cobysev

F.B. Purity is a desktop browser extension, it only works on the website from a PC. It won’t run on Android devices, unfortunately. They’ve been talking about making an app for it for years, but they still haven’t made one.

Has everyone forgotten about F.B. Purity (Fluff Busting Purity)? It’s a browser extension that lets you customize the entire interface of Facebook. It’s been around for 17 years and still works just fine.

I use it to remove not only ads, but FB games, marketplace, reels/videos, suggestions/featured content, FB Messenger, etc. I pretty much locked down my Facebook interface to only show me posts from my friends in the order that they were posted, with the latest at the top of my feed. Just like Facebook used to be before it started shoving useless content in your face.

The only reason I still have a Facebook account is because 90% of my friends, family, and contacts I’ve made over a lifetime of global travels, are all on Facebook. If I need to get in touch with someone, Facebook is where I’ll find them. But I don’t post anything to Facebook anymore; I rarely log on to it.

There isn’t another social media program where I can find everyone I know without subscribing to even more junk. I won’t use Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, TikTok, or any of the other corporate social media programs, and most people I know/knew in person don’t use or understand the Fediverse.

Bluesky and Discord are as corporate as I’ll tolerate, and I’m already on the lookout for replacements for both. I used to have a Mastodon account a decade ago, before the Fediverse was a common thing, but I have no idea what site I built an account on. I might have to just suck it up and rebuild my account somewhere else. And there are plenty of Discord clones out there, but none quite as functional as Discord yet…

I remember software in the 90s having limits on how many computers you could use an application on (however rarely enforced)

I remember software in the '90s having “limited licenses,” but operating on the honor system. Because you could just install it on as many computers as you wanted and there wasn’t really a way for companies to stop you.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s when I started seeing licenses verified through the Internet and actually limiting their usage.

Fellow millennial here. I’m in the same boat. Zero subscriptions except for Curiosity Stream, which is like Netflix for educational documentaries, and it’s dirt cheap.

I bought the lifetime subscription to Nebula. It’s been worth it; I have a few channels I follow and I appreciate the extra content and freedom of video producers to say/do whatever they want without platform censorship. YouTube has so many restrictions, no one can post content without bowing to Google censorship.

Parody laws should allow people to actually review or poke fun at other media, but Google will demonetize or block any content that they arbitrarily decide is copyright infringement. Most film review channels I follow have to be extremely creative in how they show clips of movies. Most of them mute music scenes, and some will insert their own public domain (or homemade) music over scenes to avoid a ban. It’s ridiculous how far the MPAA and RIAA have gone in locking down media from public consumption.

I always build my computers with a minimum of 64 GB RAM, so at first I didn’t see what the fuss was all about. But the article claims the Windows OS technically only needs 4 GB?!

And I see the push for more RAM is most likely to accommodate AI/Copilot, which needs a lot of resources to function. “Gaming” is just the excuse Microsoft is using to get people to upgrade.

This reminds me of a video I saw recently about how old computers didn’t have the space to waste code, so every line of code was micromanaged to perfection. But today’s computers have so much room on their hard drives, programmers don’t care how efficient the code is, as long as it runs. Which leads to your computer seemingly performing as slow (or slower!) than computers used to back at the turn of the century.

Our computers are more powerful than ever, multitudes more than the beginning of the Internet Age. And yet, we have so much wasted code because we have room for it, so our modern computers crawl. Imagine how fast our computers could perform if modern coders programmed like they did in the '90s and earlier.

Note for those passing through and not reading articles:

This is not a summary of the article, but OP’s suggestion for a solution. The article talks about creating a yeast product that’s lacking in bees’ diet due to climate change and a lack of diversity in flowers.

OP suggests combatting the effects climate change has on biodiversity by planting your own diverse flowers. Which may work, or climate change may just kill those too.

Right? The way I hold controllers, I can barely reach the bumper buttons without shifting my whole hand, so it’s much easier to just use those underside buttons.

This is my situation too! I bought the original LCD one when they were on pre-order, then my right bumper button broke (a common issue with the first models) and I took too long to request the free fix/replacement from Valve.

So my wife encouraged me to just buy one of the new OLED ones that had just released and she’d take my old one.

