At this point I’m not sure what’s newest, since my kid just watches everything streaming.

I do have to say the newer 2D animated shorts, The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse, are a fantastic return to form.

Like most really early animated characters, Mickey Mouse was a lot of things over a long period of time. And as far as American animation goes, Mickey Mouse has been a staple for the childhood of literally every generation. Younger millennials and zoomers grew up on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Children in decades prior watched Mickey be a musketeer in one short and starving due to poverty in the next.

So while the rough edges of the character have been sanded down over time, he’s still very much a plucky, brave, kind, and helpful protagonist in most of the media he’s in.

Which to your average adult viewer means… he’s a bland and uninteresting character.

That said, he’s still an icon of animation as a whole, and most things with Mickey in them are doing some new and novel something (design, production pipeline, whatever) that pushes the whole industry forward in some way.

people are lazy have busy lives and want to put their time and energy into things that aren’t learning a whole new technology skill.

FTFY.

Once Firefox on mobile got extension support, I switched over immediately to use a decent adblocker. Made sure every app that opens a browser opens in Firefox. Has made my mobile browsing experience so much better, of my goodness.

That’s bizarre. I am also on Windows 10 and use Firefox as my primary browser, largely because I can stream DRM’d video sites (Netflix etc) to my friends on discord.

Sounds dumb, but have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling? I might suggest also removing or disabling all extensions to see if that does anything.

Not so much, maybe towards the last month of that period defaulting to Bing. I think it was still being constantly rebranded then. It was still pretty new, so I never really trusted it for anything and just went to the sites in the results.

I used Bing by default for several months just because that’s what my work laptop’s browser had for default.

I never directly compared those results to DDG, but 9/10 times I would get frustrated by the lack of relevant results and go back to Google, where I’d find something useful on the first page of results.

DDG is just Bing. At least as far as the core search algorithm goes.

Unfortunately, my experience is the opposite. I tried to use DDG for about a month and consistently found myself giving up, Googling instead, and finding a relevant stack overflow page or reddit thread or whatever on the first page of results.

It’s unfortunately still far more useful than other search engines, in my experience anyway. I haven’t yet tried the paid search engine someone pointed out to me recently, Kagi, I think.

But given the cost of Kagi’s tiers based on number of searches, it would have to be MUCH more useful to me than Google to really make it feel worth it.

Kagi, you say.

I know Google search has gone down the shitter… but it’s still far and away the most useful search engine I use. Every now and then I try to use bing or ddg or whatever, and they waste so much of my goddamn time I just run the same search in Google and get something usable on the first page of results, even with all the kludge.

At this point I’d rather pay for a search engine if it meant better searching and no ads.

That’s what I was thinking. Wasn’t that the point?

Bling Bang Bang Born by Creepy Nuts Spain by Chick Corea

“what’s the Judge Rotenburg Center?” looks it up “Jesus”

To be fair, Tesla is the primary culprit of this. Waymo and other AV companies have just been slowly but steadily ramping up their testing and operating in relatively safe ways, and they are by and large doing pretty well from the coverage I’ve read. It’s not happening as quickly as anybody hoped, but we’re seeing steady improvements over time.

Tesla is just reckless, though, branding things in ways that make the whole AV endeavor look much worse than it deserves.

I feel like I’d feel similarly if I had a foldable, but the one guy I know who has one swears he’ll never buy one again. Granted, he got a gen 1 Galaxy Fold, so it’s got some major growing pains.

Curious, but was there ever a time when critical thinking was taught in US public schools above and beyond what is being taught in public schools now?

US public schools are getting underfunded, of course, but curricula themselves have probably improved over time?

I honestly don’t really even know how to begin researching this particular line of inquiry, and I have a background in social science research.

True.

But the point is the lock-in is similar from a social perspective, just hardened even further by tying the messaging platform to specific hardware.

“Hey let’s use XYZ instead of iMessage” and “hey let’s use XYZ instead of WhatsApp” will be met with the same typical resistance to any sort of change. But in the case of iMessage, there’s added elitism and othering due to Apple’s using iMessage as a lock-in to their hardware.

I think the big difference in the US is that iMessage was leagues ahead of SMS well before there were any good, popular 3rd party mobile messaging apps. iPhones also dominated here, and still do, largely due to that early market dominance.

I’ve also felt like YouTube Premium was a pretty good deal, given the sheer amount of YouTube content I consume and how much I detest ads.

That said, I also feel like most of what I really value from YouTube is on Nebula, to which I am also subscribed. I constantly wonder if it would be worth it to drop YouTube altogether, to save some money but also a huge amount of time.

The only other thing really keeping me on YouTube Premium is the included YouTube music. Not like Spotify is much cheaper, and I’m not much into manually managing libraries of my own music files like I did in the days of my 2nd Gen iPod (it had a touch wheel!).

It doesn’t, but that isn’t their point. They’re simply pointing out that existing net neutrality laws in the US usually only apply to ISPs and telcos, not internet businesses.