• 9 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • At least in the case of the Hisense TV I got for my grandparents, a “glitch” with accessibility controls (makes directional inputs unresponsive or multi-press at times) just so happens to make remapping the sponsored remote buttons impossible, as well as breaking the most common method of changing the system launcher, so screen size alone isn’t everything.

    Although Hisense still tries to reinstall sponsored apps after I delete them, using Launcher Manager to set a custom launcher that allows for the hiding of unwanted applications and channels made it much more usable for my grandparents.

    Unfortunately I wasn’t able to redirect YouTube voice input commands to SmartTube Next, so if I ever replace it, that’ll be a factor in my decision too.









  • If you’re the one paying for internet access, you should also have the right to determine the content that you’re paying to have access to. While something like pi hole could be used to metaphorically take down most of the billboards without impacting the ground below it, even everyday users should be informed about the data advertisers are getting from them, whether it is anonymized or not. Hiding an important setting about data sharing near the bottom of a page in settings doesn’t help anyone but the advertisers.








  • There isn’t a free alternative that works as well, unfortunately. Bing not only has many of the same issues, but has worse results. Since DuckDuckGo makes use of Bing’s API for its results, in addition to lacking features such as date range searches, it is still a step down in terms of the quality of one’s search results. Having switched to Firefox due to Google’s efforts to make unilateral, self-serving changes to Chromium, I’d be only too glad to switch search providers if an alternative provider had a similar number of accurate results.




  • A success does not include leaving a victim of failed experimental medicine with a non-functional implant. In contrast to how animal subjects are used as test subjects (often conducted with less oversight than there should be), using experimental medicine on volunteering patients should be done not just to collect better data than the chimps before them supplied, but with the genuine expectation that the product in question will benefit the patient beyond their usefulness as a test subject for continued product development.