WashedOver

I’ve been becoming irritated lately with search in other apps being taken over by their flavor of AI. I use the Microsoft Swift keyboard on my phone and it’s now trying to inject their AI search results over my Google searches in Firefox and the results take me to Bing.

Then today I was watching a video on Instagram and the screen went off. I lost of the video as the app refreshed when I turned on the screen again. I tried to search for it but now IG search has been turned into a Meta AI search. It offers AI answers instead of the videos I was looking and it seems like it’s the only option.

WTF are they messing up search across the platforms? Get off my lawn!

I saw there has been a recent update to Decentraleyes. Not sure if this addresses the abandoned issue though. Trying out LOCALCDN instead…

I’m impressed. It speaks to the strength of the Apple brand. Meta should benefit if this becomes the next thing despite the differences.

Sure seems like a great way to avoid severance in those places it’s required.

Amazing how the companies that “care about employees” don’t care so much these days…

I recall some pretty bold statements being made that Apple couldn’t stop this reverse engineering from working ever in the early days of tech reporting on this.

Even as a Android user I thought this was pretty bold claims to make as this whole walled garden is a big part of the Apple brand and they will need to protect this as they really don’t have leading software inovation and they are no longer ahead on tech advances or specs that made the first couple of iPhones ground breaking.

Since they are a couple to a few years behind the Android features and specs, they need to protect the special brand identity above all else so I expected them to tweak things to break anything they don’t want to have happen to their systems.

I can’t blame them at all from a business prospective. While I don’t like or enjoy their products, they had built a great brand that sells itself for those that “want to be different” but actually the same as all of their friends.

I feel like an outsider on these debates. I totally agree we should be able to own forever.

In my case I find there is so much new TV and movies I rarely go back to re-watch shows or movies so owning them isn’t on my radar. It’s a challenge just to watch a whole series I find.

I’m wondering how often do people beyond kids re-watch movies and TV shows? Kids seem to be able to rewatch the same movies several times a day…

How did they bloody well get away with that one?

Do you know how many times I heard growing up ain’t isn’t a word…

Kind of reframes the whole being a vegetarian thing…

Most here will recommend Linux Mint and it’s what I use now after trying many different versions over the years. There’s a simplicity to Mint that just works especially well for those just surfing and doing office tasks. I’ve given away old work laptops with just mint installed as most people just need a web browser and it works great for that.

MS office can be used in your web browser or you can switch to Libre Office which should open most of your office files.

If you have a old laptop or computer I recommend trying to install Mint there first to try it out. It’s pretty easy to start out there first before trying dual boot. You might be surprised at how quick your older laptop works with Mint in the process.

I use dual boot on my machines but most of the use these days is to get to a web browser so I find I rarely boot into windows now.

You will find Firefox is the default web browser but you can add Chrome to Mint if that’s your browser of choice.

Many will say what about the privacy issues with Chrome but many still use it. I’ve switched back to Firefox myself and I like it better for my Android phone.

Good luck on your journey!

I recall at one point Windows 10 was going to be the last version of the OS and they would just maintain that. I’m wondering if they said that to get the last of the Windows 7 and XP users to finally move to 10?

Coming up to 16 years since I cut the cord and hardly anyone I know that is younger has cable. It’s internet and then streaming.

My father when he passed in 2013 was paying $160/mth for old HD cable for his old 35" RCA tube set before I bought him a LCD TV that required a upgrade to modern HD channels. He didn’t have internet with that either. So while they were scamming him for this old 480p HD packages he wasn’t alone I’m sure.

I will say at new year’s I was at someone’s place that only had internet and for the group of us he brought out a HD Amazon antenna to watch the ball drop at midnight on local broadcast TV.

The amount of commercials was jarring. I’m not looking forward to when they bring those to streaming services that are currently hemorrhaging billions.

What I can’t figure out is why when viewing Lemmy by All -> New, there are bots (I think) creating many posts daily with links to back to reddit. It’s in many different instances I set these being created.

Did you have the tape drive on that thing? When I was younger my friend had one but we had no idea how to load the games up.

Yes back when they were pretty expensive still for a 20 year old. It was a old 386 DX with 1mb of Ram without the co-proccessor that they replaced with a 486 in their business. The 1 mb of ram was on a daughter card with many chips before EDO came out.

I was raised on Macs in high school and Apple IIc before that. I recall my first access to a computer was a Apple in grade 5. We had one in the class. I think only the principal knew how to use it then. He was troubleshooting my Basic assignment for me as I did more than change the color of the square. I made a snake that moved around the screen and changed colors with his help.

Later on a IBM was something we used in Graphics class while we did our Accounting classes in the Mac lab. This was backwards as Apple products were big in my district. The IBM lab was the exception. We had more Commodore 64s than IBMs but they were never used when I went there.

I eventually got the 386 with 1mb of ram on dial up internet with AOL. Can’t even imagine how slow it was then…

I wish I had this password request when first trying out DOS commands on my first PC. I came across a book of Dos commands and was playing with FDISK. Wiped out the drive in the process. Learned Dos and windows pretty quickly after as it was a computer my mother in law gave us.

It went from Dos 5 with a shell to Dos 6.22 with Windows 3.11 once I went to the library and learned about them. Yes library, I’m that old.

It appears there has been a few that caught this. I was surprised they were so far down the Consumer’s Report list for reliability as it was but honestly I don’t really think of the brand that much as it’s something my parents owned when I was a little kid then they moved onto Toyota and domestics.

It’s not to say others are better. I’ve was surprised by Ford’s decent down the list but not by Jeep’s continued place down there and I’ve owned many Jeeps.

I wonder if they can also make a vehicle not near the bottom of the reliability rankings next?

Reminds me of movies portraying early Apple and the issues with playing media and the adding of more RAM to the first Mac to get through a similar presentation.

The Macs being presented would never have that much memory when sold in the market but it was portrayed as those production models.

Not sure if it really mattered in the end as the consumer received that new Apple experience they coveted. I still recall those Macs were easier to use than the Apple IIc they replaced in my high school at the time.

I wonder how Oprah’s compares? Her’s is so large she was able to get access to a small road that cut across an island closed to the public.

This seems to be the model I’ve witnessed with many apps over the years. Free at first to get traction and users, then ads, then pay one time fee to get rid of ads, then subscription to keep using the app.

Then there are those that wouldn’t even pay a single fee and get upset at the thought as everything should be free.

The part that is upsetting is the contributions the early community made is monetized when they were they there for the benefit of the community.

I do see there are costs to maintaining and updating these apps so I can understand a need to keep revenue flowing for these future costs. The one time payment is a hell of a deal for years with updates to accommodate the revisions needed for each system update let alone functionality improvements.

In the old days we would buy software for our PC and that was it. There wasn’t really any updates or further support for newer versions of Windows. The software would become very insecure or just stop functioning altogether with enough changes to windows.

It’s hard to find the right balance. I know I only want to pay once, or heck never, but I want these upgrades and updates too.