Well said, I agree with you. The politics/debates can be so intense that it can prevent Lemmy from being a place where people go to just relax and switch off. Even the meme communities have so much political content.

And I suppose it’s only going to intensify during the U.S. election later this year.

Just wanted to say that I found the description of your job really interesting, so thanks for taking the time to write about it.

There’s absolutely no way that I could do it - I’m far too squeamish. But I’m glad that there are people who can do a job like this, which increases mankind’s understanding of diseases.

I don’t think this should be downvoted. Brave Search is one of the very few search engines that is building its own index.

DuckDuckGo and Startpage are both great, however DDG uses results from Bing and Startpage uses results from Google.

We need proper competition against these big tech giants, and Brave Search is one of the few alternatives which is attempting to provide it. Mojeek is another search engine which uses its own index.

Better late than never :)

If you’re English, then you misspelt the word ‘colour’.

Apple devices are only more “private” in the sense that the prevent third parties from collecting your data (don’t get me wrong, this is great), but then proceed to go and collect the same data for their own uses instead.

While I accept that Apple are far from perfect, my understanding is that even their data collection for their own purposes is still less than the data collection that Google use for their own purposes. And since their are only two major phone OS (Android and iOS), we can only choose between the lesser of the two evils.

After all, do you want to give your data to a company which is the world’s biggest ad company? Or instead give your data to a company whose business model is convincing people to buy $1000+ phone every year?

But yeah, I agree that Apple’s anti-consumer practices are awful. I wasn’t aware of the aftermarket parts re-using chips just for the serial numbers and I’m not even the least bit surprised. We need governments to bring in legislation to protect right to repair, because companies like Apple can’t be reasonable.

I hate the tribalism regarding Apple products. There are loyal fanboys who won’t hear a bad word about Apple, and then there are Apple haters who criticise everything about them.

I wish we had some more nuance in this debate. The reality is that there are advantages and disadvantages to Apple products. I’ll outline a few:

Advantages

• Long iOS support. Typically you can expect an iPhone to be supported for 5-7 years, which is well above the average in the industry.
• No bloatware or adverts on the iPhone
• Better privacy than Google Android/Microsoft Windows
• High-end hardware, e.g. M1 chip in MacBooks.
• User friendly design. Nice user experience.

Disadvantages

• Overpriced. Seriously all Apple products are more expensive than the competition.
• Anti-consumer business practices that influence the industry. They normalised removing the headphone jack and using non-removable batteries, which other manufacturers followed. Another anti-consumer practice is using their proprietary Lighting port, rather than USB (luckily the EU should be forcing them to adopt USB-C and removable batteries soon). Also, no SD card slot because they want you to use iCloud
• Walled garden. No support for side-loading apps
• Required to use iTunes to add/remove music to the iPhone, which is a problem if you use Linux (you’d have to use Wine to install the Windows version as a workaround)

However, this is of course annoying for people who don’t mind holding the phone vertically or who are watching videos on a widescreen device

I think you meant to write “horizontally” here :)