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Fairly sure there are some decent societal goods in outcomes around medical research and engineering

Wasn’t supposed to be condescending, apologies that I came across like that. I just more meant you aren’t representative of who a FOSS potential killer app needs to reach. I agree, I don’t want cloud, AI, subscriptions. But I do want a tool palette and interaction experience that doesn’t require looking at the docs to use.

From a UX perspective federation has been absolutely bungled. Twitters greatest trick was to cause an exodus before the alternatives had reached maturity, though I imagine the demand has pushed them further than they would be otherwise.

IMO BlueSky is by far the best Twitter replacement, insofar as you can just use it like Twitter but it is built on an open protocol, allowing you to run your own server if you wish but with zero interoperability friction or worrying about servers on the actual client. Also it has already started basic bridging between threads and mastadon, its custom feeds in place of algorithms is genius and stackable moderation is the most compelling solution I’ve seen to the core complaints and concerns over modern social media.

And it’s independent, transparent and run by intelligent, passionate people. And, very importantly, Jack Dorsey has nothing to do with it!

There’s always been a real stick in the mud attitude with GIMP. No matter how many people cry out about it’s confusing UX it’s always tried to serve the existing userbase rather than design to expand its usefulness to more people. I think this is a shame and is why GIMP never achieved what Blender has.

I remember trying to use it the best part of 20 years ago when I wanted to make animated gifs. It was so hard to use it was easier to pirate photoshop/imageready. Then a year or so back I tried to use it as I had moved to being a Linux user and was kind of astonished that the UX was still so bloody hostile.

I don’t think I’m a moron (though how many morons do… so take this with a pinch of salt) but trying to figure out how to do basic things like cut and paste, cropping etc. without reading documentation just goes hellishly wrong. Any time I take the time to follow a guide on how to use it I’m taken aback by how unintuitive it is and once I’m done I forget it’s idiosyncrasies immediately.

I remember “gimpshop” being a thing at one point, which I never got to use but heard it used the processing of GIMP with a more photoshop like UX. Though I believe that project lapsed.

Anyway, yeah it’d be nice in a world where things like GNOME have become such beautiful UXes that projects like GIMP have the courage to revolutionise themselves.

which is great for you, but not for anyone who has even briefly used more mainstream options

“Eww, like the coarser thread which forms the outline of the design in some lacemaking techniques!? That is just a bit gross don’t you think?”

The simple solution is to change it to a BSD license and call it BLIMP

I mean if you’re going to go Chromium-based at least use Vivaldi… Brave-s benefits minus Brave’s shithousery

There are allegedly even better fonts for dyslexia, but do they upset other people as much? No.

Yeah it seems way more smaller search engines use Bing than Google, I’m not sure why but I’m guessing either API costs or privacy agreements? DDG did get into hot water a couple of years ago over this because Bing was serving ads which were not private and were potentially profiling DDG users. No company is perfect all the time but they did promptly attempt to fix the issue. I do like them as far as tech firms go.

I too am a fan of Comic Sans. It sits in my heart the same place as overplayed dad rock.

I actually code in a monospace variant of comic sans because my life is basically a shitpost

https://www.fonts.com/font/tabular-type-foundry/comic-code

Phind has its own approach with various automated prompts and UI functions. It’s free to use so you can compare the differences in function.

I don’t even think I’ve ever heard the word “propitiatory” used so TIL from my own error

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As soon as we conceded “milk” for plant milks we were setting off on a long path of bullshit. If something is designed as an alternative to something it should be able to explain it’s designed purpose.

If you’re a programmer, might I suggest the brave new world of ChatGPT enhanced search via Phind.com

Even if you’re not, it’s fantastic. It basically takes your input and processes it like ChatGPT but then is trained to run web searches to grab further information and uses that to progress its own internal monologue. The result is a natural language response with search engine like results down the side which are cited within the main response.

My process is:

• Search DDG
• If that’s not satisfactory (it is IME about 80% of the time) prefix with !sp to search googles index proxied by start page

Where did you hear this? This isn’t true. If you want google without the tracking, use StartPage (if you’re using DDG this can be accessed with the !sp bang preface)

DDG uses Bing as their fallback engine but also does a lot of propitiatory indexing of its own

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/

To anyone who used Linux once upon a time and got scared off - try it again. Nowadays so much works without any config, driver support is so much better and, at least with my last year using Fedora, it’s incredibly stable.

And if you get stuck, ChatGPT is so good at helping you through the experience. Also, IMO, once you spend a week or so to get used to Gnome desktop environment it’s better than both windows and macos.