At this point I’m not sure what’s newest, since my kid just watches everything streaming.

I do have to say the newer 2D animated shorts, The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse, are a fantastic return to form.

Like most really early animated characters, Mickey Mouse was a lot of things over a long period of time. And as far as American animation goes, Mickey Mouse has been a staple for the childhood of literally every generation. Younger millennials and zoomers grew up on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Children in decades prior watched Mickey be a musketeer in one short and starving due to poverty in the next.

So while the rough edges of the character have been sanded down over time, he’s still very much a plucky, brave, kind, and helpful protagonist in most of the media he’s in.

Which to your average adult viewer means… he’s a bland and uninteresting character.

That said, he’s still an icon of animation as a whole, and most things with Mickey in them are doing some new and novel something (design, production pipeline, whatever) that pushes the whole industry forward in some way.

Pseudoregalia is a PS1-eta low-poly aesthetic 3D metroidvania with really, really slick movement mechanics. It’s the kind of game that really could’ve existed back then, had developers just known all the little quality of life design choices we have these days.

people are lazy have busy lives and want to put their time and energy into things that aren’t learning a whole new technology skill.

FTFY.

Once Firefox on mobile got extension support, I switched over immediately to use a decent adblocker. Made sure every app that opens a browser opens in Firefox. Has made my mobile browsing experience so much better, of my goodness.

That’s bizarre. I am also on Windows 10 and use Firefox as my primary browser, largely because I can stream DRM’d video sites (Netflix etc) to my friends on discord.

Sounds dumb, but have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling? I might suggest also removing or disabling all extensions to see if that does anything.

Not so much, maybe towards the last month of that period defaulting to Bing. I think it was still being constantly rebranded then. It was still pretty new, so I never really trusted it for anything and just went to the sites in the results.

I used Bing by default for several months just because that’s what my work laptop’s browser had for default.

I never directly compared those results to DDG, but 9/10 times I would get frustrated by the lack of relevant results and go back to Google, where I’d find something useful on the first page of results.

DDG is just Bing. At least as far as the core search algorithm goes.

Unfortunately, my experience is the opposite. I tried to use DDG for about a month and consistently found myself giving up, Googling instead, and finding a relevant stack overflow page or reddit thread or whatever on the first page of results.

It’s unfortunately still far more useful than other search engines, in my experience anyway. I haven’t yet tried the paid search engine someone pointed out to me recently, Kagi, I think.

But given the cost of Kagi’s tiers based on number of searches, it would have to be MUCH more useful to me than Google to really make it feel worth it.

Kagi, you say.

I know Google search has gone down the shitter… but it’s still far and away the most useful search engine I use. Every now and then I try to use bing or ddg or whatever, and they waste so much of my goddamn time I just run the same search in Google and get something usable on the first page of results, even with all the kludge.

At this point I’d rather pay for a search engine if it meant better searching and no ads.

Bling Bang Bang Born by Creepy Nuts Spain by Chick Corea

If a clot was formed due to a poison or something, is that detectable? Or is this one of those things that will always be shrouded in suspicion because we’ll never know if the clot was ‘natural’ or part of a more intentional plot?

To be fair, Tesla is the primary culprit of this. Waymo and other AV companies have just been slowly but steadily ramping up their testing and operating in relatively safe ways, and they are by and large doing pretty well from the coverage I’ve read. It’s not happening as quickly as anybody hoped, but we’re seeing steady improvements over time.

Tesla is just reckless, though, branding things in ways that make the whole AV endeavor look much worse than it deserves.

I don’t live in that particular rural area anymore, so it could just be my ignorance, who knows.

Guess it depends on where you live.

In my hometown (rural Midwest), there’s a Walmart, a Schnucks (Midwest chain), maybe an IGA if it’s still around, and about five Dollar Generals (more convenience store than grocery). I don’t think I’ve seen a farmers market there my whole life, despite being literally in the middle of a million farms. Super odd now that I think about it.

On the housing thing - there’s been a major intrusion of private equity firms into the regular house market. A report came out recently claiming as much as 40% of all single family homes sold in 2023 went to private equity firms to turn into rental properties (iirc). On mobile, otherwise would try to actually give you the source.

I can’t speak to the food price increases. My only thought is that most people are creatures of habit and always have been, so I doubt that individual shoppers ‘not putting pressure on the stores’ would explain a historic rise in costs. That said, if we did find evidence that shoppers are less savvy or willing to change habits, my first guess as to why would be people overall being more overworked and stressed. But until the data comes in, who knows.

I feel like I’d feel similarly if I had a foldable, but the one guy I know who has one swears he’ll never buy one again. Granted, he got a gen 1 Galaxy Fold, so it’s got some major growing pains.

It does make it different by virtue of sheer scale and efficiency.

A single human artist, no matter how good and fast they are, could ever singlehandedly damage the livelihoods of millions of other human artists. But a machine can. That’s a meaningful distinction.

Granted, your point is valid in its purest sense. If we lived in a world where everyone could benefit from AI art without the real-world downsides, I’d agree with you, full stop. But we do, and those ramifications matter.