The problem is, google is an advertising company now the "ad-blocking makes all content free" is a temporary argument at best. At any rate, I like Nebula's curated content better than the ai-slop/clickbait slop Youtube provides.
Only pet peeve I have is... jeffiot is in Nebula, Tom Scott is in Nebula, Lindsey Ellis is in Nebula... where is f4mi????????
We shouldn't forget that Google tried to push the whole remote browser stack attestation thing (WEI). That is where they want to go. We shouldn't follow them there.
I have both, and I find my YouTube home page way more diverse than Nebula. Nebula is an invite-only clique and they invite people who look like them. YouTube, for me, has a lot more British creators, a lot more people of colour, a lot more women creators, a bigger diversity of topics and subjects, a lot more deep technical stuff. Nebula is a lot of American guys discussing movies and politics, with only the very recent addition of Token Brit Tom Scott.
I'm yet another person who only got Nebula for week-early access to Jet Lag, and I think if that particular show ever went away or took an extended break, Nebula would be struggling. I find myself watching something on YouTube most evenings, I rarely find myself on Nebula when Jet Lag isn't on.
Wasn't Abigail PhilosophyTube, a British woman, one of the Nebula founders? I guess perhaps it has changed since the early days.I remember them kicking off JT Second Thought.
I'm not saying it doesn't have any, just that it doesn't have as many. My YouTube is just so much more diverse in every way, I'm never going to get my favourite UK canal boat creators on Nebula for instance. Nebula is a narrow thing for a narrow audience that likes one specific type of online video.
My Nebula runs out at the end of the year and I'm not renewing, I'm not that fussed about seeing Jet Lag a week late, and none of the other stuff is really for me. I'll divvy up my £60 a year Nebula sub to a few creators I like.
Something obvious to others may not be obvious to you - and to be fair it was a key ingredient in blogging.
I find it extremely sad that blogging shifted from personal writing to a performative act - we can feel ashamed stating something obvious because the expectation is to get approvals and shares, rather than us writing something we find intriguing, interesting or worth writing down.
The problem lies with people trying to claim credit without doing the work: writing. AI is a fantastic tool that catches flow errors, grammar problems and punctuation misuse, just like a copywriter. But copywriters don't get bylines.
My line is clear, if you use copy paste the AI output that's not your writing. I am okay with AI collaboration - it detects the errors, you decide what to do with them.
Yes. Exactly. I, for one, am following this credo: If your single player game has an “always online” clause; I am not your customer. No ifs, no buts, no “but i like this franchise”s.
Vote with your wallet. Do not hesitate to boycott.
I'd like to see legislation to require publisher to clearly state if game works offline, and if not, what is the committed, guaranteed operational life ("at least to June 2030" prominently displayed, for instance).
I agree, and i think one more thing should be also explicit; save files.
Whether the game works offline, and until when the servers are guaranteed, is one part. But the savegames and progression data should also belong to the user.
The game is made by the studio, sure, but the save file is the part I construct by playing. It is my time, my choices, my progress, my world state and my memories.
So I would add a clear principle that the publisher should not be able to kidnap the user's save data.
Nerds became an industry field - that's what it happened. Back in the 90'ies we were doing IT things because it geniunely interested us, not that it would "net us high salaries". I'd do this even if you didn't pay a single centa because it triggered my dopamine receptors.
Then the world digitalized, and people who do not have any interest in computing and computers in general became "experts". That's when the ball begin to roll. This created people who can't give a french fry about the work they are doing? Quality? Efficiency? What do they matter, it was a job you did for 9-5 and you got your salary. If money was in say, haystacking, they'd be doing haystacking.
Now whenever someone utters "crypto" I do a doubleback and realize they mean cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. I do not expect any of my new hires to know the word "grok" (other than the AI of course), enjoy science fiction or any nerdy things we did. IT was a community where like minded people were working, now it is not.
The best thing you can do with an enterprise Onedrive is having long long file and folder names. The moment it exceeds 255 characters, the software application dies. I am ready to hear easier fixes but so far this worked:
- Rename the offending folder from the web
- Unlink the folder from the user's machine
- Delete the existing onedrive folder
- Relink and resync
The best part is, the web side of onedrive has practically unlimited length, the windows part has. As long as you don't sync, you don't experience anything but god forbid if you try to do it.
