The problem is that the paid premium is NOT better than free with extensions. Piracy is a service problem, and the paid service is NOT better than the “pirated” one. Even if premium was completely free, if it didn’t allow extensions I would still use the ad version with extensions.

Revanced android apps also exist, and I won’t use them with premium accounts (no point) and they are the only way of having sponsorblock, return youtube dislike, manual HDR and many other small but very useful features.

I would gladly pay for the content if and when the youtube official apps and website had features similar to those extensions.

Portugal still has multiple very successful Toys R Us stores, most of them more than 20 years old at this point

Oh no, what will turtles eat now? They will all die from hunger! 🤔 /s

While editing my comment I deleted it by mistake lol. Here is what I was trying to post:

Don’t buy a Tesla or BMW. Done.

Edit: im joking, but you can just not connect your car to any internet. Most casual brands have literally zero outgoing connections if you don’t add or connect them to a network. Androd Auto and Apple Carplay are just displaying what your phone sends to the screen, the car itself doesn’t access the internet through those. Think of android auto and carplay like “HDMI monitors for your phone that have touch too”. Your phone does everything the car just displays it.

Connecting via bluetooth should also not be any problem since bluetooth doesn’t include internet access (unless you activate that ok your phone but Im sure the car will not use it). Bluetooth only sends and receives small bits of data that your phone chooses to send, not what the car chooses. Contacts names, phone numbers, audio and microphone are the only few data that gets sent to your car and only during phone calls or audio listening.

In the end, just avoid cars that have always connected systems like Teslas or modern BMWs or similar cars. Most Volkswagen, Audi, etc etc are 100% offline cars when you don’t connect them to a network. Most now can do it, but most its a subscription service that you can just not buy, and some even need SIM cards to work, that you just not use. Unless its a Tesla, those are connected even if you don’t pay the subscription.

Test drive the car. Disconnect it from all networks or don’t turn them on. Try to use all features. If the car constantly complains that it has no internet access for all of them, thats good.

Note that GPS access is always on and doesn’t require any subscription, so maps and navigation will still work. However that is not really a privacy violation by itself because GPS on cars and phones only receives signal, doesn’t transmit anything. You wont have traffic information or weather or anything tho. If you have traffic info, the car is connecting to some network, find how to deactivate that.

Many modern cars are too connected, thats true, but with the exception of a few brands, most cars go 100% offline the moment you disconnect them from their data services or don’t pay for that upgrade/subscription. So you will be fine even with a modern car.

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And yet people will just shrug it off and keep using windows. And Microsoft loves that.

To be fair, if they are like the example (static silent ads) they would be the least intrusive ads that YouTube ever had. To the point that I don’t even mind them. All of YouTube ads should be like this, not annoying, silent, and easily ignored.

Slowly more and more distros are looking over to a KDE future. GNOME devs being so incredibly hard to work with and this feeling of a huge community that is KDE and with how polished Plasma 6 is becoming, many distros are finally looking to at least give Plasma a try as a default. GNOME is well polished but there are so many extremely important and urgently needed features that KDE already implemented that are not even being discussed for GNOME. Many distros are getting fed up with how slow GNOME is into advancing their desktop. They take 2 years to change a few buttons around. And now that Plasma 6 has a 6-month fixed release schedule, it finally aligns with what distros want.

First Valve shocked the corporate distro world by choosing the seemengly less stable KDE as their default for the Steam Deck, which proved to be an amazing choice after all. Then recently, Nobara Linux, one of the most used Fedora distros, also switched to KDE as the default. And now Fedora is discussing into switching the main distro too. Qt6 is also a really flexible and promising framework and developers seem to have more fun working with it than with GTK4.

Recent switchers from Windows also largely prefer KDE instead of the minimalist approach, macOS-like GNOME. And linux has been gaining a lot of popularity and market share recently, and I could bet that a lot of these new users are not on GNOME, at least not on vania GNOME.

A great example is KDE having hit a HUGE record of bug reporting and feedback submissions, which means that more people than ever are using KDE actively and actually trying to help the project somehow. KDE has also been having a huge presence in social networks like YouTube and TikTok (especially because of its fun and interesting features that make GNOME look plain and a bit boring, needless to say GNOME vanilla wont convince a Windows user to switch…) which might speed up its adoption too.

Hum if you jailbreak/root you always could and will always be able to use any third party app store. 17.4 didn’t change a thing for jailbreak users

Apple: we now allow third party stores! You just need to pay us 1 million $! (We hope no one does it). And you need to use your developer account, but its easy!

Epic Games: we paid the 1 million, we are gonna make a third party store!

Apple: bans epic games developer account “Epic Games is not trustable!”

Apple really looks like a 5 year old kid with its own make-up rules based exclusively on their interest and gets mad when those rules that they themselves created are still not enough for them to win.

Thats mostly because of the overload quantity of ads, trackers, plugins, integrations, etc all websites have now. Using an adblocker halves your bandwidth usage. If you have a data cap, an adblocker is a must.

And then, optimization. As an Angular developer, knowing many websites nowadays are Angular or similar, the lack of optimization is a big problem. Most don’t even use lazy loading, not to mention managing the module imports into different components. They import everything into the main component and don’t do lazy loading leading you to websites that have 20-40MB (!!!) of initial load (when you open the website). This is so common that I think junior angular devs will slowly just kill angular popularity and give it a bad look. Takes work to optimize Angular, and many devs don’t care enough and just rush it. And then there are companies that don’t understand that web frameworks need optimization and just underpay devs or rush the dev time.

Please don’t use Angular (or similar complex web frameworks like Vue or React) if you don’t know how to correctly optimize it, or don’t have time or care for it. And don’t overload your pages with ads and integrations. You are ruining the web.

