean what it no longer does is a pointless exercise.

Have you considered that the comment could, in fact, be a joke?