The NHS’ virtual appointment service in the UK doesn’t support Firefox either, only Chrome, Safari and Edge. The dark days of “please view this website in Internet Explorer 6” are creeping closer to the present again. I hate the modern internet.
This is the first I’ve heard of the JPEG XL format, but it sounds pretty good!
Hopefully it doesn’t get misused by websites to mangle lossless compressed images with so much compression they’re barely visible to save a few kilobytes, though.
Been using LineageOS with microG on my phone for the last couple of years out of a general distrust for Google, using open-source apps in place of the Google ones. My phone stopped getting OEM updates after Android 12, so being able to use Android 13 through LineageOS is a plus. Main downsides are that some apps don’t play nice with microG and that unlocking the bootloader makes banking apps stop working.
This is a total affront to the ethos of the web and everyone involved in drafting this awful proposal should be publicly shamed. Stick sandwich boards on each of them saying “I tried to build the Torment Nexus”, chain them together and march them through the streets while ringing a bell and chanting “shame”.
It’s just Huffman, an Elon simp, deciding he wants IPO money and that the best way to make it is to blindly follow whatever Twitter does. Because, you know, Twitter’s so hot and profitable right now.
Anything that lets them pretend things are going just fine and user activity has never been higher. Especially if the bots view ads.
If you want one for your phone, Feedly is pretty good. On desktop, I use Liferea.
Seconding Liferea.
The TL;DR is “so it doesn’t become XMPP” - if a big player from the corporate internet world achieves significant sway over the Fediverse, that gives them a position of power to steer the platform itself, eventually letting them undermine the whole “open-source” and “decentralised” part of it entirely before taking their chunk of the federation private, effectively kneecapping the remaining communities outside the walled garden.
If you’ve ever heard “the three Es” - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, best known from the Microsoft antitrust days - that’s what we’re worried about happening here.
Hopefully no credible Fediverse platform actually federates with their trojan horse. If we let Zuck, or anyone like him, become a major player in the ActivityPub world, pretty soon we’re going to end up right back where we started.
What you think of them.
Funnily enough, it seems RTV/TUIR/TTRV still work, at least for now? Possibly since you use your own API key for those. If nothing else, my copy of RTV is still working.
Killing two people who are both destined to die in the very near future to save one who will live for a considerably longer period and save a greater number of lives would be the right thing to do from a utilitarian standpoint. Tuvix, meanwhile, is a healthy being who was competent to discharge his duties and posed no threat.
Consequently, while there is an argument to be made that killing one person to revive two others is a net benefit, the burden of suffering on that one person is extreme, and whether or not it is outweighed by the positive nature of the two others returning to live is very much a matter of individual outlook.
It is also worth noting that Tuvok and Neelix as they existed before could be considered “already dead” as a result of their combination into a single entity. Thus you could argue that what actually happened is that Tuvix “died” so that clones of the deceased Tuvok and Neelix could be created from him. Admittedly this is a shaky argument given the whole “do transporters actually kill people in-universe” thing.
I’d be fine paying Google for YouTube Premium if I could use it without being logged in. I’d take an access key for anonymous ad-free viewing for $20 a month. But Google is never going to offer that because the data-harvesting is the whole point of YouTube to them. Google is a data-slurping company with an advertising division that dabbles in video, search and phones as side hustles.
In any case, if they really do crack down on adblockers, there are always other methods of watching their videos ad-free, and if I really like a creator, I’ll subscribe to their Patreon or watch them on Nebula.
Possibly, now that we have much tighter integration between different chips using die-to-die interconnects like Apple’s “UltraFusion” and AMD’s “Infinity Fabric” to avoid the latency and microstutter issues that came with old-fashioned multi-GPU cards like the GTX 690 and Radeon HD 7990 XT.
As long as software can make proper use of the multiple processing units, I think multi-GPU cards have a chance to make a comeback… at least if anyone can actually afford the bloody things. Frankly, GPU pricing is a bit fucked at the moment even before we consider the idea of cards with multiple dies.
To be fair, a lot of these are accurate, or at least were at the time.
Multi-GPU just never caught on. There’s a reason you don’t see even the most hardcore gaming machines running SLI today.
The Wii’s novelty wore off fairly quickly (about the time Kinect happened), and it didn’t have much of a lasting impact on the gaming industry once mobile gaming slurped up the casual market.
Spore is largely forgotten, despite the enormous hype it had before release. It’s kind of the Avatar of video games.
It took years for 64-bit to become relevant to the average user (and hell, there are still devices being sold with only 4GB of memory even today!). Plenty of Core 2 Duo machines still shipped with 32-bit versions of Windows and people didn’t notice or care because basically no apps average people cared about were 64-bit native back then and you were lucky to have more than 4GB in your entire machine, let alone need more than that for one program.
Battlestar Galactica (2003) fell off sharply after season 2 and its ending was some of the most insulting back-to-nature religious tripe that has ever had the gall to label itself as science-fiction.
Downloading movies over the internet ultimately fell between the cracks outside of piracy. Most people stream films and TV now, and people who want the extra quality tend to buy a Blu-Ray disc rather than download from iTunes (can you even still do that with modern shows?)
I definitely know people who didn’t get an HDTV until 4K screens hit the market, and people still buy standard-def DVDs. Hell, they’re still outselling Blu-Rays close to 20 years later. Calling HD a dud is questionable, but it was definitely not seen as a must-have by the general public, partly because that shit was expensive back in 2008.
The Eee PC and the other netbooks were only good when they were running a lightweight operating system like Linux or Windows XP. Once Windows 7 Starter became the operating system of choice for netbooks, the user experience fell of a cliff and people tired of them. Which is a shame, because I love little devices like UMPCs.
The original iPhone was really limited for 2007. No third-party applications, no 3G support, no voice memos, you could only get it on a single carrier… the iPhone family did make a huge impact in the long run, but it wasn’t until the 3GS that it was a true competitor to something like a Symbian device.
The only entry on this list that’s really off the mark is Facebook, which even at the time was quickly reshaping the world. And I say that as someone who hates Zuck’s guts and has proudly never had a Facebook account.
I have mixed feelings about the iPhone. On one hand, the device itself was very sleek for the time and its touch-driven, easy-to-use interface was a revelation for 2007. On the other hand, it was the harbinger of the locked-down, walled-garden hellscape that is the modern tech industry, and its success paved the way for horrors like Windows 8/10/11 and the modern Mac OS which gets very testy if you try running app that hasn’t been notarised by Apple.
This is undoubtedly true. YouTube is a private entity and there is no legal obligation for them to treat speech equally. But it is subjectively troubling that YouTube, a virtual monopoly, has little qualms about directly shaping the political discourse on its platform, censoring and limiting the reach of content about LGBT people while Fox News is on the front page.
A flood of children at the same time as an exodus of the type of users who actually upload good content to Reddit could definitely set up the conditions for a steady bleed of users away from the site, though. Especially with moderators’ ability to actually do their job being impacted by the API changes.
Well, the ones based on Chromium aren’t, anyway. I’ve heard some major criticisms of Safari in the last few years, for what that’s worth.