chris

chris , 11 days ago

And you can just… Turn them off. No questions asked. DuckDuckGo is a great example of how an advertising company can be both financially viable and respecting of user-choice.

Google could let users choose to opt out of seeing any ads across their network for free today and still be one of the most profitable companies in existence. A huge percentage of users wouldn’t know or care to turn ads off, another percentage actually wants them, and for advanced users they could offer more advanced, useful features for money.

But try pitching that to stakeholders and upper-management lol

chris , 24 days ago

I’m assuming one would still be able to switch to a local account after installation, but you really shouldn’t need to. What a shit show.

chris , 26 days ago

This was the plus side for me, too. I couldn’t care less who sees what I post on social media, but (so far) at least my information here isn’t harvested to target ads to me. In fact, I had gotten so used to seeing ads on Reddit and Twitter that I was numb to it. After a year+ here, when I go back to check on those, it’s all I notice and it’s terrible.

chris , 1 month ago

Pretty much same. Feels sad to say, but I use Pixelfed much the same way I do Instagram.

Using the iOS TestFlight app for well over a year (is this thing ever going to hit the App Store?).

chris , 1 month ago

Nah, I’m on free and don’t get anything. I don’t remember unsubscribing from anything, but I signed up a couple of years ago, so may just have forgotten.

chris , 3 months ago

Imagine spending hours writing and editing something with care only for an LLM to “summarize“ it, completely missing any nuance or sarcasm, removing any creative bits or humor, while also making the wrong point altogether. To top it off anyone unwilling to read your story, their time is valuable after all (but not yours, apparently), will now repeat the LLM’s interpretation to anyone they’d like, whether it’s accurate or not.

It’s an abysmal direction to go for misinformation and even more abysmal for writers. Good content becomes irrelevant and people become less and less willing to pay for a writer’s time and expertise. Why not write with an LLM if a large percentage of your readers summarize the piece with an LLM anyways? Just need more eyeballs to justify our Google Ads spending.

Built into a “private” browser or not, it’s just another nail in the coffin of a web built by and for humans.

chris , 4 months ago

My T480 does everything I need. Picked it up for $200 and spent another $100-$150 to get brand new batteries, a pretty good screen, much faster storage, and upped it to 24GB of RAM. Pretty awesome. Pop!_OS runs like a charm.

chris , 4 months ago

I think something with this, too (and that you sorta hinted at), is that it doesn’t seem to provide any additional benefit to what we already get with the iPhone, iPad, Mac ecosystem. That’s an ecosystem with a huge and established user base. Obviously this could change as developers step in to do the heavy lifting, but… Will they want to? Is it a good investment to spend thousands of hours on an app that a fraction of users of an already niche product will use? I think it’s very telling that some of the biggest developers (like Spotify and Netflix) opted out of Vision Pro.

It’s going to take some very talented, very risk-tolerant developers to make a $3,500+ headset go anywhere. And as of now, Apple is providing very little incentive.

chris , 4 months ago

Apart from what you mentioned:

• Steam
• Darktable
• cmatrix (very important)
• pfetch
• vim
• Hugo
• clipboard manager

I think that’s about it!

chris , 4 months ago

Well, I’ve only changed distros a handful of times. But, I’ve broken my system more than a few times, as well. Back when I had more time I tinkered a lot more than I do now haha

chris , 4 months ago

Grew up Reformed Christian and you hit the nail on the head… Or hand, or whatever.

chris , 4 months ago

Huh.