Also do not get me started on "Add a shortcut/Sync" debate. All in all, onedrive feels like a system that works but will feed you to the wolves the moment it hiccups. But on the enterprise side that's the only game in town so... we suffer altogether.
My workplace has named (forcefully) the onedrive folder with around 35 characters. You add to that the path to that folder on the computer that is (forcefully) not on the root of a disk. I now mostly need a flat structure for my files. 4-5 subfolders and a file and onedrive dies.
Yes, you can but then if you have any older software in your system (for company reasons) will not play ball. And it is a workaround, not a permanent solution. Because we still do not have that fabled WinFS so...
Eh, NTFS supported long paths since forever, the problem is with applications using Win32 APIs that are limited to MAX_PATH (260 characters) path length.
There won't be a permanent solution unless all Windows applications start using NT path formatting - which won't happen.
Win64 lacks the problem with 255 characters [0]. However, stuff like File Explorer, which the vast majority of my users actually use, can only pass the first 255 characters to the registered application [1], so will Explorer will display stuff with huge long paths, double-clicking that file, or right clicking and "Compress to..." will cause an error.
0 - 32 bit windows will always have this problem.
1 - This is because File Explorer uses a hodgepodge of Win32 and Win64 stuff behind the scenes when running 64 bit windows.
Just a small note about fastmail: Do not launch a trial with your planned username. Because I have opened up a trial account, it expired and when I decided to reactivate it (with payment in mind) I find myself unable to sign in. I cannot reset my password as it says "Sorry, we canʼt find an account with that username." and it does not let me log in.
Then again I also moved from gmail to mailbox.org and am a happy camper since. I don't know if we are a majority but I find myself cutting all ties with google services (youtube premium, drive, gemini etc.) as they try to force unwanted features and workflows in my daily life.
I had the same issue, but after contacting support, I was able to re-claim the email address from my trial account and use it as an email alias of my main Fastmail account.
Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean anything but overall google is heading to an _interesting_ place. In short, it was state of the art but in 20 years it became just another conglomerate sacrificing quality for shareholder gain, I think?
As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted links above the thing I actually search for. Moved to Kagi and didn't look back.
As an AI it does not work for me. I am seeing an arbitrary usage limit, refreshing in 5 hours and a weekly quota given in a percentage. That is as opaque as it gets. Again, to give Kagi as an example I look at my usage details and I see how much is remaining in a clear way. Not working for Kagi by the way, I am just a happy customer.
As a cloud storage, it does not work for me. Probably some shared folder I am working with others has a spam user and/or a hacked account and they periodically spam x-rated notifications. And that's not only me (https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1azf25v/myster...). Moved to apple iCloud and done with it.
Mail is fine. After 22 years of usage, I kind of delegated it to a non-important stage in my life. The important bits have relocated to European providers anyway.
I feel like a crazy person, but I've been using Yandex as the last resort and having positive results in finding stuff that I know is out there but Google has decided to stop letting me see. (I tried DDG but for my use it's been worse than Google).
Nah you're not crazy. I also felt crazy when i discovered that some obscure censored russian search engine gives me overall better search results in 2026 than google.com
This is a funny (if it wasn't so sad) aspect of enshittification that was revealed to me through Chinese electronics.
There is a line we cross where the lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap is actually better than it's actively malicious "premium" counterparts.
It's like if a company spent billions of dollars creating the most perfect hammer that also happens to make itself bend to miss nails if you don't use the approved Hammertech GripGlove that plays ads and is slippery.
Or you could use a random rock with a flat side, which is a much better hammer than that in every way. In the exact same fashion, Yandex blows Google out of the water. Not because they have smarter people running it or because the code is more elegant or because they have more money. They just don't have the means or motivation to actively screw with you to the same degree as Google, and that makes it better.
Anyone at this point could make a better search engine than google just by running a basic text search algorithm and not doing anything else, it just so happens that Yandex never bothered to go as far beyond that as the mainstream ones.
Yandex is not obscure, nor “lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap”. It has very good technology behind, though not the trillion dollars of investments Google can afford. Just because it does not come from California it does not mean it's a hobby project anyone could replicate.
Is probably the Sputnik though commenters mistake it for backhanded-diss of Yandex. Conjures an alternative universe where Russian potatocraft lands live lobsters on Mars before Elon's spacesedan reaches Mars orbit.
I am intrigued by the possibility of minimalist defo of "enshittification" that tweaks "the purpose of a system is what it does".
