This question was inspired by my hatred of Temporal Anti-Aliasing which, in many games nowadays, is poorly used as a performance bandaid. On lower resolutions it will smudge and blur the image and certain bad cases of TAA will cause visible ghosting.
Yet in spite of all this, certain games won’t let you turn it off or have hair/fur/foliage look like dogshit without it so sometimes I still use it.
Amazon basically.
Some things are near impossible to get in a reasonable time frame, or get shipped from China anyway if i get them at the source.
Even if I’m going to buy the thing from a different ruthless conglomerate, I often check Amazon just to look at more reviews first.
I manage to live without Amazon. I just pretend it doesn’t exist, I don’t know if it’s cheaper or quicker on Amazon as I don’t see it (I use a search engine that can block results). It’s also probably other aspects of my life that also make it possible, spare money, spare time, no kids, live in a city.
My vote goes to Google, to whom I am tightly married. It’s ecosystem and interconnectivity between apps as well as devices is unbeatable. It’s super reliant.
It’s the one entity that can wreck my online and offline presence. I mean, I use android and Google to login everywhere. If Mr. Google so decrees, my phone could wipe and google account be gone tomorrow. Same applies to Apple and Microsoft, but I don’t use their systems as much. The poison I picked is Google and I hate it.
I feel like I don’t use that many Google services (mostly because I’m not convinced they won’t shut down), but the ones I do use are the ones that would really suck to lose access to. I realized this a few months ago and have at least been working on moving my email away from Gmail to my own domain since that is the critical one that could screw everything up.
I moved to protonmail years ago for this reason, but then my friend gave me a free paid YouTube account so I created a new Gmail account and found a new love for heavy metal. Since then the algorithm has learnt my tastes so well I would be devastated to lose my account, but I made a pact with myself that if my friend ever decided to ditch her account that I wouldn’t pay for my own. So I’m totally at the mercy of her whims, and she doesn’t even know!
In the last months I tried to cut as many Google services as I could. I use the Proton suite now, it’s nice.
Unfortunately I still heavily rely on them for Android phone and TVs… Not to mention YouTube, which is yet to have a good competitor.
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I don’t even know if YouTube will be around in 30 years, let alone not have competitors.
All gigantic businesses think they’re too big and entrenched and used every day to fail, until they do. Just look at Yahoo! as one example from recent memory.
So, we’ll see, I suppose!
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I mean…you’re probably right. But there’s a little part of me that thinks…they said the same thing about Facebook, that it wouldn’t last five years, that it would go the way of MySpace and something else would jump in, but… it’s been just a few months shy of 20 years now, and even though it’s not the juggernaut it used to be, it’s entrenched in a way I never expected.
And then there’s, like, GE, which is 130 years old…or Cigna, Remington, Citi, or Chase, which are older. Some others, like AT&T, do a little dance and come back…I dunno. Some companies just have staying power (in the case of Cigna, I think it might be a pact with some unholy abomination). And they’re all still dominating or at least leading their respective markets.
Even your example, Yahoo, while certainly not the cultural force it once was, is still around in a slightly different incarnation. Nothing ever really dies, it seems.
Youtube.
You should try Piped.
And Freetube!
and Invidious
How’s the recommendations algorithm on piped?
It simply shows videos from channels you subscribe to on your feed. In the settings, you can make it show you either “feed” ore “trending” as default. This of course makes it harder to discover new channels.
Almost anything Google. I have an Android because I hate the restrictions of iOS, but forcing me to sell my location to Google if I want to know where I am (even in an open source app because location is a system thing).
Ah man it’s depressing watching the fall of google. From my gmail beta account which was incredible to do no evil, google are great, theyre open, to so many cancelled projects replaced by similar ones(ehem chats and video chats) and so much bad behavior with their ads.
If you don’t want that, you should look into microG. It replaces Google Play Services with an open source reimplementation, so apps that use it and stuff like location still work but without actually talking to Google. If an app uses Google Maps, it will instead use OpenStreetMap, for example. There’s a version of LineageOS, which ships without Google stuff and instead with microG and F-Droid as well.
MicroG is not exactly secure or privacy friendly if you continue using the same services.
Pootly my thing is a Google Pixe phone, as these now dont have a headphone jack anymore and are from Google, but for GrapheneOS
GrapheneOS! The catch is you need to buy a google pixel.
Look into custom ROMs, there’s a few degoogled privacy focused ROMs but support depends on ur mobile. You can also degoogle it yourself but can be quite time consuming.
A car running on fossil fuel.
Well fossil fuel in general…
Amazon. I try to buy elsewhere most of the time but other sites just don’t have the same stuff sometimes.
Delivery is fast, prices are right, and they have an excellent return policy. Also Ive had many moments where I try to go to a store and thanks to this post digital retail apocalypse world we live in their selection is limited compared to what it would have had 10 years ago.
\ Yep.
Prime is just too good if you happen to use Amazon’s other products. Free overnight delivery on Whole Foods items, that’s literally 4-6 hour delivery sometimes. Access to Prime Videos which (very) occasionally has a show I want to watch. And a free Twitch subscription which I use to toss creators I like a few extra bucks every month.
