Alec out there fighting the good fight for us.

Not that I’d ever buy it, but I’m looking forward to the price tag so I can have a good laugh.

Microsoft has gone all-in on AI to the detriment of basically every other aspect of their business. They are in deep deep shit when the bubble finally pops.

I remember when this garbage used to be called malware.

So glad I switched email and calender services years ago.

I’m with Posteo.

I am open to the idea of paying for quality services that put the customer first. Hell, I pay for my email and have done so for years.

But Kagi has always squicked me out a bit. Some of their business practices over the years have been rather questionable, especially their push into AI which is exactly the sort of thing someone looking at Kagi would probably want to avoid. They are also very expensive. They’re one of those services that just assumes everyone is American so they just give a $ cost and don’t specify beyond that, so I’m going to assume their prices are in USD which means a plan for my dad and myself is $21CAD a month. That absurdly overpriced for a search engine subscription.

To put that into perspective: A YouTube premium family plan covers up to 6 accounts and is the same price and includes unlimited video and music streaming. Thoughts about YouTube aside and looking at this from a pure value perspective, paying that same price just for a search engine is a godawful shit deal. Do you know what my email costs per month? $1.25CAD

They need lifetimes in prison for treason and domestic terrorism.

The 1080p for premium users is garbage too. Youtube’s video quality in general is shockingly poor. If there is even a slight amount of noisy movement on screen (foliage, confetti, rain, snow, etc) the the video can literally become unwatchable.

Kind of a tangent, but properly encoded 1080p video with a decent bitrate actually looks pretty damn good.

A big problem is that we’ve gotten so used to streaming services delivering visual slop, like YouTube’s 1080p option which is basically just upscaled 720p and can even look as bad as 480p.

I cannot think of a piece of software that I want on my computer less than something like this. Literal voluntary malware.

Microsoft is so incredibly fucked when the AI bubble starts to burst. They’ve abandoned so many of their other projects and customers to go all-in on it.

They’re correct, though.

That’s a good idea.

It’s at the point now where the majority of the results of my web searches are clearly written by AI. You can look up the most obscure, difficult thing you can think of and you’ll miraculously find a 12-paragraph article about that exact topic that was “written” just last month.

And as with most AI “content”, those 12 paragraphs say absolutely nothing. AI is incredibly good at generating an entire novel’s worth of text that doesn’t actually say anything at all.

The K980 ditches them in favor of making you install Logi Options Plus to find out. Boo.

Instant e-waste.

Shareholder-led design.

There are so many options for fridges that don’t have any tech in them at all. This is so easy to avoid.

I use Win11 on my main computer for work and school reasons. I need maximum compatibility and reliability and it has met those goals. Back in the day, I used to use Linux on my old laptops and I dual-booted it on my main PC. It has been awesome seeing how far it has come and I would like to get back into it some day.

That being said, a huge barrier for Linux and prospective new users is the community. The Linux community is highly combative and toxic and it absolutely sours what should (and could!) be a great experience. Almost every interaction I had while troubleshooting had some level of condescending attitude or outright hostility and there were numerous times I was directly insulted for asking for help - the most recent being a couple years ago when I was trying out a distro and had sound driver issues.

Only a matter of time before Google will shut that down too.