I heccin love this!

Is this the apple protogen? lol

It's honestly pretty hard for me to find media I can swallow because of having an anxiety trigger that is so common.

Most media has depictions of death or loss in it, and I've come across first person descriptions that were so immersive that my heart was actually pounding and I had to take a few days to stop feeling down, and it's not something the authors usually mention explicitly. So in the end I don't really watch or read anything serious these days.

Hmm I think my main concern would be lack of kernel/firmware updates, running something like postmarketOS could partly solve that and still be nearly as easy to set up (just unlock and flash a prebuilt image)

But firmware is still almost entirely dependent on the vendor, since it's all signed and unpatchable.

Next issue would be lack of connectivity on a lot of phones, which have gone backwards and include USB 2.0 now. WiFi is an option, but less stable, I personally decided to just go 100Mbps and suffer.

As for the battery, it would help a lot if phones were designed to boot without one and they were removable, it all worked well for about half a year until I found out I had a spicy pillow and had to replace it with direct power to the board, which made the whole setup much less elegant and required soldering.

It all comes down to how devices are designed in the end. If someone took the time to make a computer instead of just a phone, and included features that make it useful past its initial life that aren't that popular (display output, microsd, headphone jack), mainlined all the drivers and maintained firmware, that would be a different story.

But that's not a very profitable model, because it's all about reducing waste and thus selling less. A lot needs to change.

Yeah, it's probably worth it to slightly push back against these people irl, because there is a chance that's the signal they need to change, but online they can just copy your responses around and use them to further their crap. They probably love getting attention inside furry spaces like this one.

Best option is to ignore them, or if you must interact, troll around so it's at least fun for you instead of being exhausting.

Not sure myself, I'm trying to get into some IT jobs (not necessarily programming) that aren't anywhere near social media and are more focused on internet infrastructure, but getting any job is hard when you're starting out and I would like to avoid the evil ones at all cost.

But just as there is no ethical consumption in capitalism, there's no consensual work, so the values of wherever you end up working won't align with yourself or the other workers fully, it's just a question of degree.

Assuming you want to follow from Mastodon, you'd have to replace ! with an @ or just paste the link. Though I wouldn't recommend it as you'll get the replies to every post boosted onto your timeline :/

I feel like that's where online payment systems really let us down. If there was an easy universal way to pay a few cents to view content and it wasn't a privacy and fee nightmare, I'm sure people would have no problem doing that. Digicash systems come to mind, I hope they could make a comeback one day.

But I also fear a lot of the damage could've been done already, kids who grow up with the internet now will probably only remember big tech platforms and may not be very eager to try out something more complicated.

Not really (I wasn't using Google directly anyway), I think it fills a slightly different niche than search engines.

It's good as a fuzzy search for the sum of public knowledge, since it can understand quite complex queries and point you in the right direction, then you can go to regular search engines to find more specific stuff.

Bing was fun to exploit, but I don't really see why it's useful, it tends to always look up information which means it provides less of its own knowledge, I can do the searches myself better than an LM. Maybe it can provide more concise answers than all the SEO crap everywhere, but that can be avoided by searching on specific websites like reddit.