I don't pay subs for things like photoshop. It doesn't matter if I can "afford" it. It could be one cent per year and still I just don't want stuff that's set up that way.

Right, me neither, I avoid subscriptions like a plague.

But clearly you and I aren't the typical person here, considering the success of some SaaS, and considering the amount of money Adobe et al makes regardless of their choices. So hard to say they're "wrong" when the system and ecosystem effectively actively prize them for their choices, with their wallet.

What am I even supposed to think "gallons of slop" means? Funny that this is both fake and meaningless. OP if you're reading this, this garbage was the worst possible way you could have made the point.

Samsung phones are the most bloated pieces of shit I have ever seen. Mine came with an app just to view the msn.com web site and it couldn't be uninstalled. You have google and samsung in a tug of war over every single thing the phone does. I thought my home button was breaking because of how unresponsive it was, but it turned out it just waits for a sequence to trigger such and such unwanted AI assistant or whatever the hell. It's a crapshoot whether you accidentally launch google assistant or bixby or some other crap service you never even heard of. There are touchwiz sound effects that I hear in public and to this day it sends a chill down my spine because it brings me back to so much miserable time spent with that abomination of electronics.

Unless you live in a place where your phone needs to be a regional variant and there are no custom roms that support it.

Yes registering fake views is fraud against ad networks. Ad networks love it though because they need those fake clicks to defraud advertisers in turn. Paying to have ads viewed by bots is just paying to have electricity and compute resources burned for no reason. Eventually the wrong person will find out about this and I think that's why Google's been acting like there's no tomorrow.

It's been really sad to see reddit go like this because it was pretty much the last bastion of the human internet. I hated reddit back in the day but later got into it for that reason. It's why all our web searches turned into "cake recipe reddit." But boy did they throw it in the garbage fast. One of their new features is you can read AI generated questions with AI generated answers. What could the purpose of that possibly be? We still have the old posts... for the most part (a lot of answers were purged during the protest) but what's left of it is also slipping away fast for various reasons. Maybe I'll try to get back into gemini protocol or something.

I see a retreat to the boutique internet. I recently went back to a gaming-focused website, founded in the late 90s, after a decade. No bots there, as most people have a reputation of some kind

I really want to see people who ruin functional services made into pariahs

I don't care how aggressive this sounds; name and shame.

Huffman should never be allowed to work in the industry again after what he and others did to Reddit (as you say, last bastion of the internet)

Zuckerberg should never be allowed after trapping people in his service and then selectively hiding posts (just for starters. He's never been a particularly nice guy)

Youtube and also Google - because I suspect they might share a censorship architecture... oh, boy. (But we have to remove + from searches! Our social network is called Google+! What do you mean "ruining the internet"?)

> But we have to remove + from searches

Wasn't that functionality just replaced? Parts of a query that are in quotation marks, are required to appear in any returned result.

Yeah, but quotes aren't as convenient and I think I've heard they're less accurate than + used to be

This is such an indictment of modern technology. No offense is meant to you for doing what works for you, but it is buck wild that this is the "fix" they've come up with. As somebody learning about this for the first time it sounds equivalent to a world where screenshotting became really hard so people started taking photos of their screen so they could screenshot the photo. How could such a fundamental aspect of using a computer become so ridiculous? It's like satire.

Unfortunately, some apps don't support text selection and on some websites the text selection is unpredictable.

I'd actually compare screen OCR to screenshots. Instead of every app and every website implementing their own screenshot functionality, the system provides one for you.

Same goes for text selection. Instead of every context having to agree on tagging the text and directions, your phone has a quick way of letting you scan the screen for text.

To be fair, I still use the "hold the text to select it" approach when I want to continue with the "select all" action and have some confidence that is going to do what I want.

> some apps don't support text selection and on some websites the text selection is unpredictable.

That correctly identifies the problem. Now why is that, and how can we fix it?

It seems fixable; native GUI apps have COM bindings that can fairly reliably produce the text present in certain controls in the vast majority of cases. Web apps (and "desktop" apps that are actually web apps) have accessibility attributes and at least nominally the notion of separating document data from presentation. Now why do so few applications support text extraction via those channels? If the answer is "it's hard/easier not to", how can we make the right way easier than the wrong way?

I don't see the point of publishing any AI generated content. If I want AIs opinion on something I can ask it. If I want an AI image I can generate it. I've never found it helpful to have someone else's ai output lying around.

My brain first started doing this with online ads as well.

The habit has adapted and evolved very strongly with the amount of exercise it gets from UIs, textbooks, signage, and basically every other visual medium possible these days. It has actually become a problem with how often I overlook important information due to it being situated in a "nothing useful will ever be here" zone. But it's difficult to consciously control that instinct when it's correct 99.999% of the time.

For me it just doesn't work at all. I don't know why but every windows instance I've used since Win7 has not been able to find files even with the exact filename supplied. I don't disable the indexer. I can see it using CPU and disk resources but it just doesn't find anything relevant when I search. When I instead use Search Everything on Windows it works perfectly.