Definitely as a millennial I'm of the last generation that will remember arranging to meet up somewhere in advance and sticking to that plan (or rearranging over landline with more than a day's notice...)

But something I've noticed when I ask people in my team what their dream jobs are the younger people tend to say 'run their own businesses', 'work for themselves' etc. Whereas in our generation (in my circles anyway) that definitely wasn't so prominent. Maybe a side effect of seeing influencers making it big?

That's a very black and white way of putting it. As long as you're an adult who can tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and you're not spending hours obsessed with it I don't think it's unhealthy. The way you phrase 'avoid it completely' makes it sound like you're going out of your way to avoid it already.

(I think the problems are coming through with the generation being 'brought up on porn', and thinking real sex is like it is in the videos online but that's a different story really.)

I mean this isn't miles away from what the writer's strike is about. Certainly I think the technology is great but after the last round of tech companies turning out to be fuckwits (Facebook, Google etc) it's only natural that people are going to want to make sure this stuff is properly regulated and run fairly (not at the expense of human creatives).

VPN subscriptions in the UK will be a lucrative market then for people wanting access to, let's see, Wikipedia...

I'm interested to know what the Signal President meant when she said she's much more optimistic about working with the government than she originally was.

The thing is it obviously does come from good intentions, and it's very rare you'll find me saying that about something to do with the Tories. But it's so obviously the wrong approach and yet here we are. Thanks for nothing. Yet again.

Love Pizzacake's comics, nearly always make me laugh

I'm a long time vaper, it's got me off the cigs, and I use a reusable tank because it's what I've always used but it's obviously better for the environment and cheaper.

I do support clamping down on disposables because of the waste and these ones seem to be the ones that get into the hands of kids.

However, the whole scare thing about ecigs has always looked like a massive diversion tactic when actual cigarettes are still on sale. I mean it won't happen because it's kerching for the government. But I see literally thousands more discarded cigarette butts than I do vapes round our way.

I use a VPN which has an excellent ad & bs blocker. But occasionally some sites need me to turn it off to pay for things or whatever and I forget to turn it back on and end up browsing the internet in its normal state.

And wow... welcome to commerce central. It's not that all the ads are obnoxious though some are, but the quantity of them is out of control on some websites.

To be fair, I've found it's a good rule of thumb that the quality of a website is usually proportionate to the less amount of ads they have.

I also reviewed mobile games for a while and had to play without a VPN to get the same experience most players would get - game ads are the worst. Unrepresentative of the games they're trying to sell, but also often sexist (veering towards misogynistic), obnoxious and with false endings.

I mean the article is specifically about Google search. Which might have gone downhill since whenever it first came out with the introduction of ads (sorry, 'Sponsored Results') but I'm not seeing significantly better competition for delivering search results. Everyone is still just aping the brand leader.

DuckDuckGo is obviously better for privacy for example but it doesn't seem to have any ambition except to deliver the same results as Google but without the ads and tracking which is ok but not a big enough draw except for people already concerned about privacy. Bing gets essentially the same results but if anything seems more spammy than Google with pop ups about making it or edge your default search engine or browser. It feels like other search engines just take Google search as something to copy and put their spin on it though.

I'd say search is one of the things Google is still getting right enough to earn its place as the leader. Some things it does well, some things it has badly declined on (someone above mentioned Google assistant hardly understanding anything anymore, when it used to be the best in this area too), but generally you can replace most Google things with programmes doing things their own way. Search engines just feel a bit like reskins to me

Guilty verdict not a surprise after reading about the case earlier this year. Having a nurse on the wards supposedly looking after the most vulnerable babies in hospital and instead killing them is every parents nightmare.

I'm a fan of the BBC, they make a lot of terrific programmes and the breadth of the audience their radio stations cater to is pretty phenomenal.

They also have a history of experimenting with technology so it's not a total surprise they've taken this step. Since most people on Mastodon are either sharing British news sources from the BBC or The Guardian anyway it will be interesting to see how they fare...

I think most people knew it was a protest and nothing more - I doubt a lot of people thought, hey Reddit is totally going to back down.

It was a mass expression of user dissatisfaction which escalated from an initial 2 day blackout into something so much more, and so I'm pretty impressed with what it did, which was stirred up shit for the management and made the CEO say some ridiculous things in the press to boot.

What I am a little disappointed in is that not as many mods walked. I'm not a mod, but I was fed the line 'it's going to be impossible to mod my sub without the 3rd party apps'. Given the amount of subs that seem to have been ticking over just nicely since the API switch though I feel like I was fed some bs in that department

Admittedly I've blocked the meme communities in my feed - but that's not what I wanted from Reddit or I want from here.