dskrepps

I've wondered for a while. Lots of people seem to think a Carrington Event will simply fry all small electronics and make everything stop working, but from my understanding all it'll actually do is cause power surges in long transmission lines and disrupt wireless signals. Apparently telegraph lines sparked and shocked people. So what effect will that actually have now? Will a massive power surge go through my house and destroy everything plugged in, and thus indirectly my desktop computer? Will every house on the grid catch fire, destroying all modern cities? Or will substations and transformers be destroyed but shield homes themselves from catastrophic damage? Will wildfires destroy every forest anywhere near modern infrastructure?

I want to recommend things everyone benefits from, not myself. Consequently, I don't want to support anything that doesn't trend the community toward my ideals.

For instance, the Mastodon project and mastodon.social are run by a non-profit. They have their own mastodon account which discusses updates, advertises merchandise to support them, and could ask for sponsors or donations if needed. Users can subscribe to their feed if they want, and support them should they need help, while users who don't want advertisements won't be affected. I'm confident in the stability of this model for them so I chose to make my Mastodon account on their instance so I can trust I won't have to transfer to another someday should one shut down.

I'm hoping the digital space evolves in this direction and that we approach a post-advertisement economy.

Otherwise, enshittification keeps ruining things and we can't rely on the long-term stability of anything. Just look at Google.

I'm very discouraged when I click their Blog page and see headlines like "Our best apps are now paid" and "Trial period." These apps have popups asking for support, which 100% are advertisements contrary to the thread title. Their apps which previously were free and received updates no longer get those updates and have been replaced with paid ones. This is a warning sign of enshittification and degradation of reliability. There are a multitude of ways they could someday stop updates to these apps too to replace them with another monetization scheme.

I personally don't consider what my direct experience will be, but instead the total sum of the collective experience all users will have. I want to support something everyone benefits from, not myself. Consequently, I don't want to support anything that doesn't trend the community toward my ideals.

As an example, the Mastodon project and mastodon.social are run by a non-profit. They have their own mastodon account which discusses updates, advertises merchandise to support them, and could ask for sponsors or donations if needed. Users can subscribe to their feed if they want, and support them should they need help, while users who don't want advertisements won't be affected. I'm confident in the stability of this model for them so I chose to make my Mastodon account on their instance so I can trust I won't have to transfer to another someday should one shut down.

I'm hoping the digital space evolves in this direction and we approach a post-advertisement economy.

Otherwise, enshittification keeps ruining things and we can't rely on the long-term stability of anything. Just look at Google.

I think our best bet to make a difference is to cause network effects to drive other users to take the same steps we do. In the long run that will help shrink their monopoly, and/or bring a tipping point closer to reality.

Similar to voting. Yeah, I could vote for a third party candidate, but the real power I have is in how many other people I can convince to vote for someone.

If you're mass-producing low-quality sites you would do that on day 1 with each of them. So it likely doesn't weigh positively as much as we would hope.

I use a Google Home Mini.

Half the reason I originally bought it was to simply be able to turn the light and fan on and off without getting out of bed.

The other half was music. Google Play Music was a godsend for a long time before they killed it. I can't stand Youtube Music and don't pay for other services, so I just don't use voice to listen to music anymore. Actually pretty angry and haven't given Alphabet a single cent since.

I ask it the weather every day. It answers 'when will it rain' with an hour and/or day of the week it might next.

I used to use it for relaxing sounds like rain, but one day they replaced the realistic rain sound with one that sounds to me like generated white noise only somewhat resembling rain, so it kind of annoys me now.

I constantly set alarms and timers for various reasons. Reminders and calendar events also, which sync with google services of course so I get them on my phone.

It can make notes. Any time I think of something in the shower and can't write it down I consider buying another one for the bathroom.

I can ask it where my phone is and it'll make it ring.

General queries are no more or less as good as what searching Google gives you at the top. Still useful when wondering something. I can ask it to define words or look for synonyms when I'm writing, without taking my mind away from the text. Or random stuff like 'what day of the week will September 22nd fall on,' 'how many days until Easter,' etc.

I frequently use it as a calculator. Easier to just speak a lengthy list of numbers than to type them all.

The most important thing about all of this is I don't have to move a muscle, and don't have to avert my eyes from what I'm focused on. Whether I'm passing out in bed, have my hands full while late for an appointment, or working hard at my PC, that's invaluable to me. Maybe not as important to everyone though.

Do I recommend Google's assistant specifically? Not exactly, but I don't like the other options either. Alexa will constantly break my train of thought by advertising what it can do with suggestions and whatnot, which is a main reason I don't use it, but my housemate doesn't mind. Other assistants just don't seem as polished and useful. Google's interoperability with my phone is a big reason I use it.

For $25 just get one for your desk and/or bedroom. There's still a lot of room to grow in this space before there's a better option without privacy concerns.

Now they don't have a $5 droplet, which was by name alone basically an important branding asset in of itself.

Is it important that they're losing the branding of the $5 droplet? It seems that's significantly more of an impressionable number than 4 or 6, in my understanding of the factors that made them popular. To me they've simply lost the #1 thing that people remember them by and don't stand out with that simple change. That's the only change that worries me.

What about the right congressman? Find whichever one's constituents are most likely to vote based on health related legislation, and try to suggest they get it adopted by a government agency. Through political ads people can see they immediately support the idea, visit the platform as-is, and that will influence their vote. Even if legislation doesn't ultimately get through that's still a lot of attention. Goes for any elected position whether it be federal, state, or even some smaller board of some kind. Pitching voter influence is a much stronger drive than simply suggesting people pay for something.

There's an open source version that works as a simple bookmarklet here: https://github.com/ds300/jetzt

I had been running the self-hosted version of Cloud9 back before Amazon acquired it. Once they did, development for that version was dropped and you can no longer use the current version outside of AWS. No bueno.

Eventually I found code-server and now I run that in disposable containers on my home server. It's based on vscode and has been working pretty well for me.

https://github.com/cdr/code-server