So now Windows bloat is extending to the physical keyboard itself.

Looking at the Microsoft blog post they haven't said exactly how they want keyboard layouts to change. So on a full size keyboard this could be either new key entirely, or replace an existing (and arguably more useful) key.

As a British person that's something I thought I'd never see.

Arrested on his birthday too.

With how aggressive Microsoft is becoming with ads, services, and data collection they could at least make Windows itself free.

But no, you still have to pay £100+ per license to have the pleasure of putting up with this crap.

Kids have been watching plenty of brain melting videos before AI came along too.

If you want kid’s brains to stay nice and firm don’t let them be raised by a tablet.

Oh look, yet another reason to use an ad blocker.

Yet another reminder that “the cloud” is really just “someone else’s computer”. The end users of cloud based products are controlled by “someone else’s” rules and whims.

So a supposedly cutting edge $3500 device plus an additional $300 dongle gets a wired connection speed from the year 2000. USB 2 is 24 years old

Welcome to the future folks.

SEO has been a plague in search engines for almost as long as they have existed. Unfortunately combatting it is an endless cat and mouse game, as there will always be some who will devise new ways to game the system. With how commercialised the web has become there’s enormous incentive to do so.

I’m also not convinced Google has much intention of really fixing it. They already have a monopoly on search, and as an advertising company are unlikely to want to upset the big media companies exploiting their search engine.

In the UK the BBC are running their own instance social.bbc on trial basis, and I think the trial was recently extended.

Hopefully other public bodies will follow suit.

“It was a bug” is the common excuse when an intentional feature backfires.

Loading screen ads seem like an obvious next step of enshittification. They are creeping back into video with ads breaks on streaming, only a matter of time before they are in games too.

One of the main issues is the lack of competition. There are now only 3 main browser engines, Blink, Gecko and WebKit. Blink (which poses Chrome and Edge) is by far the largest, and has a the enormous marketing might of Google (and Microsoft to a lesser extent) behind it. WebKit runs Safari, which only runs on Apple platforms and arguably only has the market share it does is because Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines to run on iPhones and iPads. Gecko, the engine of Firefox, continues to slide into irrelevance (which pains me to say as a long time Firefox user).

We are in real danger of the web being trapped in a browser monoculture again, like the dark dark times of Internet Explorer’s dominance. This led to a period of stagnation in web technology Microsoft at the time put little effort into developing IE. Allowing Blink/Chrome to do the same will likely be just as damaging, albeit in different ways - particularly for privacy on the web.

For the good of the web no one company should ever be in the position to dictate web standards, which is why we need a healthy and competitive marketplace of web browsers and browser engines. The problem is that web standards have now become so complex developing an indecent browser engine is now a monumental task. Opera gave up on Presto, once the poster child for browser innovation. Microsoft, a company with far more resources, gave up on Trident. Mozilla was developing a new generation browser engine called Servo, but gave up on the project also.

The ones that amuse me are the restaurants that don’t do table service, but still have a multiple staff on the floor and door seemingly only to tell diners they don’t do table service.

I’ve always been doubtful about these privacy “protection” services. Giving a bunch of personal data and money to a commercial entity making seemingly dubious claims it can compel other services to remove your data has never seemed like a great idea. Data is the new oil, it’s incredibly valuable, and there is too much incentive for companies like that to become just another data collector.

It’s all vertical video as well. YouTube pushes Shorts fairly aggressively on the desktop website, and it’s a crappy experience.

The best solution would be to turn away from detectors, which will always be a losing game, and return to crowdsourced curation through users likes and ratings.

But that would end up with too many of the corporate propaganda videos getting tanked with dislikes so YouTube will never go for that.

Physical game cards may also not actually contain the game:

Nintendo Switch 2 Game-Key Card Overview

Game-key cards are different from regular game cards, because they don’t contain the full game data. Instead, the game-key card is your "key" to downloading the full game to your system via the internet.

So you pay a premium and maybe don't even get a "real" cartridge.

Well even if I wanted to go back to Reddit, I couldn't use it without a decent mobile app, and all of those no longer exist.

Communities don't spring up fully formed, they grow over time with many rises and falls in activity along the way. Lemmy is still young and we can all do our part to help it.

Well that’s a headline I didn’t expect to see this morning.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of AI generated images, it’s quite concerning something like this makes it into a scientific journal at all.

South West Water also claimed it has no legal responsibility to keep the rivers and sea in the counties clean and clear of sewage

The fact that statement could even be made is pretty telling of the state we are in. It’s 2024, not 1524, dumping shit in the sea is something we should have long moved on from.

Platforms like Facebook have an incredible hold on some people. I remember a few years ago when the "Momo" hoax happened, an older coworker arrived at the office and started warning us about the danger of "Momo" they'd seen on Facebook. I'd already heard about the hoax (and was aware of the original creepyasta origins), and brought up a few news articles explaining it, including an official statement from the police. Everyone seemed satisfied by the truth, except for the Facebook addict. They just gave me a blank stare, and a few hours later I heard them telling another group of colleagues to beware of "Momo" getting to their children.

I have family members and longstanding family friends who have succumbed to this. Interestingly almost all of them were decrying the internet as something that couldn't be trusted before the age of social media.