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.
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.
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.
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’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).
Stockholm Syndrome…
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!
WhatsApp
They will fall, the enshittification has already begun with the integration of influencer-related groups.
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.
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. 😭
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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
I told myself I would never install it until it became the only option for keeping in touch with a girl I like. But hey as long a that’s all I use it for, they can’t glean that much info from me, right? Right?
Discord. Too many people and communities on it that won’t use Matrix.
What stops me from moving away from discord is the in-server game streaming. If something ever shows up with performance parity on that and the possibility of spinning up my own server I’ll drop discord in a second. So far I haven’t found it
modern internet
Several things from Google.
- Google Maps - none of the OSM-bases options are there yet. I need traffic conditions and good Android Auto support. At the same time I hate that Google Maps is so full of ads. When I search for “breakfast” and the top result is a sponsored result for Dunkin and the closest is 50 miles away…
- YouTube - the content is there so it’s hard to go to an alternative.
- Google Photos - my issue with this is really more tied to Gmail. If I stop paying for more Drive storage for my photos, I will stop receiving email because my account is full. But I did switch away from Gmail at least.
Check out piped.video. It’s content of youtube without youtube. That means no recommendatios based on their algorythm, which might be nice sometimes but it’s a good alternative. LibreTube for an Android app is what I use.
Ente seems good Google Photos alternative, but you do have to pay for it (they have like 1GB free space)
Yeah I use SmartTube on my TV and piped on my phone but I still count that as “using YouTube.”
It also sucks they offered unlimited free photo hosting then reneged.
No they didn’t. They offered unlimited free photo hosting for the Pixel 1. Which I still make use of. Later pixel generations got free unlimited uploads for 2 years.
Isn’t Waze better, functionalitywise, than google maps? I dont think they are any better on ethical fronts, but still better to use the less powerful evil…
I mean it’s still Google.
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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
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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…
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
You don’t use capitalism.
;)
Capitalism uses you.
Socks. If I’m at home you’ll never see me wearing socks, not even if it’s -5°C out there. But got to use them while wearing shoes, I guess.
I hate socks and shoes. Something to do with being on the spectrum. I go barefoot, or wear thongs (flip flops) or crocs if I have to wear something. I pretty much only wear shoes/boots when mowing the lawn.
money
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.
