Thank you for the reassurance because I felt like an idiot when the penny finally dropped. Although, admittedly, I’ve found that I rather enjoy being old and out of touch. My dad would have likely thought it was something about Linus from Peanuts.

not having the data of being told to fuck off, presumably.

Never heard of before and dgaf about whoever Linus Sebastion is. All this stuff I’ve been seeing about what an asshole “Linus” is thinking it must be some kerfuffle about Linus Torvalds but the bits and pieces I read made no sense. Even less now I’ve figured out it’s just some random asshole named Linus. How did I end up here? Take me back to my room, please.

Interesting - here’s a news story about it (Guardian) ‘It was an accident’: the scientists who have turned humid air into renewable power

Scrolling back through the original news archives is pretty interesting http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/News/9211.html there’s a link at the bottom of each for “previous edition”.

Maybe they’re just chilling in Mark’s metaverse.

I didn’t notice that you were posting from Mastodon as I’m on Lemmy and your posts appear here just like any other Lemmy user - but the @fuser at the start of your messages is probably the tell, I think Mastodon defaults the username you’re replying to, whereas Lemmy doesn’t. It’s great that we can use different applications without some corporate gatekeeper capturing everybody’s personal info at the integration point to hawk to an advertising company.

Well, thanks again for the info - I’m trying it now and the results seem excellent, it took me to wikiwand, which I’d never used but it’s a front end for wikipedia - it’s quite nice. I’ve learned so much about alternative FOSS and great ad-free content by reading and posting here. I was never a great fan of reddit - liked to scroll but hardly ever posted there - I thought RPAN was the coolest thing they did - but Lemmy is great for conversation, despite the relatively small user base - I’m grateful that reddit’s nonsense drove so many helpful people here.

The best part is watching these idiots blow their fortunes thinking they are going to continue building on the old paradigm of monolithic platforms when the ground is gradually shifting towards diversification via decentralization and they are behind the curve now, not in front of it. This is not your dad’s internet. Hopefully they continue splashing out huge amounts of cash in ill-fated efforts to prove they are still relevant. There’s no fool like an old fool - and old, rich technically-out-of-touch fools who lack the self-awareness to stop imagining they are hip are particularly amusing.

everyone has their price. with unlimited funds he should be able to make something pretty slick for whatever the vision is - not that I would ever use it, of course. But don’t imagine that software engineers won’t compromise their politics if the money is good. Given the necessity of income, you can rationalize anything if you really need to.

https://andisearch.com looks like it might be a better option - thank you so much for posting. I’m mostly using duck-duck-go which is tolerable but by this point we should have come up with a more useful way to index relevant information. Google would rather we see ads than any relevant content, which wasn’t the case when they first launched google in the late 1990s. Google was refreshing at the time because of its cleaner interface than yahoo and uncluttered results, amusingly enough - it’s a far cry from what it once was.

Right - that’s a good approach, however if you’re looking for a quick answer to an immediate question by searching using a common search engine, the garbage SEO pages are the most irritating, even with adblocking.

Yes, it is a nightmare. The insane volume of ads and clickbait injected into web pages is killing the internet as an information source. Most of the searchable stuff is unusable. Which explains why ChatGPT was so enthusiastically embraced - it’s really just synthesizing content into a readable form that doesn’t require navigating around a jungle of animated gifs and flashing ads. That’s also I think why Lemmy and Mastodon are so refreshing to use, and hopefully will stay that way - although money seems to find a way to ruin everything. Lemmy right now feels a lot like the internet used to be before the big money came along and ruined it with advertising and platform lock-ins.

assuming you are using a desktop os, e.g windows/linux, put an entry in /etc/hosts, e.g. 192.168.0.x yourname

then you can use yourname:xxxx

“Toot” is a silly word invented to make Mastodon seem like Twitter. However “tweet” is equally ridiculous.

We already have a word - “comment” - which is universally understood. Also has the added benefit of not being conceived by some Silicon Valley marketing genius.

It exists to provide the illusion of competition.

it’s not an assumption at this point. They are just a pair of losers who got lucky. They are the best argument imaginable for restoration of a 90% tax rate and inheritance taxes.

thanks - that looks like full independence and would be good to try. I’ve been using codeium, which was suggested here and it seems as good, if not better than github copilot and it’s free for solo developers.

I appreciate you taking the time to make the suggestion - I’ve learned quite a lot about open source software options in a few weeks here on Lemmy and find it’s been an excellent resource for technical info and suggestions.

gnumeric runs great on any old linux machine - it isn’t as sophisticated as Libreoffice Calc but for basic spreadsheeting, it’s very fast and lightweight.

gnucash is an alternative to quickbooks for accounting - it’s been around so long that it will run on anything and it does the job without sharing your data or bombarding you with ads.

you can always run nmap in the terminal and have some fun with that.

Right, except we aren’t trying to “replace” youtube. Those who are prepared to put up with youtube can have it. Same with spez/reddit. If people like those platforms, and happy with them then they can stay there. Those of us who don’t care for them can develop communities and content elsewhere.

If you’re cool with algorithms showing you ads every five minutes then by all means stick with the commercial platforms, but you’re also generally welcome to help build or support a platform that provides a better user experience – and doesn’t use revenue growth as the primary motivator for everything.