this is shitpost 5d chess.

I have been liking Boost because it has a nice tablet app!

Also the safety was statistically worse for the most part

Haven’t had to email a file to myself since I set up syncthing

PCR has been around since the 80s, though it has continued getting more efficient and cheaper

Maybe the Pixel team didn’t talk to the Maps team. Maybe they did and the maps team said they didn’t care. Maybe everyone involved in all of these features has since left the company. With Google, who knows?

Desktop: Zotero, RStudio, Thunderbird, Sumatra PDF, Notepad++, NoMacs (image viewer), Espanso (text expander), qBittorrent, Inkscape

Android: FairEmail or K9 Mail, Authenticator Pro, Feeder, F-Droid, Pocket Casts, SD Maid

Multi-platform: Home Assistant, Wireguard, Syncthing, Jellyfin, Kodi, Samba, Firefox

Honorable mentions that don’t have the best UX but are still hugely appreciated for existing: Joplin, QGIS

I personally would greatly prefer to use Messenger via the Facebook mobile webapp, but that’s not an option, to my great chagrin. I wish they’d just let me use their product how I want to, but that’s not The Facebook Way.

Unfortunately, I think they’re moving in the other direction. They just discontinued Messenger Lite, which I used. I think now that people in India and other countries have more powerful phones, they feel less urge to keep the Lite versions available

I think it wasn’t about low end phones in themselves. The Moto G series is an example of a cheap phone that doesn’t include a lot of bloat. Really it would be easy for cheap phones to just leave the OS alone, keep it open so that users could update it if they wanted. That’s what the Nexus program did as well. But they don’t sell nearly as well as the base Samsungs. Samsung has more marketing and carrier relationships to fall back on, but that means more corporate shenanigans adding unnecessary nonsense to the OS like Facebook installed by default and non-removable, etc. And no updates, plus no way for advanced users to install updates

There’s no money behind it, partially because there’s no real competition pushing them to provide a better experience. Plus, anything that saves time with email actually has a perverse financial disincentive. It means less time viewing the Promotions tab in Gmail. Inbox was the last gasp of innovation for its own sake at Google.

A think a lot of people commute to work, take flights, have calendar appointments and reservations. Yet their new services are worse at helping me keep track of those things than something that came out years ago with simpler technology.

I have a very similar story. I was the most Google centric person I know in 2014 and 2015. I grew disillusioned after they killed Inbox. I realized that tech doesn’t always get better with time. Sometimes the money motive leads to tech actively getting worse for users

It was too effective at helping us use our phones less, which means fewer ads viewed. Some functionality such as the commute time cards came back, but it not nearly as effective fashion. And nothing has really replicated now on tap’s abilities.

I still visit posts from search, but I’ve given up most of the logged-in experience (upvoting, commenting, submitting on a weekly basis). 99% of my previous activity was via third party apps on mobile, so I have little incentive to go back and contribute content. I don’t feel like contributing for free to some portal run by a private company. Reddit used to be a steward of their community but now feel they own it. I don’t need to work for them for free

I have felt this way for a few years now. It doesn’t help that many of the family and friends closest to me are getting older. They definitely can’t read as well as they used to. I have to make sure to word my posts on Facebook and Instagram very carefully and with concise, efficient diction. Any sarcasm or meaning left implied just flies over their heads. It scares me regarding when I get to their age.

I’ve observed how these streaming services engage in borderline elder abuse. They make it extremely easy to sign up, and then to cancel, they require clicking through five different settings pages with tiny buttons and dark patterns. They obscure what each charge is on billing statements, and they are constantly increasing price, merging with each other, which creates confusion. I’ve had to help elder family and friends get out of subscriptions so many times, and each time, I essentially have to audit what they’re paying for. I think the Feds should mandate that every website has a giant red “Cancel subscription” button in the corner. The FTC is working on something like that, but it is unclear what it will look like in the final version.

They got their start on HSW, but I believe the podcast division is now separate, owned by iHeart?