chickenfeed

vorig jaardiscuss

We have local community groups on FB. One for our hamlet of about 50 houses. Some households refuse to join as they don't do Facebook. I only do Facebook because of the local group. I long ago gave up trying to fill those people in. It is somewhat of a pain.

chickenfeed

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I have no idea what apps are sharing with what. On Android network access is so ambiguous. There's such fuzzy wording. Like when you are asked for location permission to use bluetooth. Even perms like file system access. I don't know what this extends to. Have no idea what it is doing. I recently set up a new ipad. I failed to even work out where Photos ended up. Couldn't work out what was backed up, and what wasn't. How to opt out of everything and opt in piecemeal. Whether the OS/gadget had AI enhancements, what they were or are, whether the apps would have cloud access or not. In fact for an apple device it bugged me with dialogs from the get go. And bluetooth kept turning itself back on. I would say I am technically savvy, but I was pretty clueless. I was quite keen to try out some of the AI photo tools. Like find pictures of such and such, but I didn't get that far as confusion abound.

chickenfeed

2 jaar geledendiscuss

It's actually a real drag. I live in a rural area and the mobile signal is up and down. Sometimes I don't get SMSs for hours to a day late.

chickenfeed

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Don't forget Anom. (A cautionary tale.) https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/146/

chickenfeed

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I read an article that said something along the lines of people aren't prepared to pay for apps, so instead we get app store silo advert supported crap-ware. And if it's not the apps its click bait making fractional gains by being supported by ad networks. That some of, but not all of us recoil from.

chickenfeed

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I wouldn't say it's all trash, but I find TV like this. I loathe most of it finding it pretty vacuous. I am still drawn to it.

We had a defining realisation last year when we found a Youtube channel where a guy cleans carpets. I found it more nutritionally satisfying than 99% of programming on the TV. It was and is totally eye-opening. I have a similar draw to nature. I can watch wild animals doing their thing. And get some entertainment with curtain twitching. I think it's just that inherent human thing - watching.

I do like reading. The minutes I do this are ever dwindling through competition for my idle brain.

chickenfeed

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I was very late to the party getting a smartphone. Didn't stop me picking up my laptop repeatedly. Visiting the same old haunts.

I have yet to install Facebook or Whatsapp or similar. I think it would be the death of me. I spend way too much time on my phone/computer.

I was in a care giving role and felt it couldn't leave my side. Since losing that person, I now rejoice in being able to leave my phone. Heck I didn't turn it on yesterday. And it has been sitting in the kitchen all day today.

The telephone does fill me with existential dread as most communication with me is asking me for something or alerting me to something negative. Perhaps that's an age thing. Whereas the Internet is still pleasurable but a complete and utter time suck.

chickenfeed

2 jaar geledendiscuss

If we could cut people's tongues out the world would be a better place.

I don't know, I think communication can provide a fertile ground for good exchanges as well as bad. It's just somewhat stifled in the current forms.

chickenfeed

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Self-hosting sounds good but the security concerns are just a bind. Plus you need stability. Like having a home. Our electric grid falls over at least once a week where we live. Yes I could use batteries, but no, I can't be bothered.

chickenfeed

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Bluesky has potential with the AT protocol.

I think I had a flagged post on Bluesky, early on that just referenced something elsewhere - it was pretty harmless. And I remember a few X users trying the platform saying something vaguely controversial and getting a suspension. Or some such. I don't want to get into the ins and outs of censorship and free speech but you can get booted out the pub for saying something disagreeable in front of the bar hands or patrons. And I would be quite livid if I had invested in a platform and then got shut down.

The AT protocol gives you the ability to produce feeds. But it's actually the consumption aggregation and discover-ability that seems to the difficult bit. I feel we need a lightweight RSS style reader in browser to really get past this. There are weird hacks on Bluesky to subscribe to feeds. But it is messy. The feeds are where the magic potentially happens.

Twitter had become unpalatable before Musk bought it. And there were various crisis of confidence and herd threatening migrations, but people just couldn't be bothered. In its latest ungodly form people are still sticking around, or moving to silos and bubbles on other platforms, it's just a complete and utter mess at this point.

Platforms inevitably win out with convenience. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp succeeded as people just couldn't share or publish photos or files easily. Combined with some magic discover-ability.

Twitter's collapse has been painful. But weirdly it was incredibly influential though low in membership.

My personal consumption of social feeds has been obliterated to nearly zero. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I published for myself rather than an audience and had used Twitter just because it was easy. I have a broken computer at the moment and my entire dev stack / environment is in chaos. And although I think the barriers to publishing and self hosting are low there are still inherent obstacles.

chickenfeed

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I used to enjoy using browsers like W3M, if you can just throw assets at your favourite tool of choice, like an image viewer, a video player, it just feels better for me as I don't have to learn a different interface for every site I visit.

chickenfeed

2 jaar geledendiscuss

But perhaps, not so good, don't google that one.

chickenfeed

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Great app name: ontheloo

chickenfeed

3 jaar geledendiscuss

Weird isn't it. I used to run Opera on a Pentium 200 with a pitiful amount of ram.

Oh how times change.

chickenfeed

3 jaar geledendiscuss

I have mostly old hardware (the best computers I have is a smartphone and a macmini from 2012). I'm disappointed when I load newer Linux distros and they appear slower. Even though I now have SSDs. Browsers are really greedy. I have a machine with 2GB of ram and a single core CPU. It's a low power rig. But cannot run Windows 10, it just about did when I first installed it. Debian runs better, but a browser kills it. It's a one app only. We had someone donate us a Windows 3.1 rig once, at the time we had 600MHZ Windows 2000 machines and ME. And we were gob smacked at how fast the 3.1 machine was on some ancient hardware.

Windows always used to have that fresh lightweight install vibe. But as soon as it started indexing, doing updates, and virus scanning it would drag to nothing. Along with all those system tray apps that would take an age to fire up.

Partial suspend to disk made things boot faster. Like not doing the whole driver scan thing on boot. I don't know if Linux has ever taken this on board. It's a blessing and a curse as Windows doesn't like being ported to another machine, whereas my Debian disks I can swap between some desktops and laptops without much issue.

There's also that weird delayed animation thing, that is meant to feel like polish. But slows down desktops. Weird animation effects and what not. I tend to run XFCE and turn off any thing like that.

I'm using a Chromebook right now and this is an old machine, but still feels pretty snappy. Certainly weird and wonderful experiences between hardware. I have High Sierra on an SSD on my Mac Mini, and that's slower by far to boot than my Linux Arch box on the same age hardware. Having said that the UI always feels more responsive as it's tailored for that.

Linux suffers lots for me with kcompactd or whatever it is. Some weird memory disk swap stuff. If I accidentally code an infinite loop my machine turns to complete mud, and takes about 5 minutes to recover. Whereas it boots to the browser in under 1minute. Weird huh?

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