So now Windows bloat is extending to the physical keyboard itself.

Looking at the Microsoft blog post they haven't said exactly how they want keyboard layouts to change. So on a full size keyboard this could be either new key entirely, or replace an existing (and arguably more useful) key.

With how aggressive Microsoft is becoming with ads, services, and data collection they could at least make Windows itself free.

But no, you still have to pay £100+ per license to have the pleasure of putting up with this crap.

Kids have been watching plenty of brain melting videos before AI came along too.

If you want kid’s brains to stay nice and firm don’t let them be raised by a tablet.

So a supposedly cutting edge $3500 device plus an additional $300 dongle gets a wired connection speed from the year 2000. USB 2 is 24 years old

Welcome to the future folks.

In the UK the BBC are running their own instance social.bbc on trial basis, and I think the trial was recently extended.

Hopefully other public bodies will follow suit.

“It was a bug” is the common excuse when an intentional feature backfires.

Loading screen ads seem like an obvious next step of enshittification. They are creeping back into video with ads breaks on streaming, only a matter of time before they are in games too.

One of the main issues is the lack of competition. There are now only 3 main browser engines, Blink, Gecko and WebKit. Blink (which poses Chrome and Edge) is by far the largest, and has a the enormous marketing might of Google (and Microsoft to a lesser extent) behind it. WebKit runs Safari, which only runs on Apple platforms and arguably only has the market share it does is because Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines to run on iPhones and iPads. Gecko, the engine of Firefox, continues to slide into irrelevance (which pains me to say as a long time Firefox user).

We are in real danger of the web being trapped in a browser monoculture again, like the dark dark times of Internet Explorer’s dominance. This led to a period of stagnation in web technology Microsoft at the time put little effort into developing IE. Allowing Blink/Chrome to do the same will likely be just as damaging, albeit in different ways - particularly for privacy on the web.

For the good of the web no one company should ever be in the position to dictate web standards, which is why we need a healthy and competitive marketplace of web browsers and browser engines. The problem is that web standards have now become so complex developing an indecent browser engine is now a monumental task. Opera gave up on Presto, once the poster child for browser innovation. Microsoft, a company with far more resources, gave up on Trident. Mozilla was developing a new generation browser engine called Servo, but gave up on the project also.

I’ve always been doubtful about these privacy “protection” services. Giving a bunch of personal data and money to a commercial entity making seemingly dubious claims it can compel other services to remove your data has never seemed like a great idea. Data is the new oil, it’s incredibly valuable, and there is too much incentive for companies like that to become just another data collector.

It’s all vertical video as well. YouTube pushes Shorts fairly aggressively on the desktop website, and it’s a crappy experience.

Well even if I wanted to go back to Reddit, I couldn't use it without a decent mobile app, and all of those no longer exist.

Communities don't spring up fully formed, they grow over time with many rises and falls in activity along the way. Lemmy is still young and we can all do our part to help it.

Well that’s a headline I didn’t expect to see this morning.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of AI generated images, it’s quite concerning something like this makes it into a scientific journal at all.

Platforms like Facebook have an incredible hold on some people. I remember a few years ago when the "Momo" hoax happened, an older coworker arrived at the office and started warning us about the danger of "Momo" they'd seen on Facebook. I'd already heard about the hoax (and was aware of the original creepyasta origins), and brought up a few news articles explaining it, including an official statement from the police. Everyone seemed satisfied by the truth, except for the Facebook addict. They just gave me a blank stare, and a few hours later I heard them telling another group of colleagues to beware of "Momo" getting to their children.

I have family members and longstanding family friends who have succumbed to this. Interestingly almost all of them were decrying the internet as something that couldn't be trusted before the age of social media.

So I’ve heard advancement at Google/Alphabet depends on launching new products, not improving existing ones. Which means a lot of continually reinventing the wheel, because crafting truly novel new platforms is actually quite hard.

eBay’s revenue in the last financial year was over $10 billion, I’m sure that $3 million fine will make sure they never terrorise innocents again.

SEO has been a plague in search engines for almost as long as they have existed. Unfortunately combatting it is an endless cat and mouse game, as there will always be some who will devise new ways to game the system. With how commercialised the web has become there’s enormous incentive to do so.

I’m also not convinced Google has much intention of really fixing it. They already have a monopoly on search, and as an advertising company are unlikely to want to upset the big media companies exploiting their search engine.

And how the fuck does the rotting fish bag get through security?

They aren’t directly connected to a social network and promoted with vast marketing resources however.

I remember playing with one of these about 10 years ago that looked like a car key fob, it recorded somewhat subpar footage in a weird format to a microSD card. A neat novelty but not very practical to use unless you really had a need to do covert surveillance of something, which most people don’t.

However if it’s made to be effortless to push watchable footage to social media, and people are heavily encouraged and incentivised to do so and it’s a different proposition.

Unfortunately it’s never-ending cat and mouse battle. The whole point of SEO is to game the search engines systems, so the spammers will now be adjusting their tactics.

I don’t think it’s just SEO that’s the problem with Google search either. They seem to put too much weight on e-commerce over information.

Yes, it shouldn't take a C-suite level decision to remove content praising Hitler and the Holocaust. The fact that it does suggests there is major disfunction in X/Twitter's approach to content moderation, which the article hints at but doesn't really explain.

Considering how much worse Windows seems to get with each update and new version, Microsoft will soon be developing methods of invisibly install Windows updates to force them through.

I look forward to a future where the battle between Microsoft and malware brings Windows computers to a standstill in an endless loop of invisibly installing and removing updates.

