RunawayFixer
@RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
- Comment on The Verge shows how Google search is useless 1 month ago:
I found that Qwant gives decent results in my native non English language, results similar in quality to Google, but way better than DDG which often just gives English results.
- Comment on Kagi silently removed all references to Google's index from their website 1 month ago:
I didn’t read every little bit as well, but that was my take away as well. I saw an emotially invested CEO who could not bear seeing his baby dragged through the mud, and so he wanted to provide a counterpoint to what he saw as misinformation and accusations, but in a polite professional manner. My first instinct would be that he would have been wasting his time with that, but seeing as his comments got posted and they make a more convincing level headed argument then the accusations, maybe it was worth it.
- Comment on Google Search is getting even worse for independent sites 1 month ago:
Not until I searched for “restaurant town name” and got as results tripadvisor.com, tripadvisor.co.uk, tripadvisor.ch, tripadvisor.fr *5, … ;)
But in another search it did way better than duckduckgo. So it’s not perfect, but definitely good enough to try as main search for a while :)
- Comment on Google Search is getting even worse for independent sites 1 month ago:
Just gave it a quick test drive it and it’s pretty promising, thanks for the tip.
- Comment on Windows 11 just isn't enticing Windows 10 users to upgrade, and its market share is actually falling 1 month ago:
I’m going to disagree on this one, at least for me personally using the base functions of the different windows versions was never a problem. Even when completely ignoring the UI changes (including the always increasingly messier system configuration pages), Windows has definitely been regressing.
The user transition from win XP to win 7 was completely smooth for me, it didn’t feel different at all. It’s only after using it a bit that the downsides became obvious: I remember that file search worked less good, they had made a bit of a mess of config screens and the bloat needed more ram. But it came with a smashing chess program. It felt like there was some minor regression, but it wasn’t a trainwreck.
Windows 8 upon first startup was awful since that was the first time that MS wanted to force the user to create a cloud account through dark pattern design. Even if I had not grown up in a time when my operating system did not use dark patterns against me, I would still be pissed off when I encountered it for the first time. Once I got past that hurdle, the Os was usable and problems only emerged when I tried to do more things.
Things like closing a stuck full screen game with task manager, which didn’t work because the new task manager would not come on top. Or the new store app, which installed “apps” that were not “programs” and could fe not be uninstalled in a normal way.
From my first experiences with windows 10 I remember that out of the box you could not control when it would update. That pc would wake up in the middle of the night despite the settings saying that it shouldn’t and I had to dig deep till I found how to make it behave permanently. Then at a later point I also made the mistake of using the recommended OneDrive sync system for my documents folder and nearly lost all my personal files, fortunately I had a backup on an external hard disk. And the main goal of Windows search was no longer to find files, but instead to trick users into opening bing, to boost microsoft quarterly statistics.
Microsoft has been adding more and more dark pattern design into Windows, it’s not a case of “old man yells at clouds”, it has really been getting worse and worse with each new release.
And Microsoft firing their qa team and using their customers as canaries is definitely not helping either. So many issues that should have never gone life.
- Comment on Windows 11 just isn't enticing Windows 10 users to upgrade, and its market share is actually falling 1 month ago:
Windows 7 is good compared to Vista, but bad compared to Windows Xp SP 1 or SP 2 (in my memory at least). Windows 10 is good compared to Windows 8, but bad compared to Windows 7.
After a couple more years of MS pushing win 11, we’ll probably get a win 12 that is less good than win 10, but better than win 11, so thanks to people’s short term memory, it will then be considered “good”, but anyone with a memory and some critical thinking ability will recognize it as shite.
- Comment on checkmate, big geology!! 1 month ago:
Not knowing how much is not that big an issue. If it’s too much, then it becomes an interplanetary ship. If it’s not enough, then it will come down soon enough and we can just try again on an another volcano. It’s probably going to require a bit of patience from the crew, passengers and offspring, but eventually there will be a big enough eruption and it will all work out smoothly in the end.
- Comment on checkmate, big geology!! 1 month ago:
Why has noone ever experimented with placing a very large spaceship in the mouth of an active volcano? And when erupting, the space ship would fly to space without needing any fuel. No resources wasted on multiple stage rockets just to carry up fuel a few km, all that’s needed is an enormous spaceship in the shape of a cement plug.
- Comment on Yep 1 month ago:
How about “Yippee”?