It took some work and sometimes we pay a little more but we cut Amazon out of our lives.
Windows
I like Windows, it’s MS that I hate and the bullshit they add to Windows.
I hate to break it to you, but the stuff MS added to Windows comprises literally all of Windows.
Ehhh not really. On consumer devices yes, but when you start dealing with automated deployment and group policy and things like that, you can automate disabling telemetry services.
Now if you’re using something like azure or intune, you just have control of the spyware.
‘I hate dirt in my burrito.’
‘There’s lots of stuff in a burrito.’
This analogy doesn’t work because you cannot cleanly separate things in a burrito, whereas you can in Windows to some extent.
My burritos never reboot by surprise to force updates that break decisions I mad about what’s in them.
How often does this even happen? In the past 3 years I’ve not met a single person who’s had a Windows update trigger randomly or had Windows make breaking changes.
If you expect me to prove Microsoft’s still doing what they’ve been infamous for doing for twenty straight years, the answer is no. Even if they magically stopped fucking people over this way - this doesn’t justify your dismissal of someone’s complaints about those stupid problems Microsoft created. It still happened to them, and they hated it, and you had to pipe up and say ‘well what about the parts where it didn’t fuck you.’
I’ve always felt theres multiple sides to Microsoft. Theres devs making a damn good and simple product. Then comes the enterprise devs that over-engineer the product. Then theres the marketing coming in and try to buy up competition or bundle the product with other products to force it on people (MS way of advertising). And THEN the suits either ruin the product for money or shutting it down for not either making enough money or for not helping their enterprise products make money (like for example VSCode is a product that helps MS make money on Azure).
Windows 7 was a fantastic operating system.
Windows 7 was fourteen years ago.
Stockholm Syndrome…
Google.
Reddit - I don’t post there any more, but sometimes I still end up there looking for answers and information.
BUT most of all:
LinkedIn - This platform is built to benefit companies, employers and managers, not the masses of people scrambling to use it to get noticed and build their careers. There are so many things that bug me about LinkedIn, but ONE is definitely that I have no real options NOT to use it (without suffering terrible economic penalties if I you know, don’t want to give them my data). I get resentful and anxious every time I look at it.
If you work in IT, LinkedIn is just another spam source.
I deleted my account the first time they were hacked. So much fluff and fake networking. Any employer that relies on that shit is a place I don’t want to be.
Facebook. I never willingly go on it, but my friends all use it for events and shit. It’s funny hanging out with them and having someone mention things from a group chat I’ve never even touched. I absolutely refuse to install that fucking malware they call Messenger.
Other than that, anything Google. Have to use it all for work.
So many small businesses have a Facebook page and no website which is quite frustrating too. I just want to see your hours, why did I need to sign up to another website to do that?
Google Maps is normally good for hours if they actually have a physical location.
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I’ve recently been trying to de-Google my life. I used to be all in on them, but they’ve changed and so have I.
And yea Facebook sucks, but it’s how I can keep some semblance of social interaction by lurking what other people are doing. 😭
I finally converted my friends over to discord a few years ago, and even then I’m looking to move off of discord. But it was like pulling teeth getting them to leave messenger
WhatsApp
Absolutely, it’s essentially required in Europe… but also, fuck Facebook.
Surprisingly hard for people to accept, if you don’t have it.
I really wish I could get out of using WhatsApp, but it’s all everyone ever uses.
And there just isn’t any good enough argument you can use to convince the average user from doing otherwise. Unless it literally makes the phone explode in your hands, people will not change.I didn’t have it for ages but it just resulted in people “texting” me and me never getting it because they actually sent me a WhatsApp
They will fall, the enshittification has already begun with the integration of influencer-related groups.
I think WhatsApp is still fantastic. Just a matter of time till Facebook incorporates it fully in. That is what worries me.
I won’t deny it is working very well. It is the Facebook part for me too
It’s not just one thing. I can easily whip up a list:
- Cars - they strangle out the city and make our urban communities dystopias
- MS Office - I can mostly avoid it, but every time I have to use it, WTF?
- Java - the syntax is fine. It’s the whole universe of build/config/versioning tools that gets me
- Pure Capitalism - I’m ready to protest the hell out until we get some democratic socialism
- First Past the Post Voting - It just degrades into a two party lockdown
YouTube. I wish they made better decisions about how to run the platform,.
You might be interested in trying out the grayjay app
It being free is only barely enough incentive to use it. If they ever have effective anti-adblock and force users to watch five ads before every video, I’m gone. I will never give any money to a monopolistic company if I don’t have to.
They are making great decisions for their customers and stakeholders.
Google, YouTube, Gmail, chrome.
Duck Duck Go, Grayjay, Protonmail, Firefox.
Nebula is great too!
YouTube, Amazon, Comcast Internet, and my employer. In fact, all employers.
Windows
How else would you get natural light into your house?
Skylights?
