chickenfeed

We have local community groups on FB. One for our hamlet of about 50 houses. Some households refuse to join as they don't do Facebook. I only do Facebook because of the local group. I long ago gave up trying to fill those people in. It is somewhat of a pain.

I have no idea what apps are sharing with what. On Android network access is so ambiguous. There's such fuzzy wording. Like when you are asked for location permission to use bluetooth. Even perms like file system access. I don't know what this extends to. Have no idea what it is doing. I recently set up a new ipad. I failed to even work out where Photos ended up. Couldn't work out what was backed up, and what wasn't. How to opt out of everything and opt in piecemeal. Whether the OS/gadget had AI enhancements, what they were or are, whether the apps would have cloud access or not. In fact for an apple device it bugged me with dialogs from the get go. And bluetooth kept turning itself back on. I would say I am technically savvy, but I was pretty clueless. I was quite keen to try out some of the AI photo tools. Like find pictures of such and such, but I didn't get that far as confusion abound.

It's actually a real drag. I live in a rural area and the mobile signal is up and down. Sometimes I don't get SMSs for hours to a day late.

Don't forget Anom. (A cautionary tale.) https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/146/

I read an article that said something along the lines of people aren't prepared to pay for apps, so instead we get app store silo advert supported crap-ware. And if it's not the apps its click bait making fractional gains by being supported by ad networks. That some of, but not all of us recoil from.

I wouldn't say it's all trash, but I find TV like this. I loathe most of it finding it pretty vacuous. I am still drawn to it.

We had a defining realisation last year when we found a Youtube channel where a guy cleans carpets. I found it more nutritionally satisfying than 99% of programming on the TV. It was and is totally eye-opening. I have a similar draw to nature. I can watch wild animals doing their thing. And get some entertainment with curtain twitching. I think it's just that inherent human thing - watching.

I do like reading. The minutes I do this are ever dwindling through competition for my idle brain.

I was very late to the party getting a smartphone. Didn't stop me picking up my laptop repeatedly. Visiting the same old haunts.

I have yet to install Facebook or Whatsapp or similar. I think it would be the death of me. I spend way too much time on my phone/computer.

I was in a care giving role and felt it couldn't leave my side. Since losing that person, I now rejoice in being able to leave my phone. Heck I didn't turn it on yesterday. And it has been sitting in the kitchen all day today.

The telephone does fill me with existential dread as most communication with me is asking me for something or alerting me to something negative. Perhaps that's an age thing. Whereas the Internet is still pleasurable but a complete and utter time suck.

If we could cut people's tongues out the world would be a better place.

I don't know, I think communication can provide a fertile ground for good exchanges as well as bad. It's just somewhat stifled in the current forms.

Self-hosting sounds good but the security concerns are just a bind. Plus you need stability. Like having a home. Our electric grid falls over at least once a week where we live. Yes I could use batteries, but no, I can't be bothered.

Bluesky has potential with the AT protocol.

I think I had a flagged post on Bluesky, early on that just referenced something elsewhere - it was pretty harmless. And I remember a few X users trying the platform saying something vaguely controversial and getting a suspension. Or some such. I don't want to get into the ins and outs of censorship and free speech but you can get booted out the pub for saying something disagreeable in front of the bar hands or patrons. And I would be quite livid if I had invested in a platform and then got shut down.

The AT protocol gives you the ability to produce feeds. But it's actually the consumption aggregation and discover-ability that seems to the difficult bit. I feel we need a lightweight RSS style reader in browser to really get past this. There are weird hacks on Bluesky to subscribe to feeds. But it is messy. The feeds are where the magic potentially happens.

Twitter had become unpalatable before Musk bought it. And there were various crisis of confidence and herd threatening migrations, but people just couldn't be bothered. In its latest ungodly form people are still sticking around, or moving to silos and bubbles on other platforms, it's just a complete and utter mess at this point.

Platforms inevitably win out with convenience. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp succeeded as people just couldn't share or publish photos or files easily. Combined with some magic discover-ability.

Twitter's collapse has been painful. But weirdly it was incredibly influential though low in membership.

