I'm a fan of the BBC, they make a lot of terrific programmes and the breadth of the audience their radio stations cater to is pretty phenomenal.

They also have a history of experimenting with technology so it's not a total surprise they've taken this step. Since most people on Mastodon are either sharing British news sources from the BBC or The Guardian anyway it will be interesting to see how they fare...

Definitely as a millennial I'm of the last generation that will remember arranging to meet up somewhere in advance and sticking to that plan (or rearranging over landline with more than a day's notice...)

But something I've noticed when I ask people in my team what their dream jobs are the younger people tend to say 'run their own businesses', 'work for themselves' etc. Whereas in our generation (in my circles anyway) that definitely wasn't so prominent. Maybe a side effect of seeing influencers making it big?

I mean this isn't miles away from what the writer's strike is about. Certainly I think the technology is great but after the last round of tech companies turning out to be fuckwits (Facebook, Google etc) it's only natural that people are going to want to make sure this stuff is properly regulated and run fairly (not at the expense of human creatives).

Guilty verdict not a surprise after reading about the case earlier this year. Having a nurse on the wards supposedly looking after the most vulnerable babies in hospital and instead killing them is every parents nightmare.

That's a very black and white way of putting it. As long as you're an adult who can tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and you're not spending hours obsessed with it I don't think it's unhealthy. The way you phrase 'avoid it completely' makes it sound like you're going out of your way to avoid it already.

(I think the problems are coming through with the generation being 'brought up on porn', and thinking real sex is like it is in the videos online but that's a different story really.)

I mean the article is specifically about Google search. Which might have gone downhill since whenever it first came out with the introduction of ads (sorry, 'Sponsored Results') but I'm not seeing significantly better competition for delivering search results. Everyone is still just aping the brand leader.

DuckDuckGo is obviously better for privacy for example but it doesn't seem to have any ambition except to deliver the same results as Google but without the ads and tracking which is ok but not a big enough draw except for people already concerned about privacy. Bing gets essentially the same results but if anything seems more spammy than Google with pop ups about making it or edge your default search engine or browser. It feels like other search engines just take Google search as something to copy and put their spin on it though.

I'd say search is one of the things Google is still getting right enough to earn its place as the leader. Some things it does well, some things it has badly declined on (someone above mentioned Google assistant hardly understanding anything anymore, when it used to be the best in this area too), but generally you can replace most Google things with programmes doing things their own way. Search engines just feel a bit like reskins to me

Admittedly I've blocked the meme communities in my feed - but that's not what I wanted from Reddit or I want from here.

I'm guessing the 2 uses you already know are 'joke' and 'to retch/nearly vomit'?

Another meaning of 'gag' is to physically tie something around their mouth to stop them from speaking (like in films when people get material or tape in their mouths to muffle their cries for help in a kidnap scene? That material would be the 'gag')

Obviously in this instance it's not a literal gag, although I'm sure there's plenty of people who wish it could be. A 'gagging order' is a metaphor for not being able to speak about things

I use a VPN which has an excellent ad & bs blocker. But occasionally some sites need me to turn it off to pay for things or whatever and I forget to turn it back on and end up browsing the internet in its normal state.

And wow... welcome to commerce central. It's not that all the ads are obnoxious though some are, but the quantity of them is out of control on some websites.

To be fair, I've found it's a good rule of thumb that the quality of a website is usually proportionate to the less amount of ads they have.

I also reviewed mobile games for a while and had to play without a VPN to get the same experience most players would get - game ads are the worst. Unrepresentative of the games they're trying to sell, but also often sexist (veering towards misogynistic), obnoxious and with false endings.

I think most people knew it was a protest and nothing more - I doubt a lot of people thought, hey Reddit is totally going to back down.

It was a mass expression of user dissatisfaction which escalated from an initial 2 day blackout into something so much more, and so I'm pretty impressed with what it did, which was stirred up shit for the management and made the CEO say some ridiculous things in the press to boot.

What I am a little disappointed in is that not as many mods walked. I'm not a mod, but I was fed the line 'it's going to be impossible to mod my sub without the 3rd party apps'. Given the amount of subs that seem to have been ticking over just nicely since the API switch though I feel like I was fed some bs in that department

No sorry, this is an extremely trivial thing to send death threats over. The PR for this achieves the impossible and gains sympathy for Unity

I mean I don't think any of the people protesting actually thought 'yes, Reddit is absolutely going to back down as a result of the protests no question!'

