I’m guessing Linus’s investment is safe then :)

As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:

• Chrome and Edge are owned by big companies and report god-knows-what back to their motherships whilst constantly pushing their own services
• Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
• Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
• Opera is full of random features and promotional bumpf that I don’t care about and have to turn off
• Vivaldi is a complicated beast that takes a bunch of work to set up, it also includes a mail client, calendar and feed reader in the browser which I don’t need.
• DuckDuckGo doesn’t have any extension support at all
• Arc is really fiddly and doesn’t always behave how I want it to (bookmarks behave like tabs for some reason)
• Brave pulls things like this and is also full of crypto/wallet type stuff, plus you can’t even change your home page.

I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!

There are a bunch of options each with their pros and cons, here’s what I’ve found so far:

Mlem

• Feels very Apollo like with things like slide to upvote and reply
• Doesn’t seem to be able to handle inline images and media (so you sometimes miss post information)
• Switching to new communities is not intuitive (you have to click the community name and type with the “Subscribed” toggle pane open)
• No guides on how Markdown works
• No message inbox

Memmy

• Has an inbox (not something I’ve seen from the others)
• Has Apollo like slide interactions
• Easy to find and switch communities
• Text is a little too small
• Found a couple of visual bugs (obviously this is all very beta!)

Liftoff

• Seems to show all the post information you could want (community it was posted too, which community that user is part of, etc)
• Feels a little bit like the official reddit app
• No Apollo like slide interactions
• Some interesting choices when trying to find communities (showing the full sidebar)
• Colours are a little constrasty
• A couple of UI bugs
• I don’t love the rounded corners on everything out of the box

Thunder

• Pretty polished
• Slide interactions are great
• Nice Markdown editor
• Not found any graphical bugs
• Some UI elements (subbing / unsubbing from a community) aren’t always clear
• Written in flutter so may not give a true “native” experience

Personally I think I’m gonna stick with Thunder for a bit, but I’m swapping daily at this point.

Given that any development on these really only kicked into gear in the last few weeks everything these devs are doing is incredible, they’ve all come a long way in such a short time!

It depends on which bit you’re talking about.

ChatGPT and SEO optimisation ruined the quality of results so sites who have no right to be near the top spot for particular terms get there by cramming as many pages full of tangentially related rubbish as they can.

The SERPs (search engine result pages, where you see the list of links) have been taken over by Google guessing at what you might be looking for, local results, shopping results, instant answers (which is usually aren’t relevant) and of course lots and lots of ads, leaving little to no room for the actual links you want.

If you are sick of it I would suggest trying DuckDuckGo, the results are a whole lot nicer :)

I’m nearly 40, been playing since the old Commodore 64 days.

I’ve always loved games, but with a wife and kids I don’t have anywhere near as much time as I used to with them, which means I think quite a lot about what I want to play in the 6 hours or so a week that I can actually do it.

I feel like I’m in a minority in that I still love much of the AAA stuff - Cyberpunk and Baldur’s Gate 3 is my jam right now, I might get Spider-Man 2 when it drops in price a bit and I have more time.

I love indie games too but I don’t always have as much time as I want to invest in them, I did get through Bombrush Cyberfunk recently and it scratched a Jet Set Radio itch that I had long forgotten about.

So yea, I still love them but it’s partly because it’s just always been my hobby.

Spoon my wife until she gets too hot and taps my leg so I roll over whilst listening to some trashy young adult fantasy audiobook.

Sounds like a good use for the Bee Movie script

I wish I could wipe my memory of Severance and watch it again for the first time again.

Such an incredible show.

As a Brit this seems like such a ridiculous attitude to have.

When you go out for food you are paying for:

• Quality ingredients
• The knowledge and skill of someone to take those ingredients and make a nice meal out of them

If you’re dining in you also get:

• A nice place to sit with good lighting and a nice ambiance
• Someone to bring your food
• Someone to clean away your dirty dishes

If you are getting delivery you instead pay for someone to bring it to you.

The food itself is like 40% of what you’re paying for, the rest is just convenience and atmosphere.

Quick PSA: they don’t currently block VPNs, so you can sign up for an account in a cheap country (I picked Nigeria) and use a foreign currency debit card (I use Revolut) to get Premium for like £1.50 a month for my entire family.

If they close that loophole then I think I’ll be done with it, the ads make it basically unusable these days.

I went through a period of de-googling a couple of years ago. Swapping browser, mobile os, search engine, storage, maps, music, video purchases, voice assistant and even email service was relatively simple, there are alternatives out there which do the job just as well if not better than what Google offer.

The only exception is YouTube, yea there are individual sites that occasionally offer some of the videos I want (often with a subscription attached), there are some federated systems like NewPipe which have some videos but there is no one offering remotely the quantity or quality of what you can get on YouTube for free.

As the article states, it’s basically a monopoly at this point without a viable alternative.

There really is no secret ulterior motive in this case.

Sort of. Smaller images mean it’s less work for Google to crawl and index them, if every image is 40% smaller then that’s potentially saving them millions a year in storage and bandwidth costs.

So, yea, it’s better for the web but it also massively benefits them.

I’ve seen a few video games and movies that I’ve gone on to look into from YouTube ads.

90% of them are total annoying bollocks though.

The best time to leave Twitter was when Elon took over, the second best time is right now.

