Yet another reminder that “the cloud” is really just “someone else’s computer”. The end users of cloud based products are controlled by “someone else’s” rules and whims.
It’s all vertical video as well. YouTube pushes Shorts fairly aggressively on the desktop website, and it’s a crappy experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The ones that amuse me are the restaurants that don’t do table service, but still have a multiple staff on the floor and door seemingly only to tell diners they don’t do table service.
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.
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.
“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.
They seemed to be softening somewhat on the cap, even Starmer himself had been making more open comments on it. I’ve seen some suggestions this was laying the groundwork for a “rabbit out of the hat” at the budget, either raising or removing the cap.
However, if the Starmer camp feels they still need to project strength and stability, the shift on the cap may now be jeopardised. They could now double back down on keeping it to not be seen as caving in to rebels or flip-flopping.
Time will tell. I hope I’m wrong but we still haven’t seen what the true colours of Starmer’s Labour will pan out to be.