Welcome to Incremental Social! Learn more about this project here!
Check out lemmyverse to find more communities to join from here!

RunawayFixer

@RunawayFixer@lemmy.world

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

RunawayFixer ,

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.

RunawayFixer ,

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.

Google Search is getting even worse for independent sites (www.theverge.com)

In February, HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro called out publishers like BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone as some of the culprits that publish content about air purifiers despite a lack of expertise — but Google rewards these sites with high rankings all the same. The result is a search results page filled with SEO-first...

RunawayFixer ,

Just gave it a quick test drive it and it's pretty promising, thanks for the tip.

RunawayFixer ,

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 :)

RunawayFixer ,

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.

RunawayFixer ,

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.

Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone (www.theverge.com)

Microsoft is starting to enable ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11 for all users. After testing these briefly with Windows Insiders earlier this month, Microsoft has started to distribute update KB5036980 to Windows 11 users this week, which includes “recommendations” for apps from the Microsoft Store in the Start menu....

RunawayFixer ,

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.

RunawayFixer ,

Well, this finally explains how bonobos came to be. These 2 taught conflict resolution through the power of love to the wrong ancestors.

RunawayFixer ,

Chimps also have sex for fun, I don't know about frequency. What sets bonobos apart from chimps and humans is that they use sex for conflict resolution. If humans or chimps have a territorial dispute, then it's going to lead to a violent war. If bonobos have a territorial dispute, then they usually sex it out (somehow, I don't know how they decide who comes out on top, if someone has to come out on top that is, maybe post nut clarity is enough to convince everyone that it's not worth the fuzz).

I only know one instance in human history where (maybe) something similar happened: Richard Lionheart and Philip of France.

RunawayFixer ,

There's a few android launchers that emulate the metro ui. I use the Square Home one and I have no complaints.

RunawayFixer ,

Looks pretty clean, and with a proper search in the app drawer. If I wasn't so lazy and set in my ways, I'd switch :)

Sorry about making a repeat post earlier, I hadn't seen the other posts that suggested using launchers. I think my sync might be a bit slow with syncing posts.

RunawayFixer ,

Calling it incognito has really mislead a lot of people apparently, guest mode is the best alternative name that I've seen so far. I occasionally use incognito to log into personal services on other people's devices, which kinda makes me a temporary guest on that device. Guest mode doesn't feel 100% right as a name either though.

RunawayFixer ,

Pretty much this. If you buy decent stuff and take care of it, then there's now less of an expiration date than ever before in my experience.

Computers 20+ years ago were really old after 5 years, but nowadays you can put an SSD into a PC from 10 years ago and it will be more than good enough for most people's usage. And if it doesn't have enough memory for the current windows 10 bloat, then Linux is an option, but imo it's better to just add extra ram so that the user can just stay with a familiar os.

Likewise tablets and smartphones, buy decent specs, don't use cheap chargers and don't drop them too often and they just seem too last. And if they do slow down, then a factory reset is easy+fast and can bring them to life again. In my family an almost 10y old Shield K1 still works smoothly for daily online media consumption. A cheap Samsung and Microsoft surface from the same era are now giving a horrible experience though, but those 2 were always shit in comparison to the shield.

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. (www.theverge.com)

Firefox spokesperson Christopher Hilton tells The Verge that the browser has seen a more than 50 percent jump in users in Germany and a nearly 30 percent increase in France....

RunawayFixer , (edited )

It's a recent eu (or eea) thing: https://www.android.com/choicescreen/dma/

Edit: that article seems to suggest that it's only just now a thing, but it has been here a few years already, from 2019: https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/presenting-search-app-and-browser-options-android-users-europe/:

RunawayFixer ,

No clue. Since google only wants to give this choice to users from the eea, there is going to have to be some country verification done. The 2019 blog post spoke about presenting the choice to users after an update.

Maybe the change since March 2024 is that that choice will be given during initial setup instead of later. But that change will likely take some more time to be implemented into updates from device manufacturers, I don't know how fast android updates follow these days.

RunawayFixer ,

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.

RunawayFixer ,

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.

RunawayFixer ,

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.

RunawayFixer ,

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).

RunawayFixer ,

It's a definite no from me. The color scheme and that floor, just no. The stove sticking out, also a definite no.

All the cupboards also seem abnormally shallow to me, as if large plates would not be able to fit in the hanging cupboards. But maybe my perspective is confused because of a larger stove than I'm used to.

For me, that entire kitchen would have to be replaced after buying. We don't know what corners this house flipper cut though, I would not trust this place to be done well.

RunawayFixer ,

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%.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfilling-more-government-censorship-requests-under-musk

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.

RunawayFixer ,

I thought that you were on to something and did a quick google search: the variation is apparently only 0.5%. And a variation that big is only found when comparing a measurement on the poles (heavier) vs the equator (lighter) and I think it unlikely that this pasta was made on Antarctica. So nope, it's not the reason, they really do owe the op 2 grams of pasta.

RunawayFixer ,

This has got to be one of the most stupid memes ever.

The percentage of Soviet citizens that were put into prisons/gulag camps/colonies will have far exceeded the percentage of us citizens currently incarcerated in the usa, and in far more inhumane circumstances.

Unless the op is trying to deflect from the problems of the USA penal system by drawing attention to a far worse system, I don't get the point of this meme.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • incremental_games
  • meta
  • All magazines
    •