The worst thing to do would be an inorganic botch job on here to fill a gap when there’s no need, you can read that content elsewhere.

Anyway, it’s not an automatic guarantee of engagement or interaction. It’s purely a hack move.

I’m happy to use Reddit if I feel I can’t find anything to read on Kbin. You are allowed to use both you know?

I mean yeah I vape, that makes sense because it wasn’t the nicotine itself which was killing my lungs.

Apparently nicotine itself is as bad for you as caffeine, the worst thing about it is it’s insanely addictive without giving much of a high or anything in return…

That’s a very black and white way of putting it. As long as you’re an adult who can tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and you’re not spending hours obsessed with it I don’t think it’s unhealthy. The way you phrase ‘avoid it completely’ makes it sound like you’re going out of your way to avoid it already.

(I think the problems are coming through with the generation being ‘brought up on porn’, and thinking real sex is like it is in the videos online but that’s a different story really.)

Can cigarettes be used in a healthy way? Eh, only in very specific scenarios

Gonna have to bite and ask what very specific scenarios smoking could be healthy?

It’s not really that surprising that the average user wants the most popular search engine instead of yahoo (of all things) baked in, whatever your views on Google.

I remember having to change things I got from… places… from epub to mobi using calibre for my old school kindle to recognise it years ago. I don’t even have that device anymore.

Glad they’re accepting what appears to be the standard format tbh.

This is about misinformation on social media plays a part in war and journalism

8/20 here. Proud of getting some right. Really shocked about the answers to some!

A tricky test indeed

Funnily enough gay sex was fine in ancient Rome (as long as you were the dominant one) but having sex in the light (whether natural or candle light) was seen as a massive taboo.

(Amongst the upper and middle classes anyway, I doubt the majority of people cared)

Obviously - I guess I’m more surprised at The Register in that case. They’re a very savvy industry magazine. Presumably they get a hefty wad.

Thanks for this - this is something that has passed me by. So essentially plagarising another website’s content for traffic plus the usual Google shenanigans? Nice

Thanks for the info - was not aware of this before. Yet more wonderful business practices from the world of big tech…

Sorry for that, but I don’t actually understand what you mean…

EDIT OK I’ve googled it and it seems to be a page that is sponsored by Google but I use Firefox and it worked fine with that - so is the problem that it doesn’t work with certain browsers?

I mean this isn’t miles away from what the writer’s strike is about. Certainly I think the technology is great but after the last round of tech companies turning out to be fuckwits (Facebook, Google etc) it’s only natural that people are going to want to make sure this stuff is properly regulated and run fairly (not at the expense of human creatives).

I just started using it for Android the last month or so when Chrome dropped the flag feature that let you toggle dark mode for websites with system dark mode.

I have a VPN with an adblocker so that aspect of Chrome never bothered me so much. Chrome felt like it worked slightly smoother but at the end of the day a browser is a browser and Firefox does the job. (Samsung’s browser is actually surpringly good for those with a Samsung device looking for a Chrome alternative)

Firefox does seem more trustworthy overall, although I’ve learned by now that trusting tech companies is not a sensible thing to do.

No sorry, this is an extremely trivial thing to send death threats over. The PR for this achieves the impossible and gains sympathy for Unity

Ah I was just going to their website and it was refusing to load the page. But then when I tried it on Chrome it was fine.

I’ll have a play around later, cheers

Doesn’t seem to play nicely with Firefox Android unfortunately. Which is ironic because Chrome on Android is one of the areas of Google I decided to experiment degoogling from just a week ago or so

I mean the article is specifically about Google search. Which might have gone downhill since whenever it first came out with the introduction of ads (sorry, ‘Sponsored Results’) but I’m not seeing significantly better competition for delivering search results. Everyone is still just aping the brand leader.

DuckDuckGo is obviously better for privacy for example but it doesn’t seem to have any ambition except to deliver the same results as Google but without the ads and tracking which is ok but not a big enough draw except for people already concerned about privacy. Bing gets essentially the same results but if anything seems more spammy than Google with pop ups about making it or edge your default search engine or browser. It feels like other search engines just take Google search as something to copy and put their spin on it though.

I’d say search is one of the things Google is still getting right enough to earn its place as the leader. Some things it does well, some things it has badly declined on (someone above mentioned Google assistant hardly understanding anything anymore, when it used to be the best in this area too), but generally you can replace most Google things with programmes doing things their own way. Search engines just feel a bit like reskins to me

I remember definitely that Firefox was the browser of choice in our house pre-Google. IE was always nasty to use and my Dad was always a tinkerer and worked with IT guys a lot so we had Firefox on PC for ages

(As a side note those same well meaning IT guys persuaded my Dad Linux was really easy to set up and use as a home PC for the whole family. Didn’t end well)

Anyway, Firefox was trumping IE hands down as a family PC browser, I suppose I’m talking late 90s early naughts? Don’t know exactly. But we would have been using Ask Jeeves still as our search engine before Google search launched and that made my Dad’s eyes light up, because it was fast. And it was the same with Chrome when it came out. By then I’d moved out but like you say, they had the PR as the guys who were now changing things most.

And it wasn’t all bs, because it was and in many ways is a very good browser. On the one hand there’s definitely an element of people using what everyone else does but also, if it was a total crock of shit no one would use it. For me it’s not even so much privacy but my tolerance for ads and need for a dark mode on mobile have got me back to Firefox on Android for now