"The purpose of a search engine system is to keep you searching" etc
I think this way about Marginalia Search. It's just a search engine someone threw up for the sake of making a search engine and by the sake of merely not being crap it's actually pretty decent if the thing you're looking for is in its index set (lots of tech stuff). I think the most impactful thing is that it doesn't index seoslop.
We are significantly more than that at this point, including that we've been working on our own web index for the past two years (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd...). But on top of that we don't get local results, knowledge graph, answers, sports, anything AI related, and many more essential modules from Bing, all of which collectively makes up a large % of the results at this point, let alone the vastly different UXs.
I stopped using DDG because whenever I search for information on a topic like "plumber's bread" all I get are the same 1500 sites serving the same top-10 lists of the same Amazon Affiliate links. Kagi neatly avoids all of that and serves me the dumb forum articles from 2006 that I'm looking for that describe what plumbers actually do when they want to stop up a wet pipe. This is a problem with nearly every ad-supported search engine. They all serve the same dumb top-10 lists and AI-authored blog articles about the same stuff ad-nauseum instead of inferring that I'm trying to research the answer to a question. The results all presuppose that I'm looking to buy something.
I searched for “plumber’s bread” on DuckDuckGo and this was the 3rd result which seems to match what you’re looking for - https://www.finehomebuilding.com/forum/plumbers-bread-sandwi.... I do see the other kind of results you’re talking about too, though.
I find DuckDuckGo's search results to be terrible. I use Brave search and I find it to be the best. I've also tried Startpage and I like it better than DDG, but less than Brave.
DDG often has scam sites for example when you search for FMHY, https://fmhy.net comes up on all other search engines, but fmhy [.] click comes up on DDG.
Same with "anna's archive" returning the fake site annas-archive [.]io.
We’ll take a look at those two sites, thanks for reporting. We’re actively working to improve how we detect and remove scam sites, and getting specific reports is very helpful.
I'm sure they would be happy with any combination of these 3.
1. fmhy.net
2. reddit.com/r/freemediaheckyeah
3. github.com/fmhy/FMHY
As for Anna's, it changes often, but it would be good to only allow the ones listed on the Wikipedia for sites that are posing to actually be Anna's Archive, rather than accessory sites like Github, link directories.
As for my allegation of terrible results. I think it mainly comes down to low quality sites being prioritized. I didn't want to make up search queries, so I decided to just go through my history to find my searches on Brave and compare the results with DDG.
"scientology speedrun instagram"
Brave returns mostly news articles in the main results and only a specific Instagram reel. Brave has an area for videos which is particularly relevant, but DDG has a carousel thing for news. DDG returns an Instagram and Tiktok area for the topic and an X account. Then Wikipedia and Knowyourmeme.
I would say DDG actually wins here because it is very much more on topic with the social media sites being resulted (X, IG, TikTok), but the results feel less clickable to me because those social media sites are so unfriendly to adblocking, VPN using, not-signed-in users.
"fisa news"
Brave shows a really nice variety of specific news article updates as well as primary sources like a .gov. DDG does similarly, but it's really only news and it is really a smattering of different mainstream news websites. That's fine, but then there's also that carosel which is 100% filled with Yahoo and Foxnews, which I consider both to be low-quality.
Another big problem with DDG in this specific search is there are quite a few simple links to news website's tag on fisa, which isn't helpful to me.
I'm not the happiest about either results, but Brave wins because of the lack of slop from yahoo as well as the primary source results.
who is the highest level scientologist who left
Neither DDG nor Brave returns any immediate actual answers in websites, but by automatically returning the AI summary, I get a satisfying answer from Brave's AI.
"sovereignty"
I was surprised, but DDG totally wins this one. Brave doesn't have that built in dictionary result, DDG does. Brave also has a news carosel which is not relevant. Pretty comparable with the other results, but definitely a win for DDG.
Actually, what's the deal with putting the "search assist" at the bottom. That's pretty weird.
I think a lot of my bias against DDG comes from the UI. Brave seems friendlier, rounder, easier to read.
Yes, super helpful, thanks. Hear you on the overall problem of lower-quality sites.
On the Assist question, it can appear at the bottom when we think it has a good answer but something else beats it. Curious what was weird about it? Just not expecting another answer?