She hardly games on it anyway, and when she does, I showed her how to remap that bumper button to a different button. Almost no games use the trigger buttons on the underside of the Steam Deck, so those are always available.

I use Voyager. I have NSFW posts set to blur. I need to open the thread to see it un-blurred.

I do this so I don’t have random NSFW images popping up on my phone while I’m being antisocial out in public. Yes, I could have the app just block all NSFW posts. But then I would miss beautiful works of art like OP’s post.

I was wondering why this was marked as NSFW. That explains it.

I have a Google phone, which has YouTube embedded on it. I can’t remove it. I had to disable it, then tell my phone to redirect all YouTube links to my browser. Now I can block ads again!

I don’t understand, this happened years ago. Both Rocket League and Fall Guys originally came out on Steam, but disappeared from the Steam Store and became Epic Games exclusives. If you still own a Steam copy though, you can still play it.

Is this saying that the game will be unplayable without an Epic Games authentication or something? It’s not like the Steam versions are getting updates anymore, so they should still be playable with other Steam members. Unless the publishers are pushing an update to the Steam version as well.

EDIT: Upon rereading, I see these games are being ported into another game. Does this affect Steam users at all, since Fortnite is an Epic Games exclusive?

I won’t touch Epic Games, so this doesn’t seem to have any effect on me.

I mentioned in another comment that I’m using Gboard, which is Google’s POS keyboard. It’s not great (and I’m looking for better replacements currently), but it does learn words if you swipe them 3 or more times in a short time.

I have a unique first and last name that never pop up in dictionary words or common name lists, and Gboard swipes them for me now, because I’ve used them enough times in typing and fixed their attempt at autocorrecting it. Or if it mis-reads my swiped name, it’s usually one of the suggested corrections across the top of the keyboard.

I really don’t like Gboard, but it’s been the best I’ve found lately, so I always install it on new phones and tablets as soon as I get them. I’m getting suggestions in another comment thread here for viable FOSS replacements, so I’ll need to test those out.

I’ve been using Gboard, Google’s keyboard. I don’t like it and am currently trying to de-Google my life, but I haven’t found a better swipe-to-text keyboard yet.

You’d think it would be easy to replace Gboard. Ever since Google started inserting AI into everything, half my words don’t swipe correctly, or they’ll give corrective suggestions on the top bar that are way off the mark. It was way better about 5 years ago. But it seems most keyboards are also using AI to predict swiping, so I can’t find any that work better at the moment.

I used to hate touchscreen keyboards, but then I learned about swipe-to-text. Now I can swipe words on a digital keyboard faster than I can type them on a physical keyboard. I can’t go back to pressing individual keys now unless it’s on a desktop computer keyboard.

According to that first link, it costs $6.1 billion to $11.7 billion annually to run YouTube. Even if you segment that into niche video communities, it’ll still cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually to host it, if you get a decent amount of traffic.

This is why YouTube is a monopoly. Because they have the ridiculous amount of money to throw at a “free” video hosting site. Any other video host would crumble under the weight of YouTube’s level of traffic. That’s also why some others, like Nebula, require a subscription model to function. Or any movie/TV show streaming service. They can’t afford to host that stuff for free.

This is also why Google is so obsessed with cracking down on anti-ad software. That’s how they make the money that pays for YouTube.

I didn’t even know Netflix had a games department, and I have a Netflix account. I’m assuming this is just another effort on their part for further enshittification of that service. Perhaps it’s finally time I unsubscribed from Netflix.

This doesn’t seem like it would work. Debris falling off the trains, dusty buildup, vibrations, rocks bouncing around the tracks; heck, even just wildlife crossing the tracks. So many things are gonna damage those panels if they’re just lying on the ground between tracks, and solar panels are extremely fragile.

I hope they have some sort of bullet proof glass or something over those panels. Probably going to need a special train to spray water over them to clean regularly, too.

I dunno about Swiss trains, but the tracks behind my house in America leave a thick black film on everything, and it’s very hard to clean by hand. I think they transport coal.

I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he’d be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.

Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.

He was ultra-conservative and didn’t believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.

The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know… he didn’t learn his lesson.