- Comment on Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone 1 month ago:
The task manager in win 8 wouldn’t stay/come on top if there was a frozen program. This would make the new task manager unusable to kill the problem program. And then the half-assed solution of preemptively enabling always on top did not even work reliably. A pretty fundamental issue, which for me far outweighed whatever improvements that new task manager contained.
- Comment on Firefox saw an increase in users (~50% in Germany and ~30% in France) following Apple’s default browser changes in the EU, as did Brave. 2 months ago:
It’s a recent eu (or eea) thing: www.android.com/choicescreen/dma/
- Comment on People in England facing food poisoning ‘Russian roulette’ as illnesses soar 3 months ago:
“the UK food standards authority puts it down to improved detection.”
Basically: nothing to see here, move along now. I like how clearly this communicates that no improvement is to be expected in the near future.
- Comment on The Fairphone 5 is less about what comes in the box and more about what you get over the years 3 months ago:
No, I wasn’t, my phone is still completely stock. I use a custom launcher which could slow it down, but no issues there either. The processor just works smoothly in all my use cases and I blame all my connection issues on my network provider (they suck and I have no way of knowing of it’s 100% of the time their fault, or only 90%, so I just blame them for every connection issue).
- Comment on Bro went wild 3 months ago:
I think it’s grandparents indeed. I also like how they’ve included 2 dogs (I think, the picture is a bit grainy).
- Comment on The Fairphone 5 is less about what comes in the box and more about what you get over the years 3 months ago:
How is the CPU choice and official software support related? Genuine question, I don’t follow smartphone tech news, I just look up stuff whenever I or someone in my family needs a new phone.
The comment I was replying to said that this Fairphone was going to be sluggish because of the CPU choice, with which I disagreed because I’m basically using an older CPU from that CPU family without issues, so I know that it doesn’t have to be sluggish. Not in a Fairphone though, but in a Motorola edge, so the software will indeed be different.
- Comment on The Fairphone 5 is less about what comes in the box and more about what you get over the years 3 months ago:
I’m typing this from a smartphone with Snapdragon 765g, a basically older version of the 778g. The 778g is better in every way compared to the many years older 765g and my phone does not feel sluggish in any way for my use cases: messaging, phone calls, video calls, media consumption, but no gaming. For me the 778g would be the perfect chip (like the 765g was): a perfect compromise between battery life, capabilities and price.
- Comment on Thanks to OpenAI, it's never been clearer that Sundar Pichai is Google's Steve Ballmer 3 months ago:
I also have the impression that google jumped on the feature treadmill that microsoft is on. Working with Google ads + analytics in 2016 was a pleasant experience, it was fairly simple and it worked. I could easily maintain it as a side project next to my main job, but a few years later and it had become a feature treadmill where all new features seemed to have 3 goals in common: waste my time by making me migrate settings to basically end up with the same end result, make the product more convoluted to use + milk more money per customer. Add to that, that facebook campaigns were both easier to run and resulted in more good leads for us and it doesn’t look good for Google.
- Comment on Diablo 4's new mount costs more than the actual game 3 months ago:
Here’s an complaint thread (not mine) with a screenshot: old.reddit.com/…/paradox_this_is_unacceptable_in_…
I personally get more annoyed by in game presentation of features and then getting hit with a “you need to pay extra to use this”, that’s basically an ad as well and it’s constantly there in the main gameplay loop. Bye bye immersion. It’s an annoyance every time that you are confronted with it, which in most paradox games is basically all the time. It’s like buying a car and then having to pay extra to unlock the seat heating that is already installed.
I could probably work around it by not auto updating paradox games and installing mods to remove some of the ads, but for 1 campaign every 2 years that’s just not worth the hassle for me. So I simply don’t play paradox games anymore.
- Comment on Diablo 4's new mount costs more than the actual game 3 months ago:
Paradox DLC policy is why I don’t play Paradox games anymore.
If I were to only play 1 game ever, then the DLC system might be ok, it’s basically a subscription system. But since I’d only play a campaign every other year or so, I’m not going to fork out that much money for 1 campaign. And it’s way too annoying to play some game with obvious parts missing + in game ads, so now Paradox gets no more money from me.
- Comment on France uncovers a vast Russian disinformation campaign in Europe 3 months ago:
To add: Twitter under Musk also complies with all government censorship requests since Musk took over. News on Twitter has been hugely influential in the past in protests in authoritarian states, but that’s clearly a thing of the past now.
Full compliance with government censorship was 83% in may last year, up from the 50% it was before Musk.
