Brewchin
@Brewchin@lemmy.world
- Comment on Waterfox 6.5.10: Bing terminates search syndication deal 4 days ago:
Thanks for checking and the update.
- Comment on Waterfox 6.5.10: Bing terminates search syndication deal 5 days ago:
Oh no… anyone know what this means for DuckDuckGo?
- Comment on Pornhub is Back in France. 1 week ago:
Le petit mort , ahem, comes in many forms…
- Comment on Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb to verify users 1 week ago:
What?! Think of the shareholder value! /s
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
My take on ads is this: I’ve been using the internet since 1989 - before search engines, advertising, SLIP/PPP/ADSL, etc.
When ads began to appear on websites in the late 90s, I was OK with it. A banner ad here, etc. Then they started to move. And flash. And make noise. And then popups, and pop-unders.
At that point I started to BLOCK THEM ALL. If your business model is a game of distraction from the site I’m visiting, then fuck you, your family, and anyone you’ve ever met.
Moving on to UI web-based stuff, the demise of excellent sites like AltaVista (with its superior search syntax) and the growth of Goooooooogle (with its astonishingly and intentionally shit search syntax), the progress and intention was obvious.
There was a brief period where Google, etc, provided what people wanted. But that time has passed. Now it’s all in on GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.
tl;dr: Once advertisers started to behave like gambling sites, they were yeeted to the hell in which they belong.
- Comment on Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and ‘A Better Tomorrow’: AI-Powered Kung Fu Film Plan Debuts in Shanghai 1 week ago:
Inevitable, really. And zero surprise it’s coming out of China.
- Comment on 16 Billion Apple, Facebook, Google And Other Passwords Leaked — Act Now 1 week ago:
Reads more like an advertorial. Low on detail, high on “passkeys are the future”, and plenty of typos.
- Comment on YouTube relaxes moderation rules to allow more controversial content. Videos are allowed if "freedom of expression value may outweigh harm risk" 2 weeks ago:
“Muh
freedumsprofit” outweighs life. The silent bit spoken aloud. Cool cool.As expected from this timeline and this garbage conglomerate.
- Comment on German tech media publisher Heise just launched their own PeerTube instance 3 weeks ago:
It begins. More of this from media and other organisations, please!
- Comment on Discord unveils Discord Orbs, a new in-app currency that users can earn by completing Quests, which reward participants who interact with ads 4 weeks ago:
If you’re after text, there are a number of options. If you’re after group voice, there are a number of options. You could mix and match both, but “where everyone else is” will also likely be a factor in that kind of decision.
If you want both together, then there’s probably just Element (Matrix + voice)? Not sure of other options that aren’t centralised, where you’re the product, or otherwise at obvious risk of enshittifying. (And Element has the smell of the latter to me, but that’s another topic).
I’ve prepared for Discord’s inevitable “final straw” moment by setting up a Matrix room and maintaining a self-hosted Mumble server in Docker for my gaming buddies. It’s worked when Discord has been down, so I know it works. Yet to convince them to test Element…
- Comment on Crunchyroll CEO Responds to Calls To Pay Japanese Anime Companies More Money for Overseas Distribution 4 weeks ago:
The situation definitely sucks.
What’s the saying about piracy? It’s not a morality problem - it’s a service (business model) problem.
“The easiest way to stop piracy… is to give those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” -Gabe Newell
Disagree with you on the BD issue, though. Much more capacity, higher quality video and audio, and drives are dirt cheap. I have a BDROM in an external enclosure, and it handles DVD and BD perfectly. 🤷♂️
- Comment on Crunchyroll CEO Responds to Calls To Pay Japanese Anime Companies More Money for Overseas Distribution 4 weeks ago:
I don’t disagree, but there person to whom I was replying said they were after legal copies. That means you’re going to pay for them, digital or physical. 🤷♂️
Imagine being a One Piece, Bleach or similar fan and wanting the full collection… 😬
- Comment on Crunchyroll CEO Responds to Calls To Pay Japanese Anime Companies More Money for Overseas Distribution 4 weeks ago:
Whilst I agree, there’s (currently) nothing stopping you from buying the DVDs? Many of the shows I’ve wanted own for repeat watching are released that way.
Though it’s probably a time-limited thing, given that physical media is getting rarer and everything is now all about rent-seeking, where you’ll own nothing, have nothing to hold, and be thankful to be able to pay monthly for it.
- Comment on Crunchyroll CEO Responds to Calls To Pay Japanese Anime Companies More Money for Overseas Distribution 4 weeks ago:
Interesting. This isn’t the “‘no’ with lots of words LOL” that I expected from a/their CEO, and does more to highlight the problems with Netflix’s model.