My personal consumption of social feeds has been obliterated to nearly zero. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I published for myself rather than an audience and had used Twitter just because it was easy. I have a broken computer at the moment and my entire dev stack / environment is in chaos. And although I think the barriers to publishing and self hosting are low there are still inherent obstacles.

I used to enjoy using browsers like W3M, if you can just throw assets at your favourite tool of choice, like an image viewer, a video player, it just feels better for me as I don't have to learn a different interface for every site I visit.

But perhaps, not so good, don't google that one.

Great app name: ontheloo

It was a joke, of course I don't get my partner to chew my foods for me. The blending is not so much the issue. It's the saliva being an important part of the digestive process that counts. Blended soups can upset my gut, probably as I don't chew.

It's just play. Meaning that I'm too lazy to even chew my own food, so I get someone else to do it. Like on Ferenginar.

Yes.

I thought that fat had been un-demonised and overtaken by sugars and ultra-processed foods.

Looking in my stock cupboard, the raw fats I do get are probably the best bang for the buck nutritionally.

Never mind being paid to have children. I'd just like to have the means to support a dog. It's bizarre to think that in a nation like the UK we'd struggle so much.

We have put off having kids and now have probably missed the fertility window, because we have never been financially in a position to support some. And it's a horrible pain for the pair of us.

It's always weird reading HN with over inflated egos, and those on good salaries.

I've been in debt for over a decade. For some that money would be chicken feed, but for me it has ensured I'm in perpetual debt. I never have spending money. Wear clothes until they totally fall apart. Found a pair of shoes that I have repurposed. And sometimes have barely anything to eat for weeks. If I'm lucky I get to the pub once a year. Can't afford Christmas presents etc.

Then I read that Boris Johnson will struggle for a place to live when he retreats from being a prime minister where he struggles to live on his 200k salary. And in the following months earns 5 million for doing a a few speeches.

Some of us indeed can have nothing but never have to worry.

I don't know, there's many people with dairy intolerance.

A bit off puffed grain draped in sugar with a sprinkle of vitamins, in a headache inducing substance doesn't sound like the best start for any kid.

But agree that it was a go to for me when getting back from school. But then again we starved ourselves to keep our dinner money when we were kids. And barely ate well at all. Pretty envious of those kids that had parents that cooked for them.

My second school had good food. If I had spent the money on a dinner I would have done much better than eating at home. My third school had crap food.

Envious looking back on those that had free school meals. This is in the UK. But this is years back, and I wouldn't be surprised if the quality of lunches has dwindled to nothing, or even if schools have canteens.

I visited a hospital a decade or so back, and it had a KFC on the concourse.

There's foods that trigger GERD for me, and I used to roll around the floor every night in agony, not knowing quite what was going on, as it was my norm.

To fix late night issues, I just have to eat before 6pm.

Chew properly. Soups kill me. And anything tomato sauced based is out.

Also weirdly oatmeal can trigger issues for me. But I can get away with it in the morning. I think it's also a chewing issue.

A huge amount of digestion happens in the mouth. So now I get my partner to pre-chew most of my foods for me.

Out the box the squashed tabs vs the silly tab scroll thing on Firefox is horrible. But it reminds me I have too many tabs open anyway. I mainly use FF, but the UI really is behind the times. Notice MS marketing stuff like chatGPT in their browser. They are tooling it up. I want my browser to help me. The tab/workflow/history/sandboxing, I feel could all be a bit more ingrained in the desktop OS/UI.

Google is the plugin on Chrome. If you unwittingly walk blindfold into using it on say Android etc. You'll have all that Google stuff activated, and it's a real boon. Difficult to give up. Heck hard enough to sign out. You unknowingly can sign in.

Yeah there are different options, and yeah there are extensions. But why would I install an extension that basically says it can spy on every tab in my browser? And why would I even trust Google in my browser?

AIs are magic to me. The pattern recognition feature of human I've always thought pretty unique and hard to replicate. We use it when scanning the slop on websites to do some kind of data extraction. I was part of the semantic web camp in my brain, but you are right, if machines can seemingly make sense of the slop then why bother?