And partial + full compliance was at 98.8%, up from 92% before Musk. And the remaining 1.2% were not denied, just status unknown, so it’s basically 100%.
aljazeera.com/…/twitter-fulfilling-more-governmen…
I wonder what the current numbers are and how the full/partial takedowns are geographically distributed. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if partial compliance was limited to some western countries and it’s full compliance everywhere else.
Elon Musk, the self declared “free speech absolutist”, what a shithead.
- Comment on HP raising Instant Ink subscription pricing significantly 5 months ago:
While I do agree that HP is a very scummy + awful company, their pricing system is not worse than that of many other companies. Many many companies use an inflated listed price system in combination with very large discounts, often fixed discounts per customer.
There’s several benefits to this. One of the biggest is that it allows their vendors to give nice “discounts” to entice ignorant customers. Ignorant people are more likely to buy a $2000 computer with 50% discount than a $1000 with 0% discount. And occasionally someone will come along and be scammed out of paying full listed price.
Inflating the list price is just very common and 50% is not even one of the worst offenders, just look at American health insurance prices for a much more egregious example. Construction building suppliers also systematically use it and “discounts” of 40 to 70% are common.
- Comment on What do mean things so small we can't see them with the human eye? Are you crazy? 5 months ago:
If Semmelweis’ s theories were correct, it would have meant that many deaths of their patients would have been easily avoidable. So those other doctors could either ridicule the theory and continue living + practicing in ignorance, or accept the theory and also accept that they had (unknowingly) caused the deaths of many of their patients.
I’m not surprised that they chose the route of ridicule. I’m also not surprised that 20 or 30 years later, when the assistants of the old doctors had become the new generation of doctors, that the theory was then more easily accepted.
- Comment on Senators Introduce ‘Fans First’ Bill Intended to Reform Live-Event Ticketing System 6 months ago:
Little issues should not be ignored because there exists a big other issue. There will always be a bigger issue, so with that reasoning, the right time to do something about the little issue, would be never.
Working on smaller issues also doesn’t stop anyone from working on the bigger issues, processes like this can happen in parallel.
- Comment on They are all true but the 3rd one is pretty serious... 6 months ago:
Until you really really need to go hard, then it’s clothes off again.
A few years back I had something clogging up my intestines (no clue what) on the night that I was going to take a 3 hour flight to a wedding, so no lying down and way too much sitting in a cramped position for a too long time. I never felt more constipated as after I arrived and could finally stretch again.
So about 2 hours later when I could feel that is was nearly time, I evacuated to the furthest possible bathroom (I didn’t want to be a party pooper), lost all clothing except my socks and spend 30 minutes in agony, explosively shitting away while covered in sweat and bracing myself against the walls.
All of which to say, that you might think that you have left your shirtless days behind, but when shit really hits the fan, then you won’t be able to stop yourself from going back to old habits.
- Comment on Job losses likely at VW as the people’s car brand becomes uncompetitive 6 months ago:
I had never heard of Renault Duster before (nor seen one), so I looked it up. The Renault Duster is apparently a Dacia Duster with mostly cosmetic changes, for sale outside the eu, typically released later than the Dacia Duster is released in the eu. So it’s the same car, but different brand badges + cosmetics depending on the country were it’s sold. They are so similar, that I’d just call it the same car, not a copy.
- Comment on Job losses likely at VW as the people’s car brand becomes uncompetitive 6 months ago:
Dacia sales keep increasing every year. This does show there is an increasing demand for simple cars.
- Comment on Microsoft won’t let you close OneDrive on Windows until you explain yourself 7 months ago:
It is not the settings of your enterprise, the file savings mess is 100% on Microsoft. Imo learning to work with it is pointless, since it will be entirely changed sometime in the future again when Microsoft again tries to trick more people into using these programs in order to boost their quarterly statistics.
- Comment on Quack? 7 months ago:
Can you take another picture with a banana for scale?
- Comment on Some Walmart employees say customers are getting hostile at self-checkout — and they blame anti-theft tech 8 months ago:
I’m surprised it locked up like that. About 15 years ago I was a frequent customer in a store that had these and I never encountered any problem with it, nor did I hear of anyone else encountering a malfunction while using them.
That store implemented those locks because they were the closest supermarket to a college campus. Some students were taking the carts back to their dorms and chaining them up to a tree with bicycle chains. They would also use those carts to go shopping in a nearby supermarket of another store chain.
Different continent though, so it’s probably not entirely the same technology. People like reinventing the wheel.