I use DDG as my daily driver and quite like it. Then again, I don't really see much difference between DDG and Kagi, so I may be some sort of pleb. I will say that, sometimes, DDG gets "stuck" on certain sorts of close-phrase matches, rather than showing me the thing I'm looking for, but I've learned to recognize that behavior and append !g to it.
Well, I'd love to know; as I've said in some other comments, we've changed and improved a lot in the last couple years and so feel free to send me feedback.
I've been a ddg user full time for 15+ years and I did see it improve quite lot over time. But quality dropped when Yandex was cut off.
Lately, I've noticed YET AGAIN being trapped in a bubble with results being to clever for their own good ... I did leave Google PRECISELY for the bubble effect ...
Not even mentioned the AI shenanigans with ridiculous results at times. DDG is not immune to enshitification. Way too many managers thinks they know better than the user ... they don't.
The 'mail is fine' is an impending apocalypse that most people don't think too much about. Google can dump you at any time for any reason or no reason. Your chances are small, but if it happens its incredibly disruptive. I don't know the durable answer, but I definitely need to complete that step of degoogling, the job just seems huge.
This is what I do, but it comes with its own set of problems, the most significant of which is deliverability. Some businesses can’t deliver mail to my custom domain at all (a fact I can only discover by trial and error). Some can deliver, but the forwarding to @gmail fails silently — Google just eats the mail without so much as a bounce, let alone dropping it into a spam folder.
It’s the best option we have, but it’s no solution to the crapshoot that is email today.
Worse, they often aren't even relevant: we searched "passport renewal" and you had to go the the second page to even get the government site that renews passports, and not ad scams masquerading as the real thing. Optimized for engagement, presumably.
Edit: come to think of it, I don't know why I still use Google. I don't care if they track me. But when they have been actively try to prevent me from finding the information I'm looking for, and instead try to scam me?
A good guess for any phone or tablet user, but I’m technical enough to change that default. It was because their results used to be objectively better. It’s also not the default on Windows Edge, and I still remember the experiences just after reinstalling a Windows VM that I’d be confused why search results were suddenly so unreliable until I remembered I was getting bing by default.
Small update: two thirds of my device browsers no longer default to google anymore. I’ll change the rest when relevant.
Even after that, for whatever reason, the next tranche of links is a mixture of AI slop and shopping links. If I'm looking for information about something and not a product to buy, I often have to, gasp, go to the 2nd page of results.
I found that if I search Google Maps for a specific restaurant, it assumes I must just be hungry in general. Just now, I looked for A&W and also got results for Tim Hortons, Popeyes and McDonald's.
Apple Maps never does that. Still, I usually use Google as I want an accurate idea of whether a business is actually open and what its hours are.
I just tried "McDonalds" and only got 50 straight McDonalds results. "Burger King" nets 23 Burger Kings, one "Spareribs King" and one "Burger Chicken King". Gotta love inconsistent experiences between customers / regions.
Also, Apple is gearing up to stuff ads (cough "sponsored results" cough) into Maps, at which point it will probably start suffering the same problem..
Google Maps is hellbent on giving you ANY results. I can’t think of any recent search where it doesn’t zoom out to most of Belgium and ignores the “open now” filters if it wants to.
“Oh, you’re looking for a pharmacy open now? What about going to McDonalds, which is closed, and in a completely different city?”
My experience with Google Maps is very different. We got burned so many times going to a closed restaurant that was open according to Google that we just use the listing to find the phone number now, and we call ahead
I know it’s probably not Google’s fault. The owner needs to update their listing, but it’s just one more little thing adding up over the years to make me avoid Google altogether
> I know it’s probably not Google’s fault. The owner needs to update their listing, but it’s just one more little thing adding up over the years to make me avoid Google altogether
The owner probably never signed up for that expectation.
Try searching for a type of food that has a place in it's name, like "Nashville hot chicken". It'll either center the map on Nashville, TN, and show you results for "hot chicken", or sometimes will zoom all the way out and show you results for "hot chicken" in both where the map was originally centered and in Nashville, TN.
That being said a giant corporation like Google releasing free but amazing research like AlphaFold or (less so) something like Gemma is still cool. They're the ATT PAC Bell or IBM of our age it seems
I can relate. Just today I was working on my car and I asked Gemini how to remove the Steering ball joint. It all started well, wrote a lengthy answer and then suddenly wiped it all and instead wrote 'i can't answer that, try to ask about another subject'.
