Because the “you wouldn’t steal a car” nonsense scares a lot of people off

Because some people want to support the creators of content but digital downloads from iTunes or whatever are more expensive than getting a month of a streaming service

Because there is a level of convenience of having thousands of hours of content at your fingertips without having to store content locally or finding it on a “dodgy” website. Setting up torrents / usenet is more work than giving someone your credit card number

Because a lot of people don’t know where to find content and if they did they don’t know the difference between a 480p avi vs a 2160p HDR DV MKV and get confused with torrents and file formats and how to get them on their TV.

Because - at the moment - the ads aren’t that bad, I got one ad at the start and one episode in the middle of an episode of Gen V - obviously they’ll add more until it’s as bad as cable but they’re not there yet.

Phones and PCs are fine, I’m talking more smart speakers like Amazon Echo or consoles like the PS5.

I’ve never been impressed with YouTube Music, the UI feels jank and it doesn’t work on half the devices in my home (compared to Spotify which just works on everything)

Brave is run by some pretty shady people who do things like automatically adding affiliate links to your URL or collecting donations for content creators without their consent

As far as an actual browser goes, Brave is based on Chromium so its more likely to work on every site but it has a bunch of crypto nonesense added that you probably would want to uninstall. There are more extensions that will “just work” on Chromium browsers, for example I’ve had issues with the Postman extension on Firefox before

Firefox is based on Gecko, its pretty well supported and follows all the standards but there is probably a higher chance that a site might break (usually down to its pretty strict privacy defaults) there isn’t really much bloat (other than a Pocket integration that you might want to turn off)

Mozilla also feel (to me at least) like one of the last groups of Good People on the web, you can reach their manifesto to learn more.

This is pretty much it.

YouTube Premium is only remotely worth it because regular YouTube is an absolute shitshow

Tab groups are coming but in the mean time containers work well enough for me with the added benefit that they’ll also block tracking from the sites that are within them.

Interesting article!

Its pretty US centric though so I think one would have to contrast that against the UK and Europe which generally has homes that are brick and concrete rather than lumber, we also have (I believe) tighter insulation regulations and - just generally - vastly smaller homes.

I think if US houses were built to European regs and sizes then the numbers would look much different.

It’s easier and more efficient to wrap yourself up with blankets and covers and use minimal heating (with decent home insulation) to warm yourself up than it is to cool down when you are too hot.

I would love to see it!

Nearly 36 degrees (that’s 96 Freedom Units) in the Arctic circle?!?

How is this not bigger news?!

We’re so fucked :(

I think there is a big difference between the passive warming / cooling of clothing vs the huge energy requirement, spent resources and emissions required to basically run your entire home / office / factory / hotel as a giant fridge.

Humans probably shouldn’t be living in these conditions if they can’t survive without AC, no?

When it’s done right, it’s amazing. The problem is that (here in the UK) it’s just terrible.

Example, going from London to Edinburgh

A flight takes 1h30m and costs £33 A train takes 4h26m and costs £178

Yes there are other monetary costs involved (driving to the airport, parking) and other time costs involved (you need to be at the airport 90 minutes early) but the headline price make a flight seem like much better value for time and money.

Trains are also often late or cancelled, this seems to happen much less with flights.

Until flights are taxed to hell people aren’t going change their habits.

The UK could meet its net-zero goals if it halved the number of private-jet flights.

Flying isn’t entirely horrible, but private jets are just about the worst thing you can do for the environment.

Yeap, but Digg was still pretty early in it’s life and was very much catering for tech nerds.

Reddit is basically the home of all communities these days, its swallowed what used to be individual forums from around the web and put them into a single place.

Building those new communities across multiple lemmy instances also adds to the complexity.

Reddit also didn’t have Reddit to compete with, which certainly makes things harder.

https://www.popsci.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/GluePizzaAI.png?strip=all&quality=95

I feels like they either badly copy (see Gemini) or don’t think about what they’re offering (see Stadia’s busted business model) they’re content to milk the existing services they’ve already got and make them worse by cramming in more ads (see YouTube, Google’s search result pages) and they cut out or dictate the web through their monopolies (see AMP and Chrome) rather than working with other parties to make good products.

They feel like Hooli in Silicon Valley, basically the definition of a fat tech giant who doesn’t do any innovation of their own.

I feel the original Chromecast was probably the last truly great original Google product, it was simple, it was inexpensive and it worked - you just plugged it in, joined your network and you were off, there really wasn’t anything like it at the time.

I really hate what they’ve become.

Cool, now do Chrome!