There was that small window of niceness, where the html diminished in size. Now it's just all pseudo inline styles painted by class names with lashings of scripts. Always surprised when you peek under pretty much a bereft page of nothing and it's a whole heap of code.

I'm one of those annoying people that just uses reader mode anyway - not that it always works. Because I get fed up of zooming in and out, inflating text size etc etc.

I don't want to totally neg on web dev. But it does suck donkey balls. I've been doing it for years. From writing raw html,to using scripting langs, frameworks and what not. And the amount of time it takes to do not a lot I figure is just a colossal brain drain. We just went on holiday, and all I wanted to do was look up places to go eat and drink, or visit for the day, and most of the sites sucked. Or were out of date. Not updated or whatnot. There's still lots of fire once and forget sites. Probably because budgets are just can't afford updates. Or the updates are just technically too difficult for people to grok.

The complexity of sites is paralysing. What could be a few simple pages of texts and images is totally over-engineered for no good reason and is burning a stupid amount of CPU cycles. Probably built on a hacked off-the-shelf CMS that could do with security updates.

CMS and frameworks are being used, because there wasn't a good alternative to something as neat as frames.

A site I'm working on at the moment has quite a pretty design, but pull the CSS and it's just a mess.

I was looking at going to the cinema recently and the local picture house made it practically impossible to just scan the handful of films that were playing that week. I realised you could pretty much shove it all in a spreadsheet and it would read better. Heck, I downloaded the JSON from their API, and it was easier to read.

Most of it is all tiresome lipstick on a pig.

Facebook was a success for a few reasons, one was the easy on-boarding (which uses nefarious privacy trade-offs), the other is that you could actually share photos easily. Also see, Whatsapp and Instagram. Publishing needs to be easy. And despite a simple ftp being easy, there's a weird disconnect in the usability process that makes this tricky for mere mortals. People want to drag and drop, or upload, fire and forget and edit easily.

Just been in a holiday cottage out on the exposed dales in the English peaks. And by about day four we had fruit flies. Sometimes I think they emerge from the bananas.

Weird isn't it. I used to run Opera on a Pentium 200 with a pitiful amount of ram.

Oh how times change.

I have mostly old hardware (the best computers I have is a smartphone and a macmini from 2012). I'm disappointed when I load newer Linux distros and they appear slower. Even though I now have SSDs. Browsers are really greedy. I have a machine with 2GB of ram and a single core CPU. It's a low power rig. But cannot run Windows 10, it just about did when I first installed it. Debian runs better, but a browser kills it. It's a one app only. We had someone donate us a Windows 3.1 rig once, at the time we had 600MHZ Windows 2000 machines and ME. And we were gob smacked at how fast the 3.1 machine was on some ancient hardware.

Windows always used to have that fresh lightweight install vibe. But as soon as it started indexing, doing updates, and virus scanning it would drag to nothing. Along with all those system tray apps that would take an age to fire up.

Partial suspend to disk made things boot faster. Like not doing the whole driver scan thing on boot. I don't know if Linux has ever taken this on board. It's a blessing and a curse as Windows doesn't like being ported to another machine, whereas my Debian disks I can swap between some desktops and laptops without much issue.

There's also that weird delayed animation thing, that is meant to feel like polish. But slows down desktops. Weird animation effects and what not. I tend to run XFCE and turn off any thing like that.

I'm using a Chromebook right now and this is an old machine, but still feels pretty snappy. Certainly weird and wonderful experiences between hardware. I have High Sierra on an SSD on my Mac Mini, and that's slower by far to boot than my Linux Arch box on the same age hardware. Having said that the UI always feels more responsive as it's tailored for that.

Linux suffers lots for me with kcompactd or whatever it is. Some weird memory disk swap stuff. If I accidentally code an infinite loop my machine turns to complete mud, and takes about 5 minutes to recover. Whereas it boots to the browser in under 1minute. Weird huh?

I think Musk is hoping that Twitter can be this. But he should have edged in slowly to make Twitter Auth a trustable product. It now feels like a mess and has less authenticity.

The UK government were going to delegate their age ID system to the porn industry.

Can't say I have ever used Google, Microsoft or Apple ID beyond their own gardens it fills me with ick.