focusedone
Totally get that it's a cat-and-mouse thing, but I don't mind making more work for the people trying to force this on us all.
The Telegarden was incredible! I read about it in a book about interesting places on the internet, which my dad bought for me shortly after we got our first home computer on the web, around 1996. I believe it was shortly after the Garden was moved from Berkeley to the AEC.
The incredible feeling of clicking a button in a webpage, waiting a few minutes, and then seeing the result of a robot's movement 5,000 miles away was just mindblowing.
The Telegarden was my first chat room, first 'social' account, and first human interaction online. Amazingly, tending the garden became less exciting than getting to know all of these interesting people from around the world. It was a unique community like I want to imagine still exists in tiny pockets of the old web.
Those robotic arms don't sell for tooooo terribly much used now. Someday I'd love to try replicating the site, though I don't know if it's possible to have that same social experience on the modern web.
They were also the cause of a fire on Mir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_EO-23
Looks like they only offer one plan, $99/month, which is pretty steep but must offset what other carriers make selling customer info. That's about double what I'm paying now but I do like the idea.
Most of the apps on my phone are installed from F-Droid. I guess the next time I get a new phone I'll have to wait at least 24 hours for it to become useful.
I'm seriously considering Graphene for a next personal device and whatever the cheapest iOS device is for work.
My degree is in Public Relations and I worked in political PR for a bit before moving to newspapers. The PR office worked so hard to word things in a way where news editors could lift our copy directly into print. It was a delicate balance to sell a point of view without sounding like a sales pitch.
Later, at the newspapers, I was shocked to learn how desperately editors would snag any text to fill the space between paid-for ads on a page. A minimal amount of actual journalism occurred above the fold. Past that we would publish absolutely anything in the English language without filtering.
This was all 20+ years ago. Now we've cut out the middle man, automatically publishing AI generated slop directly as if it were human-produced news. It's all very discouraging.
It does seem like a lot of computational effort to achieve what F9 / Reader View does in FF.
Doesn't take much.
The thought of people yammering to their computers in an office environment is deeply disturbing.
Imagine listening to someone trying to format a word document by dictating commands to their AI.
It feels like everything is done along party lines now with no room for compromise or working together.
If it's the latter, buying a pixel to run Graphene might be a particularly solid counter.