What I think is pretty cool is that what was initially only going to be a two day black out that (from memory) 6000 subs signed up for turned into something much, much bigger. And got the CEO to say some pretty stupid things in black and white to the press to boot. It's done much more than it set out to do.

'Fuck Spez' was a stupid meme though. Should have been 'Fire Huffman' or something that meant something outside of Reddit users.

I tried both, lurked a while and Kbin just seemed a bit more user friendly for me. Nothing deeper for me, just a matter of taste really.

For me I'd probably assume it was video games of some sort if someone said they were 'really into games'. That's speaking as someone who knows a lot of hardcore boardgame players.

That said context is everything...

From a British perspective I know there was always a huge political obsession with maintaining the 'Special Relationship' with the US up until Trump came in and Brexit happened basically simultaneously making us more irrelevant.

It's still there in a half hearted transactional way when it comes to intelligence sharing, day to day stuff etc. But in terms of the PM sucking up to the President photo opportunities to get some media attention - that aspect seems to have died pretty quickly.

It strikes me there are a lot of similarities with our politics right now though - lack of faith from the voters, rampant cronyism, lawbreaking heads of state FFS, culture war obsessions dominating the discourse when the average person is more worried about affording their rent/mortgage at the end of the month. I'd say our government is dysfunctional on the same level but the difference is we stopped being a superpower way back when.

I'm rambling way off topic, sorry. Reading that just reminded me of when our politicians used to be all over the American ones as being the glamorous ones to suck up to (whether the public agreed or not) but things have definitely changed.

Paywall free link https://archive.is/2023.07.11-140451/https://www.wired.com/story/rising-interest-rates-might-herald-the-end-of-the-open-internet/

I'm on Kbin and subscribe to some Beehaw communities and enjoy interacting with them (in a good way I hope!). Generally for the fedi to work I think people need to forget about where people are posting from and deal with comments and users as they stand on a case by case basis

I think you kind of say this yourself:

For the most part I feel like this community lives up to that; users of this instance are generally thoughtful with their responses.

Basically things are generally working except for a few people who have just started using Fedi instances. Maybe discuss with them, report them or whatever but defederation when things are more or less working out seems a bit OTT to me

I remember having to change things I got from... places... from epub to mobi using calibre for my old school kindle to recognise it years ago. I don't even have that device anymore.

Glad they're accepting what appears to be the standard format tbh.

This is true in the UK as well - the right are still clinging to it like a comfort blanket while they're dying in the polls but it's clear that voters are more concerned (and have always been more concerned) with the cost of living crisis, housing and health.

It's the economy stupid...

It depends, but I find it's at it's worst when the kiss is the 'reward' for the hero/heroine for being so heroic. Or just generally when it's used as a lazy piece of short hand storytelling to show 'yeah these guys love each other or something, whatever'.

On the other hand it can be genuinely cathartic or romantic.

I switched to vaping because I'd just met my now wife and she hated the smell of smoke and all the associated stuff that goes with it, partly because she'd just come out of a bad relationship with a chain smoker but also because it's just not nice for non smokers anyway.

That was about 10 years ago and I still vape. I'm will aware that I've just swapped one addiction for another but I don't consider myself a smoker - haven't touched a cigarette since, and genuinely never wanted to for a very long time now. My lungs still feel a lot better, I can run and do excercise without feeling like my lungs are imploding.

A lot of the studies done on vaping it should be noted use old fashioned kit and unrealistic use case scenarios (such testing until a coil gives out - a coil would usually last someone at least a week) -but even taking that into account I'll take my chances with vaping. I tried all the other methods of giving up smoking and none of them worked for me so this is the closest.

As I side note, I am against disposable vapes and think the law should crack down on sales to underage people. A solution would be to only sell in established vape shops and require ID with every sale. I'm not naturally hard-line about this sort of thing but the school vaping thing is well out of control and is need of sorting out

Someone I'm in a Discord group with wanted an invite to bluesky because it was more familiar to him than Mastodon.

He pretty much wanted a like-for-like replacement for Twitter, though to his credit he had already tried Mastodon before dismissing it out of hand.