AI in science fiction has a meltdown and starts a nuclear war or enslaves the humane race.

"AI" in reality has a meltdown and just starts talking gibberish.

Like it or not, smartphones and the internet are now a part of everyday life. Digital literacy is now as important as traditional literacy. Pretending that this shift has not happened, because education systems cannot adapt to it, is absurd.

The problems that are claimed to be caused by smartphones in class seem to be more down to to a lack of discipline and engagement. I went to school before any kind of mobile phone was a thing. There were still plenty of potential ways for students to goof off, yet teachers by and large managed to keep us focused and behaving.

The development of LLMs is possibly becoming self defeating, because the training data is being filled not just with human garbage, but also AI garbage from previous, cruder LLMs.

We may well end up with a machine learning equivalent of Kessler syndrome, with our pool of available knowledge eventually becoming too full of junk to progress.

It’s not just about data and spying, it’s also about media and influence. The argument being made that it’s not a good idea to have a “hostile” nation effectively controlling one of the major/dominant social media platforms.

There is also the trade issue of reciprocity, China bans many if not most of the western platforms, while they have free rein to operate theirs in the west.

"Stop calling my website pro-Nazi" says man constantly saying pro-Nazi things on said website.

It's a PR blunder. "Our content moderation is so broken the CEO had directly intervene to remove a post praising the Holocaust" isn't a great message.

We are going to need much stronger image rights for individuals in the AI age.

There’s no way to stop the technology itself (although current development may plateau at some point), so there must be strong legal restrictions on abusing it.

Years ago a Microsoft breakup was also once on the table, but it never happened.

I wouldn’t get too excited that regulators will follow through with this for Google either.

Seems kinda sad. I doubt it’s a program many people use (or even know of) these days, but there is an odd charm to super simple rich text editors like WordPad and TextEdit in macOS.

I suppose AbiWord sorta fills that niche as a replacement.

Anyone remember Microsoft Office’s weird cousin, Works?

That last part, what a waste.

A local school near me replaced the computer suite with new machines and just left the old ones in a big cage outside to rust. Something about being “too expensive” to properly dispose or recycle.

Mozilla expanding into social media feels like it will be walking a very delicate line regarding privacy. Things like Pocket have already been contentious enough.

They are putting a lot of emphasis on recommendation feeds and helping content publishers "build audiences", and of course there will ultimately be some form of (so far unspoken) monetisation. Mozilla are only going get so far with that until they start wanting user data, data which will be so temptingly convenient when it's tied to Mozilla accounts.

Chrome has already demonstrated the negative consequences of web browsers and web platforms becoming too intertwined. Maybe I'm just too cynical, but even with the best of intentions I'm not sure Mozilla can avoid the same fate here.

I don’t think Mozilla running a Mastodon server is losing focus. The ethos of Mozilla and the Fediverse have a lot of overlap, and Mozilla should desire to have a foot in it.

An official Mastodon server is also a useful platform for marketing and outreach. In contrast an organisation claiming to be all about privacy and open source retreating from a social media platform that embodies those is not a good look.

Yes, this the setup for regulatory capture before regulation has even been conceived. The likes of OpenAI would like nothing more than to be legally declared the only stewards of this "dangerous" technology. The constant doom laden hype that people keep falling for is all part of the plan.

I think it’s becoming fair to label a lot of commercial AI “scams” at this point, considering the huge gulf between the hype and the end results.

Open source projects are different due to their lack of commercialisation.

Well that's what to expect from a web browser created by an advertising company.

Tim Cook is the perfect captain to keep the ship on a steady course and not rock the boat, but I'm not convinced he is an innovator. I sometimes wonder if Jobs selected Cook as his successor, because Jobs expected to overcome his health problems and return, and wanted Apple in safe pair of hands during his cancer battle.

That said, Apple only appears to be "failing" from the angle of the stock markets obsession with infinite growth. They are still an enormous company with high brand strength and large cash reserves.

Unfortunately this is nothing unusual or new for the UK, an authoritarian streak has long existed in both of the countries major political parties. The Conservatives had already passed the Investigatory Powers Act, AKA the "Snoopers Charter" which introduced a wide range of digital surveillance. The Tories have already had a crack at trying to introduce porn age verification laws. During the New Labour era the Labour Party tried to introduce a new ID scheme involving a sprawling government identity database with never-ending feature creep.

Many in Westminster are ignorant of the technological reality these bills collide with, and much of the UK public are (often wilfully) ignorant of the dangers they pose.

I hope Meta follows through with their threat to pull WhatsApp from the UK market in response the to Online "Safety" Bill. WhatsApp is very popular in the UK, and seeing it and many other online services withdraw from the UK could be the wake up call my country has long needed.

It’s that daft haircut, he’s adopted a different style recently and suddenly looked 10x more human.

No amount of barbers can disguise the blokes behaviour though.

High energy bills and misinformation about energy saving seems to be causing some odd behaviour here in the UK.

I have relatives who go round turning off every device and appliance at night, despite the negligible power draw they have in standby. Another will only charge their phone at night during cheaper the electricity rate - but runs the tumble dryer during the day.

I also often hear stories about people fearing electronic devices will catch fire if left on standby over night. Which may well be a risk for charging a dodgy Chinese e-bike but probably not for a home router.

Apple is pushing productivity as the main application for Vision Pro, to the point they don't even call it VR but spatial computing instead. I don't think gaming is really for a focus for them at the moment, instead they want to try and tap into other markets who aren't using VR currently.