I feel the original Chromecast was probably the last truly great original Google product, it was simple, it was inexpensive and it worked - you just plugged it in, joined your network and you were off, there really wasn’t anything like it at the time.

I really hate what they’ve become.

I’m guessing Linus’s investment is safe then :)

I stripped the exif data from the image... that's enough right?

No, but seriously - I posted this to /r/gaming and the mods took it down in 15 minutes...

Tom seems like one of the most genuine people on the internet, he fact checks the crap out of everything (going out of his way to issue corrections when he is wrong - which just never happens) and produced exceptionally high quality and interesting content every damn week.

I’m slightly sad he’s giving up now only because I only discovered his channel a year or so ago and I’m not going to have new things to show my kids as they grow into an age of watching more educational content.

I can only wish him the best of luck with whatever comes next.

(Also, he deserves an MBE or something…)

Hah! It’s funny because it’s true!

😢

Honestly their walk back of the net zero has made me never want to vote for them again.

The planet is fucked, at this point nothing else matters, we aren’t doing anything about it because Sunak is cosied up to fossil fuels and is too busy flying his private jet about.

At what point does this shit count as a hate crime?

Humans probably shouldn’t be living in these conditions if they can’t survive without AC, no?

There are a bunch of options each with their pros and cons, here’s what I’ve found so far:

Mlem

• Feels very Apollo like with things like slide to upvote and reply
• Doesn’t seem to be able to handle inline images and media (so you sometimes miss post information)
• Switching to new communities is not intuitive (you have to click the community name and type with the “Subscribed” toggle pane open)
• No guides on how Markdown works
• No message inbox

Memmy

• Has an inbox (not something I’ve seen from the others)
• Has Apollo like slide interactions
• Easy to find and switch communities
• Text is a little too small
• Found a couple of visual bugs (obviously this is all very beta!)

Liftoff

• Seems to show all the post information you could want (community it was posted too, which community that user is part of, etc)
• Feels a little bit like the official reddit app
• No Apollo like slide interactions
• Some interesting choices when trying to find communities (showing the full sidebar)
• Colours are a little constrasty
• A couple of UI bugs
• I don’t love the rounded corners on everything out of the box

Thunder

• Pretty polished
• Slide interactions are great
• Nice Markdown editor
• Not found any graphical bugs
• Some UI elements (subbing / unsubbing from a community) aren’t always clear
• Written in flutter so may not give a true “native” experience

Personally I think I’m gonna stick with Thunder for a bit, but I’m swapping daily at this point.

Given that any development on these really only kicked into gear in the last few weeks everything these devs are doing is incredible, they’ve all come a long way in such a short time!

Well, it’s pretty shitty that they introduced it in the first place, but this is a great way to respond.

Tbh, I could see a case where a new marketing exec asked for it to be added and the dev team hated the idea so had a rollback plan ready to go in case things went south.

As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:

• Chrome and Edge are owned by big companies and report god-knows-what back to their motherships whilst constantly pushing their own services
• Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
• Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
• Opera is full of random features and promotional bumpf that I don’t care about and have to turn off
• Vivaldi is a complicated beast that takes a bunch of work to set up, it also includes a mail client, calendar and feed reader in the browser which I don’t need.
• DuckDuckGo doesn’t have any extension support at all
• Arc is really fiddly and doesn’t always behave how I want it to (bookmarks behave like tabs for some reason)
• Brave pulls things like this and is also full of crypto/wallet type stuff, plus you can’t even change your home page.

I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!

Because job hopping is scary as hell (especially for developers who struggle with imposter syndrome) and job hunting is generally shitty.

What if I don’t like the new place? What if I can’t feed my wife and kids? What if I’m actually terrible at this and my current place is so stupid they haven’t figured that out? What if the economy tanks in the next couple of months and I’m out on my ear with no severance pay?

Better to stay put, accept slightly less money for another year and look at it again when I’ve got the time and energy to cope with it.

Destiny was supposed to be their “forever” game, the problem is that after 2 dozen expansions:

1. New players are extremely intimidated about joining
2. Old players dislike losing the content they’ve paid for when it’s vaulted
3. Long term players will eventually get bored of playing the same thing they’ve been playing for years

Live service games just won’t last forever like they want them to.

How about The Expanse or The Martian? They’re both relatively hard sci-fi that focuses mostly on our own solar system.

The Martian tells the tale of a man stuck on Mars and his ability to survive on his own whilst those back on Earth figure out a way to get him back. Both the book and the film are great so you can’t go wrong with either.

The Expanse covers more of the local system. Earth and Mars are on the brink of war, whilst others live out near the asteroid belt, Jupiter and beyond. It goes a little sci-fi later on but it’s an inherently human story that has some great characters living in a time when space travel is still dangerous but achievable by humanity. It starts a little slow but ramps up brilliantly and has a nice conclusion that wraps everything up pretty neatly. You’ve got 9+ books, a 6 season TV series on Amazon Prime, and a newly released TellTale video game, all of which are well produced and worth investing time in.

I think there is a big difference between the passive warming / cooling of clothing vs the huge energy requirement, spent resources and emissions required to basically run your entire home / office / factory / hotel as a giant fridge.

It really is impressive just how much he fucked that up

It’s EA Play now, which is actually somehow worse than Origin was.

Still, Titanfall 2 is actually a great game (probably my favourite of the PS4 era) and is well worth a little suffering for.

It depends on which bit you’re talking about.

ChatGPT and SEO optimisation ruined the quality of results so sites who have no right to be near the top spot for particular terms get there by cramming as many pages full of tangentially related rubbish as they can.

The SERPs (search engine result pages, where you see the list of links) have been taken over by Google guessing at what you might be looking for, local results, shopping results, instant answers (which is usually aren’t relevant) and of course lots and lots of ads, leaving little to no room for the actual links you want.

If you are sick of it I would suggest trying DuckDuckGo, the results are a whole lot nicer :)

I feels like they either badly copy (see Gemini) or don’t think about what they’re offering (see Stadia’s busted business model) they’re content to milk the existing services they’ve already got and make them worse by cramming in more ads (see YouTube, Google’s search result pages) and they cut out or dictate the web through their monopolies (see AMP and Chrome) rather than working with other parties to make good products.

They feel like Hooli in Silicon Valley, basically the definition of a fat tech giant who doesn’t do any innovation of their own.

Wtf did I just read…