- Comment on Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails 4 weeks ago:
Classic “I’ve made a HUGE mistake” moment from yet another “thought leader”. 🙄
- Comment on Game media preservation, where? 5 weeks ago:
GOG does preservation. That and Archive.org are the ones I use.
- Comment on Digg founder Kevin Rose offers to buy Pocket from Mozilla 5 weeks ago:
That sounds more like Flipboard than Pocket?
But I’ve not used either in many years, and I’ve never been a fan of algorithmic discovery, so it’s possible Pocket went down that route, too.
- Comment on Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews. 5 weeks ago:
Pocket won’t be missed. Self-hosted alternatives like Wallabag are better and private, so switched to it many years ago. Integration (and enabled by default, requiring about:config to disable) ensured I’d never use it out of principle.
Fakespot (the website) was genuinely useful to help ID scams on Amzn Marketplace, though I never used the extension. But I think that enshittified in recent years, so (in the style of Stephen King’s Misery) it’s probably for the best.
Related, the Keepa extension is useful as a price rigging detector, but I expect that will “number must go up!” soon enough, too…
- Comment on A load of mastodon users think groups are just autoboost accounts. 1 month ago:
Like the @a.gup.pe ones? They are kind of autoboost bots, but they do have communities behind them and it’s annoying when people treat them like hashtags.
But I’d not use the term bots. They’re more like old-fashioned email reflectors: a message goes in, and it then gets sent to everyone on the list.
- Comment on Reminder if you're leaving Discord for this Revolt server ( Linux + Steam Deck devs / creators) 2 months ago:
Perhaps, but we’re now in an age where IPO announcements, CEO changes and even new features inevitably lead to enshittification. There is no harm in having a backup plan.
I’d even say that anyone who doesn’t have a plan B is an idiot, given recent history.
- Comment on Reminder if you're leaving Discord for this Revolt server ( Linux + Steam Deck devs / creators) 2 months ago:
Not currently a Revolt user, but this would be a requirement for me to consider switching, too.
It looks like its API supports webhooks, so should be relatively straightforward to enable it (or perhaps through a third party, like Zapier)?
- Comment on Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down 2 months ago:
Hard agree. Mindsets stuck in 2005 or before when cool and useful stuff was, just, free online. We were such summer children then.
Anyone still like that obviously shouldn’t be in charge of anything sharp or dangerous…
- Comment on Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down 2 months ago:
Anyone remember websites and RSS? Those were the days.
Why does everything have to get shovelled into someone’s walled garden…
(Speaking about updates and notifications here, not discussions.)
- Comment on Some heroes don't wear cape 2 months ago:
And then there’s Strike Witches…
- Comment on Black Mirror’s pessimism porn won’t lead us to a better future | Louis Anslow 2 months ago:
That’s very much what the Opinion section in the Guardian is all about: an all comers free-for-all written by anyone who cares to submit a piece. Generally unrelated their news journalism and general mission/ideology.
I see why they do it: opposing views and so on. But in the current society of headlines are everything, knee jerk reactions, polarisation and the idea of a middle ground being treason, etc, we get “Why are the Guardian saying x?!” 🤷♂️
- Comment on Plex is increasing Plex Pass prices and paywalling remote playback for personal media at $1.99/month or $19.99/year. 3 months ago:
The US$75 Lifetime price has traditionally been their Black Friday deal, regardless of the usual price.
Anyone’s guess if that deal will still be a thing, given their recent behaviour, though.
- Comment on Next week, Amazon is stripping away your ability to download your ebooks. 4 months ago:
Calibre (Kindle) and Libation (Audible) are essential backup tools.
Y’know, in case their servers are down…
- Comment on UK Encryption Order Threatens Global Privacy Rights. 4 months ago:
Every serious person in law enforcement, who doesn’t have an agenda, acknowledges that the old fashioned policing methods make all of this redundant.
It just takes longer (and so costs money), which is what this is about.
These people would destroy the security of the world’s protocols just to save a few quid. It’s deplorable.
- Comment on I am cold 4 months ago:
It’s not often I laugh aloud at a meme, and rarer that I do so loudly. Excellent. 😄
- Comment on What's up with lemmit.online? 4 months ago:
"I don’t like it…
- “…so it should be banned” (for everyone) is never the right approach.
- “…so I blocked it” (for me) is.
It’s a simple heuristic that works in almost every situation.
You don’t know what value something you don’t like provides to others.