Seriously, I wish I could just set up some kind of regex filter in iOS Shortcuts or something that would let me specify what notifications to show or block.

Doesn’t help that corporate social media apps will give you controls over every single notification type except for the ones they ram down your throat daily.

I have a very specific notification in mind: I’ve opened Instagram organically maybe eight times in the past decade, but I’ll open my messages if someone send me a message there. I can’t open their shitty platform on a browser as they hate VPNs on desktop. With all due respect to the meme posters on Lemmy, the fresh brainrot my friends send me on there is much easier humor to digest than whatever mix of Everett True, Star Trek, and den Döner-Mann nicht fragen warum er nur Bargeld nimmt the Lemmy All page has for me on most days. So I keep that malware on my phone. I want a notification when they send me a message. I want a notification when someone I meet wants to follow me. I’m squarely in the lower quantile of ages on Lemmy and a lot of people I want in my life will use that platform as their primary messenger, and while it’s not ideal, I do want those notifications. You know what notification I don’t want?

See some of today’s most watched reels!

Their stupid app sent me this notification, like clockwork, about once every 23 hours.

Check out some of today’s most watched reels!

I’ve never watched a reel in my fucking life. I still call them Stories and I haven’t watched them even when they were called that. They put the button for Reels right at the bottom where all the important stuff should be, so I’ll fat finger my way into the Reels section once every three years, and it’ll still be at the tutorial screen where it tells you to swipe and tap and whatever. You can’t seek through the videos of course - not interested.

They know I’ve left it on the tutorial screen for longer than 20% of their userbase has been alive. And yet —

Check out some of today’s most watched reels!

(This is mostly an exaggeration, it was like once a week, and I left notifications off until recently because I met a group of people who use it more than my usual crowd. I have not been bombarded by unfiltered notification sewage for a decade lol)

And they didn’t have a toggle for that notification either until pretty recently. Or maybe I didn’t look hard enough. Wish everyone would stop using these apps and try hacking together a terrible HTML website like the good old days. Computers are wasted on us all. Hosting video is expensive, it must be rapaciously profitable to be trying to get everyone hooked on it.

Good lord this makes my blood boil. I’m still in awe of the support being shown by ordinary people around the world these last few months but I don’t think I’ll ever grasp how much hatred is required to keep the machine running.

To think that if history went differently I could just get on a cab and visit the Holy Land like my grandmother did as a kid. Instead I get to watch it get bombed to bits in real time with the excuse that there wasn’t anyone there and if there were any they’re terrorists.

Y axis: Empoisoned or Swumble’s Big Jumble X axis: Menus or Parkour

I think we are moving past the outdated genre system and finally finding a way to classify games properly

Oh, I’m well aware. Every few months I search online for used Classics in working condition in my area because that’s a project I’m interested in, but I haven’t committed to it yet. Maybe I should as they are apparently getting expensive and harder to find everywhere.

I don’t think I’ll ever be a Mac user but I’ve seen how fast these newer MacBooks edit video on battery power without breaking a sweat (and without eating through the battery).

People focus on “software magic” with Apple but the M chips are serious hardware that a lot of us don’t take seriously because the company that killed the iPod made them.

I understand that the subject of the OP is community space specifically for shedding judgement and all that, but

That URL is very suspect, even knowing that not all anime is made for kids

Which is partially felt more because and is exacerbated by the fact that companies and their shareholders feel entitled to capture every drop of money you have, to the point that buying a pizza comes with the option to spread the cost over four months just in case there’s 10$ from a person that they could only capture by offering the option.

I live half a planet away from America and even I’ve seen it. Disgusting.

Remember when we looked at phone apps that cost more than .99 and thought the developers were greedy?

If you still think the hardware is pretty good, you haven’t been using their newer hardware.

I think I wrote a comment about this recently, but their newest mouse with a layout I like (G604) was made with terrible soft rubber that is practically designed to disintegrate with use. All their mouse switches are also short life crappy switches that stop working relatively quickly.

Soldering new switches into the G604 is an absolute PITA because it was designed by people who didn’t care for repair. Still doable, just annoying. I just wish the rubber was replaced with the grippy hard textured plastic they used a few years earlier.

At least you only need to use the software at first when you’re setting things up.

I only ever participated in the original Place years and years ago, putting down maybe two or three pixels.

Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people but when you’ve got like 20x30 pixels it’s hard to represent a local community online with something better than a flag. I think we ended up with less than ten pixels inside of a heart iirc.

At least for me, in my own country, I associate flags with popular protests and other symbols make me think of the government. Law enforcement uniforms and mismatched old automatic rifles from fifty years ago. Crippling bureaucracy that operates four hours a week that stretches five hours of paperwork errands into a six month chapter of your life (not a symbol but when you say government that’s what I think of).

Point being I don’t find it weird at all that people wanting to represent themselves will default to a national flag. My understanding is that in like Germany there’s a line where nobody wants to seem too proud of the flag, and in the US people are so desensitized to seeing every McDonald’s have 4000 flags on display, in England the red and white flag has different connotations if it’s in a football context or not, etc etc etc

A lot of flagpoles here are faded and tattered and often with one of the stripes almost separating off the flag. Might be doomerism but I think it looks cool, I think it very much is an appropriate representation.

