VPN dependent.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Recently I used Google maps to search for the nearest DHL near me so I could return a package. DHL is not that popular near me and when I specifically typed for DHL, I would get only their competitors in the search results.

    There was a DHL service center near me and I had to scroll a bunch to find it. Oh, and apparently big box stores (or anyone) can pay Google to come up in the search on maps, even if unrelated.

    I don’t think they have skin the in shipping game but their algorithms are over optimized that they don’t even show what your searching for, but trying to infer why you’re searching for it. That or whoever pays them more. Certainly a search risk




  • People like having choice, it was never about saving space in phones.

    If you look at which company (apple) and the time of removal of headphone jack (around the time their wireless buds were announced), you’ll notice they removed choice so the consumer can only buy more expensive wireless buds, or many many dongles.

    The “save space” is an absolute lie. The international (EU, Asia, etc) version of the iPhone has a dedicated SIM card tray. The US model? No tray, just a freakin placeholder where the international version has the SIM tray. Yes, there is a volume of space that can fit 2 headphone jacks on the US iPhone that is just empty.

    Look at this iFixit video where they call apple out on it. The placeholder is huge. at ~1:17+



  • The letter is a post on his own blog . Hard to distill into a summary so I recommend reading it get more context. But it seems to have boiled down to:

    • How It Was:

      • Strong adherence to the “don’t be evil” ethos, focusing on societal good over profits.
      • Open, transparent communication and decision-making processes.
      • High morale, with a culture of learning from successes and failures.
      • Work focused on benefitting the web and users, rather than Google’s immediate interests.
      • Collaboration and lack of internal silos, encouraging innovation and autonomy.
    • How It Is Now:

      • Shift from user-centric to Google-centric, and then to individual-centric decision making.
      • Eroded transparency and increase in organizational silos.
      • Decline in morale and a culture of distrust between employees and management.
      • Focus on short-term financial gains leading to layoffs and defensive employee behavior.
      • Lack of clear vision and leadership, resulting in confused and ineffective management.
      • Overall deterioration of Google’s unique, innovative culture and values.

  • Brave has superior fingerprint protection, they achieve this by randomizing the browsers fingerprint. Visit EFF’s cover your tracks to test your browser.

    To achieve the same functionality that brave achieves out of the box with Firefox I need many extensions and then when I profile both browsers, Firefox is more resource intensive. Brave’s blocking is native to the browser. I will give Firefox the W because I’ve read that uBlock is technically more capable. But as a long time Firefox/uBlock user who switched to brave - this has not been noticable.

    As for accessibility, I can configure brave to be really aggressive at ad blocking, tracking blocking, fingerprint blocking, and restricting JS even, and all those options I can set from one place instead of in different settings/extensions. When a website breaks, I click on the button next to the URL and immediately have options to granularly dial down the “protection” or add a website to my trusted list. In Firefox I was annoyed to having go through settings for the extension.

    Brave plans to continue supporting Manifest V2 after Google kills it. For Ungoogled Chromium, however, it’s still undecided, likely depending on whether UG contributors are willing to maintain it.


  • Brave has superior fingerprint protection, they achieve this by randomizing the browsers fingerprint. Visit EFF’s cover your tracks to test your browser.

    To achieve the same functionality that brave achieves out of the box with Firefox I need many extensions and then when I profile both browsers, Firefox is more resource intensive. Brave’s blocking is native to the browser. I will give Firefox the W because I’ve read that uBlock is technically more capable. But as a long time Firefox/uBlock user who switched to brave - this has not been noticable.

    As for accessibility, I can configure brave to be really aggressive at ad blocking, tracking blocking, fingerprint blocking, and restricting JS even, and all those options I can set from one place instead of in different settings/extensions. When a website breaks, I click on the button next to the URL and immediately have options to granularly dial down the “protection” or add a website to my trusted list. In Firefox I was annoyed to having go through settings for the extension.

    Brave plans to continue supporting Manifest V2 after Google kills it. For Ungoogled Chromium, however, it’s still undecided, likely depending on whether UG contributors are willing to maintain it.



  • to preface what might sound like slander, I really would love to get my hands on apple hardware. It is engineered rather well and the geek in me can appreciate that. However, getting access to your own hardware is an issue.

    While I have some concerns about their objective features, to my shame, the greatest problem is with the brand and their practices.

    I think the root cause of all my issues stems from their morals and aggressive/elitist business practice - specifically their quest to squeeze money out of users and hide behind the lie of “we are doing this for the user’s benefit”.

    I have no issue paying money for features I want or entities I’d like to support. In fact, I’m more inclined to financially support those who I believe in.

    And apple loves to gatekeep features and keep them exclusive to apple. They effectively benefit from hard work of others who contribute to open standards and services, but at the same time do not share their own. Greedy.








  • duckduckgo (who uses Microsoft’s index I believe) is able to find Lemmy instances already.

    problem is since every instance has its own domain you cannot search all of Lemmy or the more obscure fediverse. lemmy.world, beehaw.org, programming.dev are all different “websites”.

    I append “reddit” to my query when I want to search reddit for a human answer to a question. Can’t do that with Lemmy, unless the instance is branded as Lemmy.

    Unless there will be an org or volunteers that indexes federated instances and makes them available to search engines to they can be differentiated, finding stuff in the fediverse might be difficult…