In my defense I’m not the sharpest tool in the wetlands.

Snapstore has proprietary software too…

Came here to ask that too… is it really supposed to be a joke, and that’s it?

I partially agree. Installing from a script saves time and energy, but installing manually allows you to learn and have a deeper understanding for your computer (along with giving you more control). I’d say install from scratch once, install from a script the rest of the time, in my opinion it’s worth it to have the extra understanding of how everything works, and also then you can audit the script you’ll be using.

Feeds.

Thank you, I fixed it!

TL;DR: The article claims that the Brave web browser is bad and should not be used.

The author points out that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, co-founder (and ex-CEO) of Mozilla, and founder of Brave, donated 1,000 USD in support of a proposition to ban same-sex marriage. Along with making the claim that Brave’s goal is not to act as an ad-blocker, but instead to build and grow their own advertisement network, and he also believes that the network has several flaws:

• Brave Ads paysout in a form of cryptocurrency, called BAT (🦇).
• As BAT is a cryptocurrency there is high volatility.
• BAT can not be redeemed for fiat (“actual”) money directly from within the Brave Wallet.
• The author also believes that “it [the network] has largely failed” but that it “has generated a lot of revenue for Brave,” via the ICO (Initial Coin Offering; IPO for crypto).

In addition to these key points the author also:

• Claims that Brave prompted FTX, before the scandal.
• Cites the The Brave Marketer Podcast where ex-CMO of Crypto.com Steven Kalifowitz shares an ambitious goal of being a “‘brand like Coke and Netflix.’” The author then mentions that:
  • In 2023 there was a report from The Financial Times that Crypto.com traded against their customers.
  • In 2022 the company try to hide the severity of its layoffs.
• Mentions Brave’s integration with Gemini, and how the crypto exchange is under investigation for lying about FDIC insurance.
• Mentions a partnership with the the 3XP Web3 Gaming Expo where they sponsored the Esports Arena and rewarded contestants with the BAT token.
• Claims that Brave added affiliate/referral codes to URLs, such as “binance.us.”

Finally, the author lists Firefox and Vivaldi as alternatives to Brave, and ends the article with “Brave Browser is irredeemable, and you should not use it under any circumstances.”

I am human, please let me know if I’ve made a mistake.

Edit: Fixed bat emoji and typo.

culturally a lot more like Reddit, for the worse.

I have to agree with you… but, the good thing is is that we don’t have karma farming!

a “mostly Seattle-based transit-loving” Mastodon

I think one of the greatest powers of the federation is that you can join a niche community and still get the rest of the content. It’s pretty amazing.

There is a way to mark a video as watched in youtube-dl (--mark-watched), so it’s possible for Piped to have the same thing.

own

I think the real problem is that OP doesn’t own Windows, “the software is licensed, not sold.”

Copyright in of itself is not a bad thing. The problem is our execution of it.

Not a desktop environment, Hyprland. The bar is a custom Waybar.

Thanks, here’s the color scheme!

Gosh, I’ve really messed up. Fixing immediately, thank you for bring this to my attention – and I apologize to all y’all.

I’ve never heard of InviZible, it looks supper cool. Although, I can’t really give it a try right now (I’m using an iPhone – I had a Motorola, but the battery gave out on me a few months? ago and I can’t find a good price for a replacement).

Yeah, you really aren’t supposed to… I rarely use Orbot to be honest, it’s just super useful if I do need to use it, like on a network that blocks a whole bunch of things and you want to catch up on Matrix messages or whatever. Also, if you’re worried about your phone updating or making a bunch of useless requests, you can turn on low data mode/mark your current connection as metered.

https://blog.kagi.com/update-kagi-search-pricing

I gotta hand it to them for being transparent about their pricing, including that limit feature… AWS should take some notes.

These are actually super cool because they put things like the old “site:reddit.com” trick on steroids and https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/code.html is like site:stackoverflow.com on steroids.

I’m assuming you’re a programmer so I gotta ask, how much easier does this make it for your to find documentation and answers to that one error that the language never decided to document for some reason?

It’s also quite a bit more user facing, and easier to work with than say, getting the same options from Google search.

Google does always seem to hide them for some reason, despite the fact that it would be easy to work into the interface.

Not sure what you mean by custom ones, haven’t seen anything about that; but it’s definitely in the feature parity category.

In this post they say: “We have many instant answers already and are constantly adding more, with the idea of allowing users to define their own ‘widgets’ in the future.” I’m assuming it’s not released yet, but it does sound like a cool feature when they do.

Don’t forget things like redirects (change your lemmy UI?) and their own index, which includes things like wayback machine results – particularly relevant with CNET deleting old content to boost their Google ranking.

I didn’t see either one of these features on the blog post, likely because it was from 2022, but pretty cool being able to search for old content that’s been deleted.

The search engine itself, no; but their browser extensions are open source: https://github.com/kagisearch/browser_extensions

I stand corrected, that is nice that at least a bit of it is, I didn’t see that on their website, granted I did miss the entire “Help” page somehow.

Their generated summaries are also pretty cool

Alright, so I created a trail account, and gave it a try with a random article, and hey, pretty cool, and would actually save time. I even tried it with some pretty simple documentation, it did end up just describing the steps that had to be taken. Although, I noticed a little “discuss this document” button, and asked it what code I’d need, it gave it to me. Then asked it to make tweaks like changing the key and sections to ones that actually would be in a configuration file, and it changed it. It could even do things beyond just the lines it’s on, like instead of printing the value, make sure it’s not a value. I gotta say, I actually am pretty impressed by that (even if it is relatively simple work), I know ChatGPT and Copilot could (likely) do the same things, but how it broke it down from an article is pretty cool.

Now, I’m likely not gonna become a paying customer for it, like I said in the original post – I’m using (Neo)vim, and, while I’ve played around with AI like this, I don’t find it ever really falling into my workflow. Maybe down the road, and if the internet keeps getting worse, it might be worth it. That being said you can do a lot of these things with alternative solutions, but a search engine that puts them all together is pretty cool, and does save some time.

I’ve tried a lot of different backup solutions… I’d be curious where you’re leaning, but I’d say this one is likely going to be your winner for ease of use, privacy, and cross-platform functionality.

Currently, I’m using Nextcloud, and I distro hop enough that all I need to do is backup my documents, which most are code and can go on Git(Lab/Tea/Hub). Although, I’m finally settling down (there’s like one or two more distros that I want to try) with Arch Linux, and a proper backup solution would be nice, by plan is to just go through this entire thread, compare features, and try them out.

Thanks for explaining Kagi to me by the way, it is in fact a pretty cool service!

Orbit acts as a VPN and effects the entire system, so all of your apps get routed through ToR.