I’m from Lebanon, this flag is for me, and when the government uses it, it’s using it deceptively to pretend it has any interest in our lives and our problems

I remember seeing people mod the iPhone 4 to replace the glass back with a nice wood back.

Metal and wood can’t be a worse idea than glass. Grippy too. Although without the right treatment it can get gross I guess.

It’s also funny because It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is still airing too, and that is massively more edgy than anything seinfeld ever did.

And that’s always been my argument when it comes to this particular dead horse. I don’t think any jokes are off the table, you just really have to make whatever discomfort you’re summoning be worth the punchline. The edgier something is the more it has to be funny to compensate, the point of offensive humor is to be funny not to offend, right? This has to be common sense. I don’t get how it flies over the head of so many people.

This has been happening on and off for months in Lebanon, the pilots have all been landing without GPS lately in case it cuts out again while they’re mid-landing. Utter chaos when it first happened, delivery drivers especially were very lost, and people in general had a tough time dealing with the loss of GPS. We don’t have a rigorous address system so sending locations to each other’s phones is really important here.

I think “sounds more like” is a weird thing to say though for this kind of thing

This is the comment that got me back out of lurking mode. Hi. Apologies if any of what I write goes against the Solarpunk ethos, it’s not something I know the details of, just the broad ideas.

So, the Middle East has a weird relationship with solar power. I will split this into two parts for two very different regions:

In the Gulf, solar installations have been gaining momentum as essentially vanity projects to show the world “Hey, look, we’re not all dependent on fossil fuels! Look at this n million dollar investment we made into solar power! We are actively participating to become more sustainable!”. I applaud any initiative to harness some of the sun’s free power, I think it’s not a net negative when they do this. But it is worth mentioning that these places really have no drive to push away from burning fuel for their main source of power. It literally comes out of the ground, of course it made sense to use it before all the money came in, but these solar projects are really just puff pieces. I am glad they are building these arrays but they certainly aren’t part of some solar revolution. If we want to look at sustainability more broadly, it’s not like the urban planning, transport infrastructure, or labor conditions are geared towards sustainability. This is a part of the world where sustainability is seen as a tech thing, hell, a tech feature. “Oh you like the environment? Your single-family home must have a dedicated Tesla charger!”. But the Gulf is its own thing. I do believe that since that part of the world is going to be dealing with the effects of climate change head-on, and they will be figuring out stuff like how to deal with microclimate management and so on. I’m not familiar with that kind of science, I want to be optimistic about something.

They do have to keep cleaning the panels though, it’s really dusty out there.

I cannot really speak for Palestine, but I do know about the relationship my country has with solar. I’m from Lebanon, a place with a climate very different from the Gulf (for now). You may remember from a few years ago we were in the news for a bunch of reasons: Record protests, economic meltdown, the whole port incident, all fun things. In 2021 I remember seeing articles pop out from western news outlets with “uplifting” stories about how many households in Lebanon are setting up rooftop solar. Sadly, those stories are not uplifting. Solar (PV) is not this great liberator that the average household is setting up to become more environmentally friendly or independent from the (very terrible) power grid/power mafia (let’s not get into the mafia thing or this comment would be 10x longer). Solar is something only the top 10 odd percent of households can afford, so it’s kind of given us one more layer of inequality here. Don’t get me wrong: my own household installed solar, at what for us is a significant financial investment, and I can tell you for a fact that for people here it is absolutely life-changing. I haven’t had 24/hour electricity in my lifetime, it’s really only something I saw in hospitals. My life is so much better, I can do things overnight thanks to battery storage, I don’t have to worry about how some appliances react to having their power taken away for anywhere between half a second to a few minutes. Things just work and it is amazing.

But the inequality angle I think is being lost on a lot of us, and I find myself forgetting that not everyone has electricity after midnight. We have never been particularly wealthy - I remember seeing photos of my friends on vacation abroad as a kid and asking my parents why that wasn’t something we would do - but now those same friends roll their eyes when I suggest we play one more round of a game at 11:50 PM. There’s a weird survivor’s guilt with being able to pay your way out of a problem. I’m a true believer in household solar, this isn’t just a “throw money at the problem” thing - my country runs on diesel and I hate it so much. The main power stations are ancient and inefficient, and have been converted decades ago (inefficiently) to burn diesel. The mafia generators that used to fill the gaps in power run on diesel. Heating runs on diesel. I hate the smell of diesel smoke interrupting the fresh mountain air, I hate the sound of generators in the street. I hate the generator mafia shaking us down monthly, and I hate them even more after they started pulling more dirty tricks after we installed solar. But this is so worth it, and it’s been worth every dollar (and dollars aren’t as easy to come by here). It has been a life changer for me and my family. If only we can generate water from the sun :p

I hate to make this a “woe is us, Lebanon has it really hard” comment, especially with the manmade hell that has been unleashed in Gaza, but yeah, the Middle East has different areas with different relationships with solar.

I also think Jordan has a PV manufacturing plant, I guess that’s nice.