Nope, my wife uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Discord.

Can’t get her to adopt Fediverse equivalents.

I’d say I choose quality over quantity, but she mostly is in artist communities that don’t want to move off the old platforms. They say they were there before the crazies, they aren’t the problem, so they’re not gonna move, even if the people who own those platforms are straight up fascists. I couldn’t do it.

I’m not a nurse. Nurses are a different breed.

But as for me and my answer, I don’t let other people decide my happiness. That’s really all it is. Someone wants to be a jerk to me, I let them, I smile, and I go about my day. Because they do the things they do because of who they are and I do what I do because of who I am. Sounds cliche AF but it works for me.

That doesn’t sound accurate. Plenty of places use ballasts and those are legal. A ballast is a barrier, typically concrete but some are plastic and filled with sand, and they are commonly used to keep cars out of pedestrian spaces. You might not even notice them sometimes, but if you think about what keeps cars off the sidewalk or out of parks, you might notice them.

That’s my point, for most people the performance gains of one 2024 or 2025 flagship over another don’t mean much.

I can transfer stuff over WiFi to my iPhone in seconds. Like 2-3GB movies, 100MB-1GB video clips, etc. Seconds.

microSD sucks and I think anyone familiar with the tech knows it. The issue is speed. microSD is fine for like 16GB, maybe 32GB. Once you get bigger, you wanna put bigger files up there, more files, but they move. so. slow. It’s painful to watch. Then you get a bigger one and it’s such a headache to transfer stuff between them. I think a couple companies tried to make faster microSD cards/readers but they never took off. So I talked about NVMe and UFS. Slower than UFS, on garbage Android phones that aren’t good enough for UFS, is EMMC, and EMMC is faster than microSD. microSD is good for Jack and shit, and Jack left town. Apple may have blessed the industry by never including it. It’s trash and Jobs knew it, and he didn’t put trash in his products. Lots of people know microSD is trash and that, not Apple, is why most Android phones don’t include them now either. One, because yeah, they wanna sell you the faster internal storage and/or cloud storage. But two, because it’s just so slow.

But yeah, I’d say get a big-ish phone (storage wise, like 256GB or more) and keep stuff on the internal UFS or NVMe. Optionally get a Samsung T7 or T9 portable SSD, 2TB for around $100, on Black Friday (I mean, that’s about what I paid for my T7, like $110 tops) and keep stuff on that. Yes, iPhones can read/write from/to flash drives and portable drives. Same as Android, you open the file manager, browse to the drive, copy stuff over. Apple’s built in Files does it. On Android I’m old school, I’d only mess with either Solid Explorer (my personal choice) or FX File Explorer (2nd choice). I know Android has a file manager now (Samsung had one longer) but I trust those.

A lot of names can be converted. My favorite uncle gave his oldest daughter a pretty name, but he wanted a son to name after himself. They quit after having two girls, and he named his youngest girl after himself, with the name converted to the feminine variety.

I’d say the good guys are the ones supporting, or trying to support human rights. And gay rights, trans rights, the rights of immigrants and such… are human rights. A civilisation is judged not by how it treats its nobility, but how it treats its working poor. And we need to do better.

Well, I have the best one. I have the 16 Pro Max, 512GB. I like the big screen, and I like a lot of things about it. And how well it works with my watch, my AirPods, and my Macs — for example, being able to copy something on one and paste it on the other. “The Ecosystem” isn’t as great as some say, but it does have its advantages.

Some apps cost money. I refuse to do subscriptions. I’ll pay for an app if I like it but I won’t pay monthly unless it’s a service (like say Apple Music). There are free apps on both platforms. There are paid/subscription apps on both platforms. Both platforms take 30% so they’re both incentivised to promote subscriptions and paid apps over free ones. The free ones still exist. Only on Android, you also have F-Droid which is all free/open source apps.

