AI is really starting to take off in a big way. You cannot find anything anywhere without AI shoehorned in, for better or worse. Google has AI chatbots serving up nonsense in search that you cannot turn off, Shopify has AI "helpdesk" bots that provide no better solution than just searching their database, and the only thing ChatGPT is useful for is generating code quickly (and boy howdy is it good at that).
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This is gonna be a long post filled mainly with documentation. Not really gonna be a page turner, but interesting to think about the differences as time passes.
They fucking suck. Possibly the worst PC invention of all time. We have this arbitrary file type that exists only to be rendered EXACTLY the same on all computers. That is a novel and purposeful idea, but when it is monopolized by a single company (Adobe) and requires sketchy 3rd party software (Foxit) or expensive first party software to do ANYTHING with them, they are really a pain. Top that off with the fact that basically everything requires a PDF and it is really easy to create them (microsoft print to PDF, export) so as long as you have the files for it, all is well. But when you have to update one or fill one that isn't set as fillable, you essentially have fight God himself to move a picture two inches and match a font.
A while ago, there was a meme on TikTok of a girl sing-talking the phrase 'Girl Dinner' alongside what this girl ate for dinner, and the dinner was always very low quality and unhealthy (originally nicotine vape and iced coffee). In my lifetime, I have met a lot of girls that seem to be perpetually ill or sickly, usually with some form of vitamin deficiency and other issues, and only one time have I met one that could actually say they went to a doctor to determine that they are indeed fucked up in the health department.
I am really starting to believe that a lot of the illness in society is based on low quality food: obesity? probably eat high sugar, high seed oil, high fat, high carb diet, indicative of very processed foods. Malnutrition? Probably don't eat enough or have some kind of eating disorder that stops you from eating healthy quantities of food. Or, you eat girl dinner. It seems like a funny concept, but I honestly believe that girl dinner as a concept stems from social media and some form of mass hysteria or collective illness.
I really love the idea of Linux taking off. It would not only be the beginning of lightweight operating systems in modern day as a gaming system, but also would start a "we don't like megacorporations" movement that may save the free and open internet. It would mean that people would hypothetically start developing and/or improving personal cloud programs, meaning more selfhosting. All of these things that are a wet dream for tech-lovers would start to occur or at least become more common. As a tech professional, it would also give me a LOT more work. The Steam deck is even moving this into the mainstream, with Linux now being on AT LEAST 1m new devices basically overnight (I even bought one for myself, thanks Dad!)
Dear readers, I ask you a question: do you know who controls you? Most will say the government, some of the funny ones will say a wife/girlfriend, others might say something like an addiction or money (an object or goal), but as far as the tech world is concerned, it really comes down to conglomerate entities, and there isn't really a way to get around it.
I had a fear some time ago about my google account arbitrarily getting banned because of reading a post about how the creator of the hit game Terraria had his google account deleted for no reason, and lost a ton of stuff like his steam library, all of his email, a ton of services like netflix and whatnot, and most importantly, a lot of his game development stuff like servers and licenses. Why was his account banned? Actually no reason. "This could happen to me!" So as a kneejerk reaction, I moved all of my email over to a zero-trust provider, in this case ProtonMail, and purchased a custom domain because it's cool.
Has any of you readers ever tried to use Bing? What about Apple maps? Aren't they just fucking awful? What about iCloud for windows? 
I use Google not because I think they are moralistic and wholesome but because there isn't another choice without significantly gimping myself. There two backup services for windows are one drive and Google drive. The only worthwhile maps service is Google maps. The only worthwhile review service is Google reviews. The only worthwhile search engines are Google and DuckDuckGo. The only email that is any different is proton mail. The best assistant is Google.
Google makes the best stuff. But they are also a shitty company that loves to chip away at society's privacy. Don't even get me started on phone->app and phone->pc integration: Apple devices are fucking awful for using outside of other Apple devices. So until Apple makes gaming on mac good, or until kagi gets their shit together an releases the rest of the suite and a phone, or until a privacy focused linux ecosystem competitor comes along, I'm just gonna stick with a domain email as a failsafe and hope my Google account never gets banned for no reason, and assume that Google wont know anything I actually care about.
Bad solution, but best solution. I really wish Mozilla had email, phone OS, search, maps, reviews, notes, and cloud storage solutions, because I really like their browser.
Article referenced throughout this post
This article proposes two really interesting points that seem to counteract each other: point one is that people will retreat to the most convenient place on the internet while still holding on to the previous places they were a part of, and point two is that people desire like-minded communities and will skip out on the bigger internet in order ot find that. This idea of the dark forest and cozy web is interesting because it is both new and old (like most of this concept, it fits and yet is self contradicting). Historically, people in the 90s did a lot of stuff on the federated internet, like browsing forums for specific topics (a lot of this still remains in car forums), IRC was the discord/slack of that era, and personal blogs were all the rage (even my dad had one!)