manmikey

Jan 1st 2026…To continue to enjoy our AI free experience it will now come will Ads…or pay us 9.99 for an Ad free AI experience.

Love from Samsung

All sorts of things are still useful with email, for instance my work sends my duty rosters to my personal email address (my preference so I don’t have to log into work when I’m off duty) I get a reminder for my car service, confirmation that my online grocery shopping has been picked and when to expect delivery, confirmation of orders I’ve made and delivery dates times, where I live we have a management company and they communicate to residents by email, some 2FA checks come by email, I still find these things useful & prefer an email rather than endless push notifications on my mobile if that’s an alternative, I don’t allow email to notify my mobile either, I just check the inbox a couple of times a day.

For me the internet is still just about bearable but only because of the following…

Firefox + unlock origin for web browsing.

RedReader for Reddit when I occasionally need to go there.

Lemmy for the best Reddit alternative.

Revanced and NewPipe for YouTube.

Recently moved from Google podcasts to Podcast Republic after Google moved podcasts to you tube music.

Never had Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram.

Email is still functional and necessary so have to stick with that.

It feels like I’m swimming against a strong tide just to maintain a good experience, in no other industry do the major players want to cripple your goods and services if you don’t bend over and accept their increasingly poor goods and services 🤷🏻‍♂️

I’d be happy to keep the ones that say:

“we notice you are in europe and we can’t use our cookies to track you so you can’t come to our website”

It’s good to know sites with policies like that to ensure I never visit them.

I recently started getting ads on my discover feed, it was the last Google thing to be ad free, it used to be a good selection of my interests and local news, I’ve turned it off now as it’s full of irrelevant crap and adverts.

We had all this back in the 1970s with “Robots and Computers will take all our jobs” scaremongering.

As factories & production lines started to use robots and CNC machines, CAD and digital imaging appeared, accounting software etc etc we were all going to lose our jobs and live a life of unemployed leisure.

Never happened.

I’m sure AI will play an important role in the future but like so many new fads it will settle into its niche and we will all be okay.

My dog once found a biscuit* in a bush near our home, from that day onwards he always checked the bush for a biscuit, there never was another one, the bush became known as “The Biscuit Bush”

• Cookie if your American 🍪

The Insider blocked Lemmy user’s from reading this article unless they pony up to get through their paywall

We’ll never know, the article is behind a paywall

The closing sentence of the article…

“as Apple customers, we shouldn’t stand for it”

Apple customers…

“Here’s my $200”

Child hood trauma resurfacing…

Little me using all my text adventure skills…

/West

/South

/West

/West

“You enter the vegetable isle”

/Look

“You see carrots potatoes and cabbage”

/Search onions

“Sorry I don’t know [onions]”

😰

“You hear a loud voice shouting”

Google recently announced that it’s podcast service is shutting down and moving to YouTube music, I don’t want or need YouTube music so I’ve already moved to Podcast Republic, it has a few ads but they can be removed with a small one off payment. Google just wants to shove all it’s users into YouTube and YouTube music for maximum ads and data harvesting.

The thing is, no matter how many times big tech companies are caught out and facing inquiries and legal judgements for bending and breaking the rules, lying, doing illegal things, targeting kids, misinformation, election fixing etc etc NOTHING EVER CHANGES