I think it’s completely insane to say that any of that is worse now than it ever was. Luckily you only meet pessimism like this in sheltered online echo chambers, so busy whining about Elon Musk or “Google bad” or other irrelevant bullshit, that they can’t see beyond their own bubble of ignorance.

The fact that Twitter is dying or websites are collecting more cookies is not a world crisis. The rest of these issues are just caused by USA’s capitalist greed, and no amount of activism is changing that, evidently.

Nostalgia trips are always great, but it was nothing compared to now

The internet has endless quality content (including porn) for free and is still a place where you can have fun while being completely anonymous.

The world has never been more peaceful and prosperous.

I don’t get how either is worse than, say, 20 years ago. Stop being so fucking pessimistic all the time. It is what you make it.

You should mention what part of the world you live in. Western/northern Europe is paradise for cyclists compared to USA, for example

Working in IT/development, this article encapsulates all my every day frustrations

The conspiracies never end with you people…

I work primarily in tmux and even in an IT department, people regularly say something along the lines of “woah are you hacking?”

I hear it a lot from almost all my engineer friends, so I guess it just depends on your field.

Coming from C-like syntax, Python looks horrible to me. PHP has come a long way with 7 and 8.

It just isn’t. A car would need at least 2 passengers to beat a plane, maybe 3-4 depending on the car. Jet engines are incredibly efficient and planes carry a lot of people. If they all hopped in cars, the planet would turn into a smog hellscape.

If you care about personal emissions so much, take a train.

You write as if you’ve had a bit too much to drink

This site quickly turned into reddit-style bandwagoning and downvoting stuff you disagree with, huh

They do it anyway though.

A full plane is still greener than a car with 1-2 passengers.

YouTube has Shorts. Mine is mostly cute parrots and dog grooming videos though

Only played the first one which was pretty good. It’s super big on character customization as it has a million race/class combinations. A bit more extreme than the rest

DOS 1 and 2 were almost on par with BG3 imo.

Pillars of Eternity was also really good.

It’s not usually the software on these locks that fail… You can make secure radio equipment. What does code have to do with it?

Most locks aren’t that secure anyway, and windows suck. I would only bother with this if I had a lot of money (and enemies) to secure everything around my house.

Locking down your stuff is more of an insurance thing, not a real security problem.

In my understanding, the metrics tracked by just having Google Play services are pretty minimal.

It’s more like an API between your phone and apps you install through it, and the permission system for apps has improved immensely over the past 5-10 years. As I see it, it’s more like a firewall.

If you don’t want Google to know which apps you use and how much, you can go full custom, but that’s a bit too much tinfoil for me.

The tracking is mostly from web browsing. If you use Google Chrome, of course you can expect to be tracked based on browser history, cookies, etc., like most other browsers.

If I wanna do something in private, obviously I won’t use Chrome or a builtin browser.

There are lots of privacy oriented Android flavors out there. Most of them won’t come with Google Play services installed. Any of them will be able to run any apps you need.

In my opinion, Google isn’t bad at all when it comes to tracking and bloatware. They’re much like Apple. It’s the branded phones like Samsung that are absolutely horrible.

Anyway, check out the LineageOS Wiki: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

It can give a quick overview of the devices which can easily install a custom ROM (OS). I heard good things about Fairphone

Sure do, and they’re not nearly as prevalent where I live. Almost beyond comparison