Nothing is more powerful than an iPhone in all conditions. Okay so the Galaxy S25 is faster right now, but when it gets hot, its thermal protections reduce power by like 50-60% to cool it faster. iPhone only loses 20-30%, so under no load, the S25 is gonna be faster, and the iPhone is gonna be faster under load. Talking about playing the top games. So most of the time you’re under no load. Also, on paper nothing has faster storage than an iPhone because iPhones use more expensive NVMe SSDs. Your top Android phones use UFS 4.0, or even 3.x, which is slower… on paper. The benchmarks speak for themselves. But power on an iPhone 16 Pro and a Galaxy S25 Ultra and open and close apps, you’re not going to see a big enough difference to say “I’m selling the phone in my left hand to buy the phone in my right,” whichever way you wanna go. Android has more RAM. Android has better AI. iPhone has never had a good keyboard — Gboard sucks on iOS but it’s amazing on Android. Android has Firefox with uBlock Origin. iPhone has better video cameras. Still cameras? iPhone over-sharpens, Samsung over-softens, and Pixel uses AI hallucinations to fill in what it can’t see. They can all show you lab-created conditions where their phone comes out on top. MKBHD has shown people time and time again that in blind image contests, most of his viewers/subscribers prefer pictures taken by cheap Android phones, not flagships from anyone.

So the truth is, there really is no best smartphone platform. For a Mac guy, iPhones have a slight advantage, but their disadvantages are notable, too. And honestly I’d love to have a better Android phone than my 2019 Galaxy S10, but the fact that I like my S10 better than my 16PM for a few things speaks volumes.

I think what I’m gonna do is, in a few years, buy a Galaxy phone that’s a couple generations out that is better than my S10 (it should be — by a lot) and then after a few more years, replace the iPhone… probably with a base model, because honestly I don’t play top end games and even the top iPhone can’t get something as basic as typing.

Just trying to keep my head above water for the most part.

Trying to pass along kindness hoping it continues to be passed along.

And voting for the good guys in every election.

And avoiding the worst privacy offenders in tech where I can because I care about that too.

Yes, Widget Locker! I used that too. Now there’s KWGT (I think that’s how it’s spelled) and also KLWP and KLCK. Kustom is the brand and their apps make widgets, live wallpapers, and lock screens, respectively. But Widget Locker came first IIRC.

It’s not even the 6th yet! …which tells me he’s in Europe and that makes Nova a little cooler.

iPhone guy but of course I have Nova Prime on my backup phone. I wanna say I had a couple other apps he made, too? Tesla Coil sounds familiar. But it’s been almost 10 years since an Android phone was my main phone.

So Nova should be usable for a few more years at least… but… what’s everyone gonna replace it with? For what I use my S10 for, it should be good enough. I mainly need the launcher to support custom grid sizes, larger icons, and custom icons since my Android phone is a cosplay prop. (It’s meant to look and act like the NookPhone from Animal Crossing. It’s fully functional — you open Nook Music and it’s Apple Music which I’m subscribed to, as long as it has WiFi it will play, and it has a lot of stuff downloaded. And of course the browser is Firefox with uBlock Origin — it’s just Redd the fake art purveyor on a globe rather than the red panda we all know and love.)

Gen X here. My mother (boomer, hippie) would have friends over and they’d smoke, they’d send the friend’s kid up to my room, upstairs and around the corner. Didn’t matter if the door was open or closed, they were in the makeshift den (converted garage) stoned outta their gourds. I had a few girls up, and I remember one flashing me and being nervous about it. Looking back I think she was giving me a hint, somewhere between “I wanna see yours” and “come get this.” But I was a dumb teenage boy and I think I just played on the Nintendo or the computer (had both in my bedroom). But yeah, had a few girls up there, and it didn’t matter if we had the door open or closed, if we wanted to hook up, our parents wouldn’t have known (except my bedroom was directly above the garage, though my mother would also play her records, so maybe they wouldn’t have heard thumping).

Straight guy, but again, I wasn’t really interested in hooking up in those days. And when I say “friend’s kid” I mean boys or girls, as young as 5 or 6 and as old as 16 or 17. I was 13-15 when I lived there. If it was a little kid, I was designated the babysitter and would entertain the kid. I was pretty good at it. Only one or twice was it a girl my age. About half the time it was a boy, and about 3/4 of the time they were way too young — not that I was really into girls, or enough to try to make a move even if they were the right age. They were all, as the guy says in Fight Club about airplane neighbors, “disposable friends.” Or was it “single-use”? So I never made a move on the girls my age; whether they were attractive to me or not, we just played Nintendo or computer games or looked at comic books or something.

Do that many people in 2025 not know that while OpenOffice was first, LibreOffice is the more actively maintained fork and that OpenOffice has been somewhat problematic in the past and is kinda avoided?

I clicked your link, and I actually like how that office suite has the options on the left rather than the top. Like it was made for widescreen monitors.

