My most recent was the Big Bad Wolf series by Charlie Adhara. It wasn't my usual venture, but I really enjoyed the pacing, world building, characters, and mystery that each book had.
Yet I often tend to think way too long on even smaller digital expenses, like an app for €2, but I will happily pay €10 for a coffee and a croissant at a train station like it is nothing.
I think about this a lot too. I spend $10 on a drink that's gone in a half hour, and I'll never remember having months from now, but spend lots of time questioning whether it's worth it to pay for apps I use daily.
I regularly pay for a VPN, cloud storage, and music/video streaming. I find myself most willing to pay extra for no ads on streaming services I use a lot, even if I only pay for a month here or there (YouTube, Peacock, Hulu). I used to pay for Proton (VPN, Email, Cloud Storage, and Calendar) before iCloud implemented E2EE. Sometimes I'll pay for news.
I find a lot of the apps I use I wouldn't benefit from paying for extra features for, and if I would benefit from them, I wouldn't have enough free time to use it to justify paying for it. A lot of my needs are covered by the free and/or stock apps.
AI is starting to feel like another financial bubble to me.
I’ve seen other people mention it, and it makes sense it’d look like something missing considering all the recent large MacBooks have had their speaker grills there. But it doesn’t bother me personally.
Not sure how much I trust them to handle this well considering how poorly the live-streamed Love is Blind reunion went.
Such data may be useful, it says, to “identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records.” Such civil liberties concerns are prime examples of how “large quantities of nominally ‘public’ information can result in sensitive aggregations.” What's more, information collected for one purpose “may be reused for other purposes,” which may “raise risks beyond those originally calculated,” an effect called “mission creep.”
Terrifying. Thank you for posting.
The problem with Signal is there is no way to backup your messages on iOS. I’m a very pro-privacy and used Signal for a while but stopped. Being able to have backups of my conversations with loved ones is more important than having the utmost privacy to me.
Sorry for your situation. Trying to sleep when it’s too hot is no fun. I recommend getting as much air circulation as possible. It makes a big difference. Fans will be your best friend. And switching to lightweight sheets, blankets, and sleeping nude might help. Good luck!
Same. I’d love to have a 64 ouncer because it feels like I’m constantly filling up my 32oz bottle, but my 32oz is already annoying in terms of it not really fitting in cup holders. A 64oz bottle wouldn’t fit in my backpack side pocket either.
Here's the website if you want to see the updates live without the twitch stream: https://reddark.untone.uk
This is apt timing because I was just looking for a new book lol. Goodreads recommendations and lists, local librarian recommendations (on our library website), www.whatshouldireadnext.com, and I used to use a subreddit for a niche category of books, but I'm trying not to use reddit anymore.
Congrats! I know how the small things can feel like major victories when closeted or just coming out.
I really hope so. I really miss that feel of the old internet. It's nice to have an online community where you get to know other users just from seeing their posts regularly. And obviously, I'm all for decentralization at this point after seeing how bad consolidation and centralization of websites has messed up the internet at this point. I still use one forum regularly that's very active and two others less often that are smaller but have enough active users.
Obviously, if reddit dies, I could see them making at least a small comeback. But I'm not sure how sustainable they are. It would require several different website owners to make their own websites with different topics of focus. Enough people would have to be able to find the websites in the first place for them to be successful. Like most of the internet, Google as a search engine seems to have gotten worse over the past 5-7 years and it's harder to find websites, especially smaller, newer websites like a brand new forum. If it's hard to find, you're going to be struggling with the network effect for a long time which will cripple growth even further.
Additionally, without the automatic sorting that reddit and lemmy has, the format of static pages of replies also feels a bit dated now. It's harder to discover useful/helpful/quality posts without reading through pages of replies. Plus, I don't know how much money small website owners can realistically make off just putting ads on their website nowadays. But I'm rooting for them. I really am.
One of my most visited lately is for a reality TV show, Vanderpump Rules. It’s not here, but I suspect the crossover between early adopters here on the fediverse and trashy reality TV shows is very low lol.