fuser

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I didn't notice that you were posting from Mastodon as I'm on Lemmy and your posts appear here just like any other Lemmy user - but the @fuser at the start of your messages is probably the tell, I think Mastodon defaults the username you're replying to, whereas Lemmy doesn't. It's great that we can use different applications without some corporate gatekeeper capturing everybody's personal info at the integration point to hawk to an advertising company.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Well, thanks again for the info - I'm trying it now and the results seem excellent, it took me to wikiwand, which I'd never used but it's a front end for wikipedia - it's quite nice. I've learned so much about alternative FOSS and great ad-free content by reading and posting here. I was never a great fan of reddit - liked to scroll but hardly ever posted there - I thought RPAN was the coolest thing they did - but Lemmy is great for conversation, despite the relatively small user base - I'm grateful that reddit's nonsense drove so many helpful people here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The best part is watching these idiots blow their fortunes thinking they are going to continue building on the old paradigm of monolithic platforms when the ground is gradually shifting towards diversification via decentralization and they are behind the curve now, not in front of it. This is not your dad's internet. Hopefully they continue splashing out huge amounts of cash in ill-fated efforts to prove they are still relevant. There's no fool like an old fool - and old, rich technically-out-of-touch fools who lack the self-awareness to stop imagining they are hip are particularly amusing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

everyone has their price. with unlimited funds he should be able to make something pretty slick for whatever the vision is - not that I would ever use it, of course. But don't imagine that software engineers won't compromise their politics if the money is good. Given the necessity of income, you can rationalize anything if you really need to.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (6 children)

https://andisearch.com looks like it might be a better option - thank you so much for posting. I'm mostly using duck-duck-go which is tolerable but by this point we should have come up with a more useful way to index relevant information. Google would rather we see ads than any relevant content, which wasn't the case when they first launched google in the late 1990s. Google was refreshing at the time because of its cleaner interface than yahoo and uncluttered results, amusingly enough - it's a far cry from what it once was.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Right - that's a good approach, however if you're looking for a quick answer to an immediate question by searching using a common search engine, the garbage SEO pages are the most irritating, even with adblocking.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (10 children)

Yes, it is a nightmare. The insane volume of ads and clickbait injected into web pages is killing the internet as an information source. Most of the searchable stuff is unusable. Which explains why ChatGPT was so enthusiastically embraced - it's really just synthesizing content into a readable form that doesn't require navigating around a jungle of animated gifs and flashing ads. That's also I think why Lemmy and Mastodon are so refreshing to use, and hopefully will stay that way - although money seems to find a way to ruin everything. Lemmy right now feels a lot like the internet used to be before the big money came along and ruined it with advertising and platform lock-ins.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Speaking to CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria on Friday, President Biden said he needed to send cluster bombs because Ukraine and the US are running out of ammunition. “This is a war relating to munitions. And they’re running out of that ammunition, and we’re low on it,” he said.


the FY2023 presidential budget request was $842 billion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States

not enough for ammo, apparently.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's a good analogy - in the days before email, all you had was a username @ your BBS (Bulletin Board Server). You dialed into your local BBS's landlines with a modem - they usually had 2-4 numbers available, so that gives you an idea of scale. The BBS systems were federated so user@bbs1 could see and respond to the same threads as user@bbs2. It was nice - it worked pretty much like the fediverse actually - and the tone was similar.

The messaging systems on the BBS communities evolved into email and Usenet before big money came along and fucked everything up.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Her husband has a net worth of USD 10M. Why do rich people never seem to know when it's time to shut up?

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