For the love of God, talking about cars are now also being forbidden by Google.
And it's not a one off, I asked multiple questions about other parts because I had a lot of issue and it was the first time removing the Gimbals and replacing the Gimbal head on that car.
Google is beyond infuriating, they are a tech company and behave like some old fashioned administration lady. Completely out of touch with real life.
On this last part, I'm convinced that it's because Google management must be completely out of touch with real life. Tech world is special, add millions on top of that..
The best that could happen to this company is to break it's monopoly so that they are forced to get rid of these lunatics.
I'm surprised it's still a standard thing to let us see the message getting typed up before it's finalized. The term "literally 1984" gets thrown around a lot but wow what a dystopian feeling when that happens. It's so much creepier than if it just said "sorry that question violates our guidelines" without showing anything.
Agreed, especially as with images it does the opposite. It waits until the image is finalised, then tests it for suitability, and decides whether or not to show it. It would be interesting to see the intermediate steps, but they're not shown.
Well, I have created several assistants for writing checks, the researcher module is really good and am using it when the need is there. It is expensive but the chained search queries it does is extensive and solves my problems so... that became something invaluable.
For the normal queries and questions though I use their cheaper selections from the normal screen. My go-to is Kimi usually and I like how, unless specified, the chats disappear in 24 hours.
Mail is terrible. The central conceit of Gmail, and unfortunately what made it immediately popular, is that you should not have to care about deleting emails because you “have enough” storage. Over time this evolved into an awful incentive structure that results in 100s if not 1000s of spam/useless/irrelevant/garbage marketing emails a day and a reminder that the next tier up is just $1 a month (for now). In the end, the state of mail is emblematic of the whole problem with that company.
As technical people we tend to have a technical outlook to this. However, after a certain threshold - say $1M - these projects become political things rather than a simple technical issue.
From a creator's standpoint, a software project exists to solve a problem - or at least make the lives of the software users easier. But the moment a company bigwig clique decides to make money out of company, "bad" projects pop up.
To my chance, I experienced this for three times. The signs are nearly the same. The company has a lot of workflows - usually handled by excel and/or internally developed apps that actually reflect those workflows. Then comes the buzzword team proclaiming miracles, snake oil and an app that will even cure the dandruff - just sign here. Of course, the clique has their cut - that's why they say yes or advice the board to say yes.
Then begins the grueling process of "analyzing workflows". Do they contact the actual users who are doing the work? Hell. No. What they do is, create a "Project Team" - usually hired anew, with no information about how the company does its work - and they try to "understand" the workflows. Then it becomes like that game, user says one thing, project team understands another and says a different thing and the outcome is a different product that solves a problem but not the user's problem.
Of course, this process burns money. You gotta do development, you gotta have a server to run the app, you have to book meeting rooms in hotels to train the users, you have to create fliers internally to promote the app - and create pdfs, many many pdfs to make the users understand how the app works. And no one asks "hey, if this app is reflecting our workflows... why are we getting this training?"
Because at the end of the day, this app only exists to make some people money. And after a certain point, no one dares to say anything because of all the money spent. An ambassador who says "the app we spent $10M does not work" will be get shot. People get retired with the f-you money they gained and the company tries to work with the app they "built" usually it ends up hiring an internal team and do it from the zero - and the expensive shit becomes a thing nobody talks about, a company omerta so to speak.
This may be an unpopular opinion but I feel Bazzite (and immutable distros in general) is the future for the normal users. Yes I know, they take the freedom of messing with the system core but for most people this is fine. All they need is a device that works without any problems.
First time I switched to asus kernel from the generic one was magic - I know asus-linux exists and following the instructions probably would have ended up in a working system, but with bazzite I wrote only one command and everything worked. It still feels weird not to monkey around with package installations (and this was a dangerous path, usually ended up with more work for me) but this is a tradeoff I can live with. The software I used - luckily - already moved to Flatpak so everything was a breeze. Also the fact that I can switch to a working state with one keypress is a stress reliever.
I agree. Linux is good now - for the common user. I still can't see immutable distros can be used for all scenarios but for gaming/home use, this is a methodology I can easily recommend for my friends and family who only want a computer that works without messing with console.
Only pet peeve I have is... jeffiot is in Nebula, Tom Scott is in Nebula, Lindsey Ellis is in Nebula... where is f4mi????????