It's not that he disliked it exactly, but he wasn't that interested by what he saw so didn't stick with it - to each their own

Devolver have done some terrific games going way back - I think the first time I played one of their games was the first Reigns for mobile and that was what, 2016?

Their name is a good indicator of quality so good for them thinking rationally about what they have to offer to players and not just taking the money

Really I wonder why we need 'karma' scores, or visible ones anyway. I understand why upvoting and downvoting posts is useful but having a user karma score just leads to all the karma farming, playing to the gallery to 'earn points' that could be harmful to normal conversation on Reddit.

When you start gamifying a system people start treating it like a game and that makes things weird on what should just be a normal discussion forum. In my opinion anyway

Anything using the terminal... I once tried to do something on Linux because a friend told me it was great. I gave it another go when it came up on my Chromebook and tried to teach myself. I just don't get it.

I'm not a programmer at all, so anything that involves typing commands is going to baffle me!

I just started using it for Android the last month or so when Chrome dropped the flag feature that let you toggle dark mode for websites with system dark mode.

I have a VPN with an adblocker so that aspect of Chrome never bothered me so much. Chrome felt like it worked slightly smoother but at the end of the day a browser is a browser and Firefox does the job. (Samsung's browser is actually surpringly good for those with a Samsung device looking for a Chrome alternative)

Firefox does seem more trustworthy overall, although I've learned by now that trusting tech companies is not a sensible thing to do.

This is crazy, I'm in the UK and we have to do it ourselves, I didn't even realise it was a thing that people packed your bags for you just buying your food. For me that feels like a service you should tip for.

God's sake. I mean... At least he's apologising? I could imagine some of our recent lot doubling down on this and refusing to give in to wokeness blah blah blah...

But yeah. I'm really trying hard to be charitable cos it's Christmas and everything. That's not really pleasant stuff to hear from the guy who is in charge of the Police (over 1,100 under investigation for sexual assault or domestic violence atm)

For me, Mini Metro. I can just zone out on it. I get that with Tetris and similar games (rymdkapsul is another, Civilization to an extent but not in the same way) - there's that thing of, 'this will end at some point, but before it ends just focus on the now' which puts the mind at ease. But Mini Metro has a more relaxing theme and art style for me than Tetris.

They should just give up and leave, bless them for trying and all but haven't they learned anything...

Don't get me wrong. There's some support communities on Reddit I still visit. I don't want to see them burn down in flames. But there's no help from the admins coming. You might as well ask your cat.

It's not really that surprising that the average user wants the most popular search engine instead of yahoo (of all things) baked in, whatever your views on Google.

There was actually someone similar in the news when I was growing up, Beverly Allit. I remember seeing stuff about that on the local news because it wasn't that far away from where we were. It's pretty terrifying, the idea that you can just be leaving your children in the hands of people like this

I don't see how it would 'fuck Reddit'. Do you mean it would draw more people to using Lemmy/Kbin? Or have I misunderstood? Because that's definitely not going to happen.

And if you want to see that stuff just go back to using Reddit.

That is indeed interesting. I would like to know more about the people they're giving huge amounts of money to who are political speakers. Does seem very odd

I left Twitter back in 2016 when I realised I wasn't using it anymore and it had come up in a you've been pwnd result. Figured I'd just delete the account instead of resetting the password and didn't miss it.

But I signed up to Mastodon today, because why not? I don't really see why it's being called hard to use. There's some nice apps as well, which is making me more excited for a Kbin app when I wasn't so bothered before...

Fair.

But I was just giving my perspective as an outsider who stumbled across this post because messing about with the terminal had the opposite affect on me as someone who appreciates the concept of Linux but doesn't really have the level of passion to learn programming for it.

what works for you works and the beauty of the fediverse is the choice to be able to choose the source and still see everything.

This is the main point for me really, everything else is just quibbling. Although collapsible comments on Kbin definitely need to happen!

It looks like a shady dealer in an orange hoodie.

It's the b-plot from what I recall, it's not the main focus of the episode.

It was written long before his TERF days and so it's not exactly hateful, just ignorant and it's comparable to a lot of other ways comedy treated trans characters from the era - The League Of Gentleman was much, much worse than the IT Crowd imo, and that was a recurring character in every episode.

It's rather the issue that while Matt Berry has distanced himself from the episode Linehan actually still defends it as pro-trans.

This will be related to the recent news that there are plans to pay contributors for posts. Will update with a link when I find it...