1 - buy one of those refillable ink tank printers that are now actually common and not expensive;

2 - buy ink bottles at aliexpress for $10 4x200ml ink or around that;

3 - years of ink for a few bucks.

If you have a cartridge printer, search on aliexpress for refillable cartridges for your printer and do step 2 anyway (you can usually refill those easily with a seringe).

Don’t feed their greed.

Streisand effect is currently very active on this one. Thousands of news outlets, many extremely casual and geared towards average joes who never new emulation existed, are now all being told that “this thing called yuzu can play switch games for free”. Nintendo is shooting themselves in the foot. Even if Yuzu dies, it will get forked and people who never knew emulation existed, now do, and look for alternatives.

Good luck shipping stuff in glass packaging. Very heavy, extremely fragile, big, expensive. Glass is only worth it on reusable stuff. We need to find a good material for “throwaway” stuff. Eco plastic made from stuff like bamboo are great starting points. They feel like plastic even mcdonalds is using this material for their throwaway spoons. And it can’t be that expensive or they wouldnt be using it for free spoons

Everytime I buy something from a local shop or a western brand, it comes packaged with minimal plastic, and a lot of well thought out materials. Even if they use plastic, its always a very thin plastic and very “soft”. Can’t describe. But when I buy ANYTHING from aliexpress you can tell it came from china just by looking at the packaging. It has SO MANY LAYERS of plastic, and very hard and thick plastic. If you buy for example a single keychain comes with 20x the weight of it in plastic. They smell so much to plastic chemicals too, something that “western plastic” doesn’t smell like. Every time I have to drink from a paper straw I remind myself that a 10x10cm sticker I bought came with 5kg of plastic and still arrived damaged from shipping.

We don’t need to reduce even more. We need to somehow force china to reduce it. I am againt taxes for everything, but maybe tax the amount/weight of plastic that comes on stuff you get from china. And find a way to tax the sender, not the buyer. Maybe that will make chinese companies to actually think about reducing they 50 tons of useless plastic waste they make each second.

The problem with AVP is that it constantly feels extremely lonely. The fun part about VR is playing stuff together, games, being in the same room even if others are in different countries, have funny full size avatars, interact in a “vr-chat” kind of way. VR is supposed to be a fun version of our world. AVP is extremely serious, too “professional” focused, and especially b o r i n g. All you do on AVP is exactly the same that you would do by yourself with your current devices already. Just even more isolated from the world. And even the most enthusiastic Apple users eventually get this feeling when using AVP. While stuff like Quest 3, Valve Index, PSVR2 all might look “cheap” and “not polished” at first, while using them all you get is “wooow” factor and fun. AVP, yes its well crafted and polished, but it does basically nothing and feels lonely inside it.

Use private dns on your wifi settings and input dns.adguard.com into the dns setting. Sometimes this can cause connection problems tho. It’s a bit hard overall to block stuff on iOS, too strict of an OS

The bigger the screen, the more you notice because it covers more of your field of view. I would say 240Hz is the sweet spot. You can definitely feel the improvement from lower rates, but rates above it start to be barely noticeable. However I am fine with 144-165Hz if I wanted to save money and still get a great experience. Bellow 120Hz is unusable for me. Once you go high refresh, you cannot go back, ever. 60Hz feels like a slideshow. For gaming 60 is fine, but for work use and scrolling around I can’t have 60. Yes people, high refresh rate is useful even outside of gaming.

Funny thing is, while gaming, even if my monitor and PC can do it, I rarely let my fps go above 120-140. I limit them in the game. PC gets much quieter, uses less power, heats up less and its smooth enough to enjoy a great gameplay. I will never understand people who get a 4090 and play with unlocked fps just to get 2000 fps on minecraft while their pc is screaming for air. Limit your fps at least to your Hz people, have some care for your hardware. I know you get less input lag but you are not Shroud, those less 0.000001ms of input lag will not make a difference.

To be fair, 60Hz to 75Hz is barely noticeable even by those who are used to notice these things. If you can’t tell the difference, it’s understandable.

Then, the bigger the screen, the more noticeable high refresh rate is, because it covers more of your field of vision. So in a small iPhone screen it’s not easy for everyone to notice (and then there is the fact that iPhones rarely go to 120Hz anyway which is an absolute mess by itself but that’s another topic, so your 15 Pro probably rarely goes above a noticeable Hz change anyway).

However, if you get a 144Hz or above, 24" and above monitor, you will IMMEDIATELY see the difference against your 60Hz monitor. Even moving the mouse feels more responsive and accurate. Makes targeting stuff with your mouse easier. Reading text while scrolling is possible also. It unlocks a new world, it’s not only for gaming. Casual and work use also benefit a lot from high refresh rates.

Because privacy and convenience are two extreme opposites and you can only go so far in the privacy direction before you start losing everything. Discord just works a million times better as a public forum/community than Matrix and is much more easily accessible to everyone.

There is a limit. I am privacy conscious but I still use all Google Services for example, because they actually provide me with a better web, work, mobile and entertainment experiences. Similarly, I prefer Discord for big communities with channels, server bots and topics, over Matrix.

Edit: all those people saying we can’t be privacy conscious and use Google Services at the same time: yes you can. Their services literally make my life better so I will keep using them, but I keep what I share with them to the absolute minimum. I go into their settings and disable everything I can about tracking and ads personalization (even if they still track me, I do my best not to be). You can surely still be privacy conscious using non-private products. Being extremist is not how you convince average joes to think about privacy, nor by telling them to give up all they use for unknown (for them) alternatives.