I don’t disagree.

There is one forum I still participate in:

https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum/

It’s mostly tech-focussed and Australia-centric, but it does have other topics like sport, TV etc…

I wish there were more like this.

I hate that the bulk of online discussion is now owned/monopolised by a couple of huge corporations.

A decent percentage of Gen X and early millennials grew up familiar with computers. You kind of had to be, to some extent. Stuff didn’t always work smoothly or easily, so some tinkering and understanding of how things work beneath the surface was required.

We’re moving towards a future where a computer becomes just like an appliance, like a TV. Both the hardware and software will be locked down and set up to work. You just tap and press buttons to get it to do its thing.

Eventually, we may even get to the point where computers are required to be locked down “for our safety”.

If we get that far, then I can imagine those who want to build their own and have full freedom to install and customise it any way they want could be considered the very fringe/fanatical elements of society.

“Hey, you want an illegal unauthorised computer, why on earth would you need that, are you a terrorist or criminal or something?”

I hope things don’t go quite that far. But I don’t think it’s out of the question.

Thanks for sharing.

All too often the free and open alternatives (or these days even just the non-subscription alternatives!) involve compromising some features or convenience.

But not always.

Only kids and teens? Pretty much everyone around here has their head down starting at one.

(He says while scrolling through Lemmy on his phone…)

Is this a surprise to anyone?

This was already my understanding when I got the first pre-release one in 2014.

In that time, it has mainly learned how to"dim the living area lights to 50%" and “set the AC to 22 degrees”. That is about 99% of it’s use.

Wonder if that’s helped it’s AI much…

Nice, I’ve been using it for years and didn’t even know about this feature!

Train goes onto ship, ship sails out, train continues on the other end :)

When I first joined I mainly used all to find communities I was interested in and then subbed to them.

Now that I have nearly 100 communities subbed, I mainly use the subscribed view, occasionally I’ll take a look at all, very rarely local.

I’ve never had a Facebook account, I’ve never had an insta account, but I do use WhatsApp.

Pretty much everyone I know whether old or young uses WhatsApp. When I was travelling, a lot of apartments, hotels and booking services used it too.

Seems to be the one messaging app that cuts across all generations, countries and also the Android/IOS divide.

This is so true.

For 10 years (2011 to 2021) I carried both an Android phone (personal) and an iPhone (work provided). Both phones were updated about every 2 years.

Over those years I’ve watched IOS get closer and closer to Android. The funny thing is Android has also been creeping towards IOS in some areas, though that is to a lesser extent than the other way around.

In recent years they’ve gotten pretty close to each other in basic functionality.

I still prefer Android, but IOS is much less annoying to use than it was a decade ago.