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.

Just wanted to say that I like your username :)

OK, no worries.

(Also, I didn’t downvote your comment btw)

Are you sure that Feedly is open source? I can’t find any mention of it on their website.

Ah ok. That makes sense. Thanks for your reply.

Can I ask why you’ve taken this approach? I understand why you would use AdGuard at home, but couldn’t you just also use it on your phone/laptop as well when you are away?

Wouldn’t using the VPN to your home network just add extra latency? Or is there some benefit that I’m not aware of?

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.“

Haha. I thoroughly enjoyed this comment. It was so well-written. Thank you for writing this.

Better late than never :)

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

Am I missing something here? I count the total number of net beneficial decisions to be 22, and total number of net disadvantageous decisions to be 21.

Shouldn’t both totals be the same number? When one team gets a beneficial decision, it can only happen at the expense of another team (i.e. it’s a zero-sum game).

I could understand the discrepancy if this analysis were counting games in other competitions, but this is only counting Premier games so I would expect equal totals.

There’s a difference.

“A company may lay off an employee when it doesn’t have the resources to retain them, while a company may fire an employee who isn’t meeting the company’s expectations.”

Source: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/laid-off-vs-fired

Sure, they both suck because they both result in you not having a job anymore. However, if you are fired, then this looks worse when you’re looking for your next job. Potential employers may want to know why you were fired, and will likely view you as a risk.

Whereas, being laid off doesn’t carry the same negative impact to your reputation that being fired does. You haven’t done anything wrong to get laid off.

And in some countries, getting laid off (AKA made redundant) means that the company has to provide a payout, which is proportional to your length of service. You wouldn’t get this if you have been fired for wrongdoing.

I would say, if anything, the fear is likely under-blown.

Sure, you’ll find many users here on Lemmy who hate what Google are doing… but we’re not the typical internet user. I mean, we specifically found this niche platform called Lemmy rather than use one of the mainstream social media platforms. The typical “normie” who uses Chrome probably has no idea about the privacy risks of using it (either in its current form or when the Topics API is being used). We need to help others understand, and hopefully convince these people to move over to Firefox.

Except you’re giving your passwords in an encrypted format. So if the company is trustworthy, it’s safe to let them store your passwords because it’s encrypted in such a way that even the company who own the password manager couldn’t access your passwords even if they wanted to.

(Note the caveat of “IF the company is trustworthy”, which rules out Lastpass)

Now I accept that there are legitimate arguments against storing passwords in the cloud via a password manager… so in that case, you may wish to use a local password manager (like Keepass) instead. But realistically, a typical person isn’t capable of memorising lots of unique, secure passwords… so the passwords need to be written down or stored in a password manager, just to avoid weak passwords or password reuse.

Do you have a source for the claim that DuckDuckGo browser is selling user data to Microsoft?

You might be referring to the time when the DuckDuckGo browser was blocking all known trackers except Microsoft trackers. After that information was made public and users complained, DuckDuckGo was able to renegotiate its agreement with Microsoft so that it can block their trackers.

Furthermore, DuckDuckGo now publish their blocklist on GitHub.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts

So this privacy issue has been rectified now. But even if it hadn’t, failing to block Microsoft trackers isn’t the same as collecting data and selling it to Microsoft.

But if you are aware of DDG browser selling data to Microsoft, please share a source.

Could you please explain why you don’t think Brave is privacy friendly?

I think Brave Search has a really good privacy policy.

Brave Search is designed to be private by default. We don’t collect personal information about you, your device or your searches. We also don’t transmit information to the web that could be used to profile you or track you or learn anything about you. Your searches are private to YOU.

It’s also worth noting that Brave has its own search index… as opposed to DuckDuckGo which uses Bing, and StartPage which uses Google.

Although admittedly this does mean that the search results from Brave Search isn’t the best at the moment. Hopefully this will improve with time.

Are you referring to the time when the DuckDuckGo browser was blocking all known trackers except Microsoft trackers? After that information was made public and users complained, DuckDuckGo was able to renegotiate its agreement with Microsoft so that it can block their trackers.

Furthermore, DuckDuckGo now publish their blocklist on GitHub.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts

It’s worth clarifying that this issue affected the DuckDuckGo browser, not the search engine itself.

So if you were refusing to use DuckDuckGo browser on the basis that they allow Microsoft tracking, then that issue has been resolved now. But if you were saying that this incident has made you lose trust in DDG and that’s why you refuse to use it… well, that’s fair enough. It’s your choice, but I personally would trust DDG more than StartPage, just because StartPage is owned by an ad company.

Look how they massacred my boy…

For real though, if it bothers you that much, I think it’s possible to change the shortcut icon on your desktop. You would have to download the old Firefox logo as an image on your computer, and then edit the properties of the Firefox shortcut to use the downloaded image of the old icon instead of the regular app icon. This won’t help for the mobile app though.