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.

If I had to guess, he’d try to find a business selling enterprise supported distributions of Linux, buy them, then try to expand/convert them to develop “consumer Linux”. He’d advertise it as getting out from under the thumb of evil corps (ie his competitors), then as soon as it gains even a modicum of traction start implementing privacy violating shit, ads, whatever, to enshittify it as quickly as possible for a quick buck.

Inkscape is for vector art, yeah. Great for design, not for like, painting.

Krita is pretty great for a free digital art app. But I used it for about a year and could never quite get used to it. I recently went back to Clip Studio Paint (with my perpetual license they do still honor), and my experience just improved so much. It was like… ah, yes, an art program that clearly paid people to specifically make the UI easier to use for non-programmers, what an underrated feature.

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.

Like most FOSS projects… they’re awful at promoting what they actually do on their website front page, instead focusing on FOSS buzzwords. It’s unfortunately a thing.

It’s vector art. You can design all sorts of things. App layouts, website design, logo design, basically anything that is visual and will need to scale up and down without loss of detail.

Bling Bang Bang Born by Creepy Nuts Spain by Chick Corea

So like… “Forums are a good communication technology for modern use” and “have you ever found a solution in a forum” are different things.

As a counterexample, I’ve had more luck finding weird ass computer hardware issue solutions by appending ‘reddit’ to a search string than just about anything else. On the other hand I’ve wasted hours and hours on forum threads that go nowhere, with a million dead ends, and terminates in “see this other thread for the actual answer” and then that thread is archived or otherwise inaccessible.

I have definitely solved the odd issue from forums… but only because forums were the only thing available. Reading through them is still a chore and a half. Especially when 90% of the posts are “has anyone found a solution for this yet” ad nauseum that you still have to scroll through to eventually (maybe) find the page with the post you actually need.

I may just be bad at forums, but that’s been my experience with them for the last 20+ years.

Well if that’s your only exposure to it, then yeah I could see why you think it’s not good.

But if you just want to hang out with a regular group of friends async and in voice chat, it’s pretty damn good.

I left mumble, teamspeak, and Skype for Discord.

Discord is easily the better options among those choices.

I also can’t think of much use for being in more than one call at once. I dunno seems like you’re just looking for a different thing. And that’s okay.

I will never understand “forums are best”. I’ve tried, but they are worse in just about every aspect compared to any other communication system I’ve seen.

People just like what they like, I guess.

To be fair, Lemmy is my reddit replacement.

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.

True.

But the point is the lock-in is similar from a social perspective, just hardened even further by tying the messaging platform to specific hardware.

“Hey let’s use XYZ instead of iMessage” and “hey let’s use XYZ instead of WhatsApp” will be met with the same typical resistance to any sort of change. But in the case of iMessage, there’s added elitism and othering due to Apple’s using iMessage as a lock-in to their hardware.

I think the big difference in the US is that iMessage was leagues ahead of SMS well before there were any good, popular 3rd party mobile messaging apps. iPhones also dominated here, and still do, largely due to that early market dominance.

Words are redefined all the time. Keep up and ask for clarification when needed.

“no algorithms” I’ve always interpreted as “no algorithm tailored to you based on your behavior on the platform and whatever other information we can obtain about you, with the intent to keep you scrolling and interacting as much as possible” but maybe that’s just me.

To be fair I was primarily a lurker on Reddit, too. Occasional commenter. Same here, lol.