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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • I still use DDG as my “daily driver” (I know there are better options for privacy and avoiding big tech, but I haven’t yet found anything independent that is good enough for me to switch to full time yet). I bookmarked Stract a while back, and it proved useful a few months back when Microsoft had an outage that took down Bing and by extension, Duck Duck Go. I do like Stract, their index seems to be enough larger than MoJeek (another independent search with their own index) that it gives me better results.

    Stract might not be as open as I’d like, but it’s nice to have as an option, and I’m never going to complain about having more search providers with independent indexes.










  • I remember seeing an interview with the model, who at the time of the interview was in her 70s or 80s, she apparently wasn’t enthusiastic about having become a common test image. But since she had technically consented to be in Playboy (which was only a magazine at the time), there wasn’t anything she could do to stop it. I think in this case it’s probably best to stop using her image specifically, as it does kinda get into a weird messy situation of consent, and how her consent to be in a magazine morphed through technology into something more “permanent” than she originally realized. There are plenty of other models who would absolutely be down for that, and given enough time, knowing how nerds are, there will be other test images of women. But I think it’s probably for the best that this one gets retired from this use.

    And yes, there are people who have tried to use this instance as a “there shouldn’t be images of attractive/implied nude women a standard test images, because it can cause body image issues for women who go into that field.” Which on one hand, I can see where they’re coming from, but also people take pictures of people, and some people do look better than most of us, having more diverse test images would be a good thing, because we don’t all look like that. But some do, and they’re probably going to get more pictures taken of them than the rest if us.


  • In general, yes more tabs = more RAM used, but Firefox does have a neat trick compared to Chrome that helps lower memory usage for those of us with hundreds of tabs. When you launch Chrome with a bunch of tabs open from a previous session, it actually loads them all into RAM at launch, with Firefox, it doesn’t actually load the pages of tabs from previous sessions, until you switch to them. The page titles and icons get loaded into RAM, obviously, but if you have lots of old tabs that you almost never open, the memory usage impact of lots of tabs is minimized.





  • So, I in no way want to argue that algorithms are better, as they are often used to manipulate and their design to drive engagement at any cost leads to plenty of their own problems.

    That said, I was raised in a pretty strong echo chamber (that a good portion of my family is still firmly in). If I had been solely responsible for curating what content I got via RSS (which I did for a short period in the early 2010s). I never would have been exposed to content that challenged the worldview I was given. Ironically, it ended up being the YouTube algorithm that while it was simultaneously feeding people down the gamergate conspiracy tunnel was opening my eyes to the realities of climate change, making me less bigoted towards LGBTQ people, and helping me find the empathy that I had hidden to fit in with the world around me.

    I don’t know what the answer is. On the one hand, I know how bad echo chambers can be, on the other hand, corporations and algorithms manipulate people all the time and shouldn’t be trusted either. I do think RSS had potential to be better than what we have now (where social media sites like Twitter and Digg/Reddit/Lemmy essentially act as everyone’s shared feed reader and end up putting people into new echo chambers), but I think having the chance of seeing content that challenges our worldviews has also been a good thing, that I’m not sure would happen as often if we all only read our personally-curated RSS feeds.

    That said algorithms are getting more manipulative, and I may just be a lucky outlier that an algorithm happened to push in a positive direction.


  • With all the discounts they offer it is, but technically Incogni is 12.98/month. And with as many YouTube sponsor spots as they buy, I’d imagine they’re just trying to get as many people signed up as they can, and will stop offering as many discounts once they’ve burned through their investor cash.


  • Honestly, let’s bring geocities back (not exactly in that form). Anything that isn’t a throwaway post on social media goes there, and you can post links to it from all the social platforms for reaching a broader audience. Then there’s a place for getting the most up to date information about an event, that doesn’t require making an account, and the person putting the event on doesn’t have to make sure posts across multiple platforms are updated with the same new information.