For Echo Shows, you can turn off most of the stuff it'll sort through on the display is in Settings > Home and Clock > Home Content. I have mine just showing the weather in places my friends live, and slideshows of my photos.

For FireOS tablets, they charge $15 to turn off the ads if you bought a device that has them. You could also have paid that $15 up front to not have them. I don't have one at the moment, but I've certainly bought enough of them as gifts.

It's my general experience that DDG's search results are 100% identical to Bing's. I'm using a great deal of ad and script blocking, so I don't see whatever ad bullshit is put there by either, but Bing's results are typically a lot less useful than Google's as far as the information I'm actually trying to find.

I do see a lot of people complaining that Google has gotten worse and I wonder if it's just because there are people who haven't heard the gospel of blocking ads or are lazy or have insufficient tech skills to use platforms and software that allow ad blocking.

Did you ever use MacOS Server? It was basically just some extra stuff in Settings compared to what's there normally. There really wasn't any reason to have it for "server" stuff vs having a BSD system, and running the Server version actually kept some normal desktop software from installing. Sure, you got Apple's GUI and that probably has appeal to someone, but it's not like that was necessary to configure a web server.

This is a nonbinary person and it's easier to say partner than anything else.

I'm a never-Apple person, but my domestic partner is absolutely thrilled that she'll finally be able to ditch her iPhone 14 Pro-whatever for a phone that shares the same power connection as her vape. I wish I were kidding.

Brief but funny digression:

My partner also owns an S23+.

The S23+ is slightly smaller than her current iPhone by both weight and volume, which has caused real-life problems for her because in her mind the iPhone is ALWAYS the smaller phone and apparently she subconsciously pays more attention to how her phone FEELS than what's happening on the screen, meaning that she's inadvertently posted thirst trap pictures on her private Instagram and Snapchat stories (i.e. the ones her family can see) instead of the ones connected to her public persona connected to her Android device.

She insists on getting these new high status flagship devices and she'll even specifically mention that she wants the best camera on her phone. She never uses the camera on her phone. We use Canon R5, or R6 II or a Sony A6200 cameras if either of us are taking pictures or shooting video. She'll also mention blue text bubbles. We pretty much only communicate via Google Chat or via Snap.

Since I don't own one, I can't say to what degree computational photography can be disabled on an iPhone. I am aware that my Android phone does a certain amount of sharpening and skin smoothing that I can't take out even when I shoot in manual mode and use camera raw data rather than let my phone process the image directly to a JPG. I am aware that some phones are worse offenders than others in that department.

It is fair to say that smartphones are a lot closer to being AI-assisted output for pretty much all photographs, even if most end users aren't actually aware that AI is being used in the first place.

I don't like Reddit either. Fuck it with a knife.
But there has been a trend of interest communities migrating to Discord, another platform I have zero interest in visiting or supporting.

I'd love it if discussions moved back to something like USENET or some kind of Mastodon implementation. General purpose discussion tools are just too important to leave in the hands of one big site with a single corporate owner.

I do enough IT contracting side work, and I almost always get asked why I'm billing for a few extra hours. The answer is documentation, which is as much for my benefit as for the next guy to come through the door.

Write things down, and make diagrams, then go back and explain why your thinking. And then bill your customer for it. They need it more than you do.

Not that I'm finding fault with your list, but I'm not aware of a significant reason not remove Vivaldi from consideration, especially if Opera still makes the list.

There's also Mullvad, which I think is a fork from Tor.
Basically skip Safari, Edge and Chrome and you're probably better off if you remotely care about privacy.

Presumably they've done a lot of work to build a resilient and secure infrastructure with all the money that VCs have been giving them. As easy as it is to roll out a discussion forum, it's another matter to build a global network of synchronized databases.

On the other hand, once it has fully departed for irrelevance, another large scale forum host will be along, just as the internet moved from Digg to Reddit over a decade ago.

If you make contacts with names that include your profanities of choice, your phone will stop arguing with you about what you're typing. At least, it does on Android.

I rent a half-rack in a small datacenter. I'm literally their only local customer, so when I come in, I usually spend some time bullshitting with whichever one of the four techs is handling ops that day.

They get asked to dispose of EOL equipment pretty regularly, and EOL at this point can mean pretty awesome hardware. Every time I go in, I ask what they have sitting around. My last visit, I was able to grab some idiot's GPU mining setup (SMALL datacenter; they don't charge for power) for the price of their past-due bill, and other times, I've been able to snag some high capacity SAS drives they have stacked up to make their desks to make little forts.

I don't care if this crap counts as having fallen off a truck or that there's a chance that it's got a billion power on hours. I think it has worked out very well for me to date.

If you have anything AM4ish or newer on the AMD side, support for firmware updates without a CPU is a chipset feature. I won't touch an MSI board for unrelated reasons, but you should still be able to do it on at least one of the root hubs on the I/O backplate.

This experience is closer to tipping a couple bucks to a stripper. The person in question performed a service that was briefly pleasing and (probably) quickly forgotten. The value of the interaction was relatively low and simple on both sides.

It's really not a great Stallman moment.

I assume they're dropping support because they only licensed the voices for a set amount of time. It really doesn't change the underlying capability of the devices.

I am also a Samuel and I frequently use the word motherfucker in business communication. The Samuel L. Jackson voice was kind of fun and something I thought was pretty fun. I hope the dude got a chunk of the whole $1 I spent on getting his voice to come out of my Dots.

For what it's worth, all my smart home stuff is shoved off on its own VLAN with no access to the rest of my network. I get a lot out of using Echo devices as speaker groups and they were my starting point as an IoT controller.