TheTechnician27

Shhh, don't call it "haptic feedback" or they might make them flat, unmoving buttons that have a vibration motor behind them.

Good. Fuck Chegg. Let cheating, plagiarizing dipshits have the dubious AI slop.

I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs' absolute credit, they don't push new users toward any of those, though.

I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there's a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in 'all').

Hence "4+", because I agree with you wholeheartedly.

When I told people that literally every aspect of life will be worse under Trump, I absolutely meant it. Republican poison will seep into literally every aspect of our lives. And this is exactly what I mean when I say "everything is political" to those who only single out a handful of hot-button issues as "political".

With the rise of fascism in the US, just keep "everything is political" in the back of your mind for the next 4+ years, and if you don't believe it by then, I don't know what to tell you.

Incidentally, we try not to use these sorts of "Forbes contributor" articles on Wikipedia when possible. They're effectively just blogs masquerading under the credibility of Forbes staff's actual journalism.

That said, I don't see anything wrong with this excerpt. This is legitimate attack vector.

The two criteria I suggested were "not saturated with ads and AI trash" (technically just the latter would satisfy OP's problem), and DDG meets both of those with no problem. Its AI "assistant" and its ads can both be trivially disabled. I use DuckDuckGo because I love its frontend and because it gives me fewer problems than Google did. I've only ever used alternative search engines that piggyback off the major ones (as you listed: DDG, Startpage, and SearX), so someone else would have to answer that for you.

Using a search engine that isn't saturated with ads and AI trash also solves this problem.

insultingly tiny, unupgradeable storage aside, that's surprisingly competitive with most modern Windows laptops

Twenty putillion dollars

Decentralization actually can be really powerful to give you a backup even if you prefer Signal; Signal's servers very infrequently go down, but when they do, you entirely lose that channel for an unpredictable amount of time.

Not joining the rooms Element suggests on its own client? Element will show you a list of suggested, popular rooms to join, and a fuckton of these are overrun by spammers and worse. If Matrix has basically zero ability to curate these rooms outside of "here's what's got the most members", then it absolutely should not in any capacity be recommending them, let alone as a way to get started for new users. It's fucking ridiculous, and before you say "Well why should they be expected to curate the rooms they suggest?", imagine the fucking disaster Discord would have on its hands if it started recommending servers, and several of its top 100 claimed to be related to popular FOSS applications but were actually completely unmoderated and filled with CSAM and Bitcoin scams.