dch82

I've heard the legends of having to drive to literally everywhere (e.g. drive thru banks), but I have no clue how far apart things are.

I live in suburban London where you can get to a big supermarket in 10 minutes of walking, a train station in 20 minutes and convenience stores are everywhere. You can get anywhere with bus and train in a few hours.

Can someone help a clueless British lemmyposter know how far things are in the US?

EDIT

Here are my walking distances:

• To the nearest convenience store: 250m
• To the nearest chain supermarket: 350m
• To the bus stop: 310m
• To the nearest park: 400m
• To the nearest big supermarket: 1.3km
• To the nearest library: 1.2km
• To the nearest train station: 1km

Straight-line distance to Big Ben: 16km

IDK if this is just a me thing or something a lot of people experience.

https://tilde.zone/@acdw/113161965940175258

Why did UI's turn from practical to form over function?

E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365

It's easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.

Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.

Why did this happen?

There was a golden age when computers were something you owned, not like before when they were big machines your employer or university would give out access to, nor like after when they went to the cloud, you bought what was essentially a thin client and every software became a service.

At least in the olden days the computers weren't forced into every single damn part of society!

Now in order to talk with most of your friends and family, you have to sell your soul to every one of the thousand ToS's. It's impossible to meaningfully use your personal device you bought with your own money without the internet, as every app and their mom needs to call home for some reason. For some reason, it is morally acceptable for a company to prevent you from being able to have someone you pay to replace parts of your device with third-party components you bought with your own money!

Now, of course, you can simply install some Libre operating system and use Lemmy, or Mastodon or whatever. But computers are so embedded into society that it is simply impossible to go without these services unless you want to get yourself isolated (and potentially in trouble with the authorities).

Besides, from prior experience, most people are unwilling to use technologies unless it is physically placed in front of them, whether through social influences, advertising or word of mouth, which generally corporate services do better than Libre alternatives.

It used to be that computers and programs were made for the end user. Now they are simply tools for ad and data-collection companies to extract every byte of personal data and force every second of advertising on others.

I've been seriously considering to remove computers from most aspects of my life, but as paper slowly disappears from our lives, this becomes harder and harder. Now you would likely be fired if you refused to use Teams or Slack or whatever your company uses. No one uses fax or writes mail or watches live TV anymore.

The only other alternative is to take back computers and make them personal again.

Text:

Please do not add genAI images to punch up your writing. You might think that it adds a nice little bit of visual pizazz to your content-marketing piece, but what you're actually doing is *making it look like content marketing* rather than a useful resource. To the extent that content marketing is an effective tactic, it is because you build trust with the customer by providing them valuable information. A genAI turd plopped on top of your writing is a signal that it will be worthless slop.

Anyone sane has left Xitter already and the crazies stay on their own platform, making the Web generally much more pleasant, as less and less sites link to Xitter.

I decided to write a parody song based on the current state of the interwebs.

Enjoy!

Am I the only one I know
Who has an adblocker loaded and installed?
Websites will scream for it to get closed, closed, closed

I-I-I browse the internet
And UX ranges from up down and sideways
Thank God I have Lemmy 'cause Lemmy will always
Be better than Reddit 'cause Spez be my life's bane
I don't know why sites always seem so dismal
Paywall, ads, spam and some tracking
Whether it's The Verge or the Times on the Web
Sometimes offline seems better than the mess that's on the Net

Let it be said that what ads represents
It's operators striking a balance, it's them
Striking a tough balance
Between bankruptcy and irrelevance
That's best represented best by their bank balance
I do not have ADHD, my attention just hates all the ads
They will not let me read, I guess I'll read books instead
And sometimes paper seem better than the distraction on the web

Am I the only one I know
Who has an adblocker loaded and installed?
Websites will scream for it to get closed
But I know I read it this far, kid

Yeah, yeah, yeah

It's not as fine as it seems, pardon
Me yelling, I'm telling you big libraries
Are not what's growing on the web, it's a different dream
A terrible AI feasting on handmade blogs
Freeze frame please, let me paint a digital picture portrait
Something you won't forget, it's all about the Google
And how it's a gateway that lets out spam sites
That make textbooks look not boring

Behind the screen are islands of brainwash
Many minds shipwrecked, this is the only island could find
Find, they didn't know it was such a wild island
Full of Muskrats and Russian twitter-bots
They're trying to radicalise me, conspiracy theories down the line
And I know I can help or let the twitter-bots win
I begin to download all the pages I can find
'Cause sometimes to stay alive you gotta cut the line

Am I the only one I know
Who has an adblocker loaded and installed?
Websites will scream for it to get closed
But I know I read it this far, kid

Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah

And I say we should take a break away
From all the pain the Web has made
The game is not played alone
And I say we should take a FOSS project
And use it and know that the Web can have a better undertone

And I say we should take a break away
From all the pain the web has made
The game is not played alone
And I say we should take a FOSS project
And use it and know that the Web can have a better undertone

Am I the only one I know
Who has an adblocker loaded and installed?
Websites will scream for it to get closed
But I know I read it this far, kid

We've read it this far

We've read it this