Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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From my limited understanding as a common pleb, they are inserting DRM into Chromium browsers to prevent ad-blockers.
Internet with no ad-blockers is like a nightmare
Yes, it is a nightmare. The insane volume of ads and clickbait injected into web pages is killing the internet as an information source. Most of the searchable stuff is unusable. Which explains why ChatGPT was so enthusiastically embraced - it's really just synthesizing content into a readable form that doesn't require navigating around a jungle of animated gifs and flashing ads. That's also I think why Lemmy and Mastodon are so refreshing to use, and hopefully will stay that way - although money seems to find a way to ruin everything. Lemmy right now feels a lot like the internet used to be before the big money came along and ruined it with advertising and platform lock-ins.
@fuser @Lem0n, the only AI I most use and which is really useful for me is Andisearch.
https://andisearch.com
https://andisearch.com looks like it might be a better option - thank you so much for posting. I'm mostly using duck-duck-go which is tolerable but by this point we should have come up with a more useful way to index relevant information. Google would rather we see ads than any relevant content, which wasn't the case when they first launched google in the late 1990s. Google was refreshing at the time because of its cleaner interface than yahoo and uncluttered results, amusingly enough - it's a far cry from what it once was.
@fuser, Andi certainly is a fresh wind, it was the first search engine with AI which appears, before Google, Bing and the others. Great work of two very nice and friendly devs, Angie Hoover and Jed White, with an open ear to the user in their Discord channel for suggestions, feature request, bug report (well, it's still in developement) or simple chat.
Well, thanks again for the info - I'm trying it now and the results seem excellent, it took me to wikiwand, which I'd never used but it's a front end for wikipedia - it's quite nice. I've learned so much about alternative FOSS and great ad-free content by reading and posting here. I was never a great fan of reddit - liked to scroll but hardly ever posted there - I thought RPAN was the coolest thing they did - but Lemmy is great for conversation, despite the relatively small user base - I'm grateful that reddit's nonsense drove so many helpful people here.
@fuser, the fediverse has nothing to do with monolithic social networks, controlled by large multinationals. It doesn't matter if you use an instance of Lemmy, Friendica, Diaspora, or Mastodon. etc., are really of the people and independent of large corporations and linkable with each other. Here in Mastodon I see posts of all these in my Timeline and I suppose you too, like the one where I am.
I didn't notice that you were posting from Mastodon as I'm on Lemmy and your posts appear here just like any other Lemmy user - but the @fuser at the start of your messages is probably the tell, I think Mastodon defaults the username you're replying to, whereas Lemmy doesn't. It's great that we can use different applications without some corporate gatekeeper capturing everybody's personal info at the integration point to hawk to an advertising company.
@fuser, apart of Vivaldi social, the instance made by the Vivaldi browser for it's users, I'm also since long time ago in Lemmy.ml (with another Nick), also conected to Mastodon.
@fuser, with Mastodon you can even logging in Pixelfed. I love the #fediverse.
@fuser @Lem0n Regarding articles, I just save them to a read-later app that strips them of all the crap. If the site won't let me, I'll find another source reporting the same information, and save it to read later. If this process ultimately fails without a saved page, I won't read the article.
Right - that's a good approach, however if you're looking for a quick answer to an immediate question by searching using a common search engine, the garbage SEO pages are the most irritating, even with adblocking.
Living the dream.
To be fair, it is useful for other purposes, but the cost to users is likely to be huge, with ad blocking being one of them. It probably also prevents other things even outside your browser because there's no point in securing a browser running in an untrusted environment. IIRC there is/was an issue running Netflix on certain Android devices and rooted devices after a similar feature was added to Android.
This would also hurt users that need accessibility extensions so they can properly browse websites that don't have good accessibility features.
My S7 was running a custom rom, I had to manually download and install the Netflix apk, as the play store wouldn't let me do it. WhatsApp was weird too, it would let you install, but there were a bunch of aggravating bugs, like if your device was on it showed you as "online". Got in trouble at work because my boss thought I was on my phone all day.