_pete_

If you really think about those books as a grown up some of the plot holes are big enough to drive a goddam truck through.

As a kid having their first experience of a magical universe though they were goddam incredible

I really hate the corporate IT.

I was at a job that was slowly transitioning from a medium sized company to a larger one, initially we were allowed just install and use whatever on our machines, but gradually IT started implementing policies where if we wanted to add something it had to go through a request system and usually it would be denied.

As a software developer this was just infuriating, it would hold up work, force us to use shitty software (like Chrome and Edge) and there would often be fuck ups where installing a new version of software would require removal of the old one and installation of a new one - which would trigger the approval process again.

Like - I get it - some people can’t be trusted, but we were some of the key devs for the companies product, we know what we’re doing.

I was rather happy to leave that part of the company behind when I left.

Destiny was supposed to be their “forever” game, the problem is that after 2 dozen expansions:

1. New players are extremely intimidated about joining
2. Old players dislike losing the content they’ve paid for when it’s vaulted
3. Long term players will eventually get bored of playing the same thing they’ve been playing for years

Live service games just won’t last forever like they want them to.

Quick PSA: they don’t currently block VPNs, so you can sign up for an account in a cheap country (I picked Nigeria) and use a foreign currency debit card (I use Revolut) to get Premium for like £1.50 a month for my entire family.

If they close that loophole then I think I’ll be done with it, the ads make it basically unusable these days.

Hard disagree with that, DDG searches are accurate about 90% of the time that I use it (which as a web dev is quite a lot) if they aren’t hitting Google with the same term rarely wields any better results.

Apple Maps and Fastmail.

Fastmail is paid but the 1Password and disposable email address system makes it worth it for me.

I went through a period of de-googling a couple of years ago. Swapping browser, mobile os, search engine, storage, maps, music, video purchases, voice assistant and even email service was relatively simple, there are alternatives out there which do the job just as well if not better than what Google offer.

The only exception is YouTube, yea there are individual sites that occasionally offer some of the videos I want (often with a subscription attached), there are some federated systems like NewPipe which have some videos but there is no one offering remotely the quantity or quality of what you can get on YouTube for free.

As the article states, it’s basically a monopoly at this point without a viable alternative.

Arc is weird but pretty good once you get used to it.

DuckDuckGo is good if you want a minimal browser and don’t really care about extensions

Brave is OK if you want a slightly more private version of Chrome

Honestly though, just use Firefox.

They totally did that

The problem was that people weren’t really interested in any of it.

The UI was cluttered and messy to look at, none of it was as polished or natural to use as iOS or Android.

Plus there was no Google Maps, no Google Docs (and Office 365 wasn’t around to replace it), even that apps that were in the store felt pretty bad quality. I had Spotify on my iPhone and it was nearly flawless, when I switched to Windows Phone it kept cutting out or crashing or disconnecting from the mobile connection, it just wasn’t fully baked.

I’ve seen a few video games and movies that I’ve gone on to look into from YouTube ads.

90% of them are total annoying bollocks though.

/r/webdev and /r/formulae are the main ones I miss.

This is how I do it.

I pay for Netflix, Prime (only really for the free shipping), Disney+, Apple TV+ and Spotify, if it’s not on any of these then I’m going to pirate it.

The whole exclusivity stuff is just rubbish, I get the reasoning but if you can’t make your content easily accessible then I just don’t want to pay for it.