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

South West Water also claimed it has no legal responsibility to keep the rivers and sea in the counties clean and clear of sewage

The fact that statement could even be made is pretty telling of the state we are in. It’s 2024, not 1524, dumping shit in the sea is something we should have long moved on from.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There was a BBC documentary a few years ago where they gave GPS tracking collars to a bunch of cats in a neighbourhood and tracked where they went. Each of the cats had their own territory and favourite locations.

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.

“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.

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.

There’s not many phone boxes left in the UK of any design now.

I’ve seen a few converted into tiny libraries or art displays.