The only other office suite I’ve seen do that is Apple’s. As a Mac user, I recognised the style immediately. So I use iWork stuff because it’s on my Mac already and it’s good enough for me. I like the way LibreOffice is looking but I don’t need another office suite. But I really like the way calligra looks. It might need some polish, but they have some good ideas.

Replies are more valuable, but I’m finding the replies to be not much higher quality than Reddit, which is a bit disappointing.

That said, for every 10 replies, you may get a good one, and that one is worth sorting through the rest.

Lemmy-Status says it’s back up but it’s back to that bug where the content warning never goes away when you hit the green button. Sometimes it works and you can clear it, other times you can’t.

There may be a way around it but pretty much every time I check, no luck. Is there a better way to access it?

There’s a community here on Lemmy that I used to follow, something like “share anime art.” It’s all AI generated. Or at least, the user who is keeping it going is just posting that. They are not being disingenuous; while they don’t tag it as AI (that I have seen), they DO include the prompt, which is pretty transparent in my book. Nothing against that user at all.

In fact, the art looks pretty official. That said… it maybe looks too perfect? Official art usually has copyright tags in the lower right corner. The prompt specifically avoids any kind of copyright or artist tags. Fan art typically does have tags of some kind.

If someone were trying to fool me, they probably could. AI art has gotten to that point. But at this point, my old ass just doesn’t trust anything without verifying. I was among the first on the Web and we didn’t trust it then. There was a time when we grew to trust the Web. Now we can’t trust it again and that’s fine with me. I’ve always tried to be genuine, but I also wouldn’t recommend anyone blindly trust me, either. Just take everything with a grain of salt and it’s fine.

I have something like that on my iPhone, except it’s like 150GB of media (it’s a 512GB phone).

I have a lot more on my Plex server. But, sometimes I’m without Internet and it’s nice to be able to queue up a favorite video or movie without worrying about my network connection.

If you only have 10GB, any phone should work. A newer one will have faster data rates than a flash drive. iPhones are guaranteed to. Good Android phones use UFS 3.0 or better which is only slower than what’s in an iPhone on paper. In real usage you won’t really see a difference. Plus, you have a screen on it so you can watch whenever. I mean the cheap phones now start at like 64GB, iPhones and probably Android flagships start at 128GB, even from a few years ago. So it’s plenty of space and it’s also emulators and books and whatever else you wanna throw on it. Oh yeah, music too.

At least with Cyberpunk we have a number e.g. CP77

Bollocks. Microsoft has shut down whole game studios (the team behind HiFi Rush for example) for doing WELL. Any studio is taking risks publishing through Microsoft.

So I wouldn’t be too optimistic as a studio that is going against the grain. Unless it is consistently driving GamePass numbers — and even if it is — a team is likely to be disbanded. We don’t really understand the how or the why behind the decisions.

Final Fantasy 7 on PS2. They published the intro movie re-imagined using the PS2’s capabilities. Later they laughed it off and said it was just a tech demo. Later beyond that they said they felt they should not capitalise on FF7 by remaking it until they could release a newer FF game they were proud of enough to not need FF7 to support the company (newer FF games should do that on their own). The FF7 remake was later broken into 3 parts (2 have released so far) for the PS4 and PS5, with an Xbox release on the way.

As for the Amiga (mentioned by OP), that computer was more capable than the IBM/clones and Apple computers of its day. Bill Gates (Microsoft cofounder) once said you need 8MB of RAM for multitasking, but the Amiga did it with 256K (and also with 512KB if you had the memory expander), though some argued Amiga did not do true multitasking. The Amiga was in the 1980s what the Mac is today, a computer for artists and creators.

Also, obligatory Half-Life 3. The issue there is, Valve decided it was more profitable to sell other people’s games and make money off the backs of others rather than develop their own games. At this point I don’t even want HL3. HL2 built such strong momentum, and it spawned two expansions that were mostly good. And then of course Portal, and arguably, The Stanley Parable (game that started as a HL2 mod). I don’t think a HL3 based on how games are now would be as popular as some people think. And if it were based more on HL2 gameplay, I don’t think it would sell very well today. Same reason we don’t have Deus Ex anymore. The Deus Ex formula got pretty diluted with the latest entry, Mankind Divided, and that was almost 10 years ago? Now if you want the Deus Ex gameplay, you kinda have to go for something like Cyberpunk. DX elements plus some GTA stuff.