I think would be a step too far for most

I wish this was the case with Brexit…

So there are still some 3rd party reddit apps that seem to work, Orion and Reno on iOS, probably others on Android, neither are as good as Apollo (RIP) but they’re not terrible.

Once they stop working, I’m done. The shitty ads alone are enough for me to dump that trash fire.

98 was incredible, besides all the ones OP mentioned they missed:

• Metal Gear Solid
• Sonic Adventure
• Resident Evil 2
• Sonic Adventure
• Grim Fandango
• Caesar III
• Unreal

Surely one of the best years, only possibly beaten by 2004:

• Half Life 2
• MGS3
• GTA: San Andreas
• Ninja Gaiden
• Halo 2
• World of Warcraft
• Doom 3
• Killzone
• Fable
• Burnout 3: Takedown
• Lumines
• Far Cry

So many amazing games!

That was also mine, didn’t really have a clue about what it was going in (other than it had Nick Cage in) and enjoyed it pretty much all the way through, great movie!

I think I got my .fun for about £2 from names.co.uk usually price for a .com is £30.

I’ve found most weird TLDs are cheaper than classic ones, but there are some exceptions (.app and .io comes to mind)

Turns out quality OC is actually pretty hard to make, plus the numbers of lemmings is still pretty low, even after all the Reddit shit went down.

If you want to move them elsewhere(or even just get a csv export of them) there are apps for that.

https://freeyourmusic.com will let you pay a one time fee to do it to as many services as you want, it’s a bit slow but it’ll get there eventually.

This was it for us, kids do not give a fuck about protocol and formalities

Foundation on Apple TV+, beautiful, complicated, epic sci-fi. I’m rewatching the first season whilst the second is getting released week by week.

I deleted my 13 year old 50K karma account today.

Kinda sad but there is no way I could go back after how they’ve been treating not only 3rd party app users and developers but more recently the unpaid mods who kept the site great.

WhatsApp for family Discord for friends Slack for work iMessage / SMS for everyone else

Needed office for my Mac, internet was terrible and I couldn’t find it legitimately to download anywhere (these were the days before Office 365)

Took a shot at an eBay listing, got sent a burned DVD with an OEM product key written on it sharpie

It worked, but I wasn’t particularly happy

They’re all in test flight, an online search will usually throw up their GitHub page with either a link to their lemmy communities and the TestFlight sign up page.

Honestly Apple TV+ is a pretty good service; Silo, Severance, Physical, Shrinking, Mythic Quest, For All Mankind and Invasion are all worth a watch, and that’s just the stuff I’ve seen.

I would recommend at least taking a trial for a month, there is less stuff but it’s a lot higher quality than much of the junk on Netflix.

the more traditional style of forums are still around too.

They’re very rare these days though. It’s a whole lot easier to keep all your interests in one place rather than heading off to one forum for gaming chat and another for programming chat and another for gardening chat.

Keeping it all in a single feed means your interest can be piqued at random times and you’ll be more likely to interact.

/r/webdev and /r/formulae are the main ones I miss.

YSK that YouTube Premium can be bought over a VPN for a whole lot less than the regular retail price, it’s a bit fiddly to set up but I’ve got a Nigerian based family account that costs me £1.76 a month.

Oh yea, you could do 1080p or even 800p like a Steam Deck in handheld mode and I think that that would be fine, on a TV it should be > 1080p tho

Yea, I really liked Edge when it was first launched, clean fast and simple. These days there is so much shoe-horning of Microsoft integrations it just feels like they’re desperately trying to steal all of your personal information

Arc could be amazing but there are some features which just don’t work as I would expect.

I can’t be the only one thinking finally…

The Switch was reasonably powered at launch but now feels positively antiquated compared to the Steam Deck and the like, there is no way I would buy any third party games on it right now when I’ve got a PS5 sitting right next to it.

All I need is a good spec bump to get games running at 1440p / 60fps in docked mode to make me happy!

I have friends who are big time LOTR fans who absolutely hate it and didn’t get past the first couple of episodes.

Me - who has no context around the whole thing - found it kinda entertaining :/

Both of these.

American Gods really pissed me off though if they had stuck to the books it could have been an amazing series with great characters and weird but fun storylines in a unique setting. But they added too much stuff and there was a total mess with the show runners leaving so it all sort of fell apart before one of the best plot lines of the whole story.

I kinda want to rewatch it again someday though…

Obvious answer is obvious

Fight Club

It is!

I picked it up at launch and it’s improved quite a lot over the last few years, better combat and skill trees, fewer bugs, better cops, the world is beautiful and the quest design and performance animation makes Starfield feel pretty antiquated.

It’s still not perfect but I’m on my second play through and I’m still having a good time, I’m very excited to see the new stuff in Phantom Liberty too.

Apple Maps and Fastmail.

Fastmail is paid but the 1Password and disposable email address system makes it worth it for me.

This is the thing that got me.

I never used to mind ads that much, yea they were there but the sites had to earn money somehow and advertising was a fair way for them to do it. I’m not going to pay a subscription for every site that I want to visit.

Then one time I was looking at jeans on GAP and was bombarded for the next 3 weeks with ads for them on basically every damn site I visited.

I don’t hate ads that don’t track me about and are obnoxious in their presence, but that just doesn’t exist anymore.