Brewchin

Pocket won’t be missed. Self-hosted alternatives like Wallabag are better and private, so switched to it many years ago. Integration (and enabled by default, requiring about:config to disable) ensured I’d never use it out of principle.

Fakespot (the website) was genuinely useful to help ID scams on Am*z*n Marketplace, though I never used the extension. But I think that enshittified in recent years, so (in the style of Stephen King’s Misery) it’s probably for the best.

Related, the Keepa extension is useful as a price rigging detector, but I expect that will “number must go up!” soon enough, too…

Your initial response got peoples’ backs up because of its dismissive tone and (it seemed to me, as you hadn’t provided context) apparent advocacy for web-based tools like O365 or GSheets.

Many office application users wouldn’t consider vim as an “office application”, as they have their word processing app, their spreadsheet app, their email app, their chat app, their file explorer/manager, maybe something other than Notepad as a text editor, etc, and don’t really know much beyond some of what each of them can do.

The fact that vim (or Emacs or vim/nvim with plugins, or LazyVim or Doom Emacs) can do all of those things would blow many minds.

But the setup effort and learning curve is still there, and also requires that they have sufficient permissions/policy to be able to install things.

Like the @a.gup.pe ones? They are kind of autoboost bots, but they do have communities behind them and it’s annoying when people treat them like hashtags.

But I’d not use the term bots. They’re more like old-fashioned email reflectors: a message goes in, and it then gets sent to everyone on the list.

Hard agree. Mindsets stuck in 2005 or before when cool and useful stuff was, just, free online. We were such summer children then.

Anyone still like that obviously shouldn’t be in charge of anything sharp or dangerous…

Anyone remember websites and RSS? Those were the days.

Why does everything have to get shovelled into someone’s walled garden…

(Speaking about updates and notifications here, not discussions.)

By stores do you mean Amazon Fresh? Definitely.

I thought it was interesting it wasn’t mentioned in the comparison to similar historical false claims.

That’s very much what the Opinion section in the Guardian is all about: an all comers free-for-all written by anyone who cares to submit a piece. Generally unrelated their news journalism and general mission/ideology.

I see why they do it: opposing views and so on. But in the current society of headlines are everything, knee jerk reactions, polarisation and the idea of a middle ground being treason, etc, we get “Why are the Guardian saying x?!” 🤷‍♂️

The US$75 Lifetime price has traditionally been their Black Friday deal, regardless of the usual price.

Anyone’s guess if that deal will still be a thing, given their recent behaviour, though.

This is what FAFO in public looks like. Gold!

You may be right, but I worked around this using https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NetworkManager#Network_services_with_NetworkManager_dispatcher

I added the CIFS shares to my fstab with the _netdev option and created /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/30-nas-shares.sh containing (got the WiFi UUID using nmcli con show):

#!/bin/sh
WANTED_CON_UUID="UUID-OF-MY-WIFI"

if [ "$CONNECTION_UUID" = "$WANTED_CON_UUID" ]; then
  case "$2" in
    "up"|"vpn-up")
      mount -a -t cifs
      ;;
  esac
fi

This waits for my WiFi to come up, ensures it’s my home WiFi, and then mounts my shares.

There are probably other and better ways to do it, but it works.

I don’t mind it with companies that produce multiple products, as nesting them does make sense.

But for one-hit-wonders it’s a bit… 😬

I was thinking more of one product companies using a $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Boop Snoot Partners, Inc/<Software Name You Remember Installing>/ convention, which seems to be the norm inside %APPDATA%.

But I take your point. 😊

So much this. It’s like these clowns don’t read the XDG directory spec and think $XDG_CONFIG_HOME and $XDG_DATA_HOME are interchangeable, and even that cache files can be in either or both. No, one directory you need to backup for when things go sideways, and the other can go to /nev/dull.

I’m not a fan of ~/.local/share/ being the data directory (two directories deep seems stupid), but it’s definitely where regular data belongs.

Never mind developers who, in 2025, still think their project is special enough for a $HOME dotfile/dotdir or - somehow worse - those who put $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/<weird-name>/subdir/[subdir/]. The latter strikes me as well-meaning Windows developers trying to follow best-practice-like-Microsoft-does, but it makes my teeth itch.

Rant over. :)

If you’re going back that far, I remember hearing a story about the Australian military experimenting with immersive AI during a typical “give us money” event where a helicopter was flying over an area and the kangaroos scattered at the sound, disappearing over a hill…

Then reappeared with RPGs and fired them at the helicopter, taking it down. Lots of red faces and mumbling about working out some kinks. 😄

tl;dr: I’m old enough to remember when “AI” was a benign comic novelty. 🙃

Calibre (Kindle) and Libation (Audible) are essential backup tools.

Y’know, in case their servers are down…

Every serious person in law enforcement, who doesn’t have an agenda, acknowledges that the old fashioned policing methods make all of this redundant.

It just takes longer (and so costs money), which is what this is about.

These people would destroy the security of the world’s protocols just to save a few quid. It’s deplorable.

I get what you’re saying, but I’m not sure greedy pigboy is doing that. Everything changes.

It won’t be what it was, and the grift will grow be off the charts, but I think it will evolve into a mix of what it was and grifters grifting. Just delineated by subreddit.

"I don’t like it…

• “…so it should be banned” (for everyone) is never the right approach.
• “…so I blocked it” (for me) is.

It’s a simple heuristic that works in almost every situation.

You don’t know what value something you don’t like provides to others.

The algorithmic feed and the low barrier to entry, including UX familiarity.

Aside from the headache of understanding what instances are and choosing one, and finding a decent mobile client, a lot of people care about unique usernames - especially those in the business/professional sphere.

I see their point, when @trustedname@genuine-instance can have all their effort and goodwill destroyed in a day by @trustedname@malicious-instance. While the Verification option exists, more needs to be done in ActivityPub and client developer guidelines to prevent or intuitively mitigate this kind of impersonation. But mentioning such shortcomings get sneered at or waved away, which keeps serious well-meaning people away.

Why would they go through that hassle when Bluesky’s shortcomings are ideological and potential future direction?

I’ve worked with both in my career. Tell me more…