From a UX perspective federation has been absolutely bungled. Twitters greatest trick was to cause an exodus before the alternatives had reached maturity, though I imagine the demand has pushed them further than they would be otherwise.

IMO BlueSky is by far the best Twitter replacement, insofar as you can just use it like Twitter but it is built on an open protocol, allowing you to run your own server if you wish but with zero interoperability friction or worrying about servers on the actual client. Also it has already started basic bridging between threads and mastadon, its custom feeds in place of algorithms is genius and stackable moderation is the most compelling solution I’ve seen to the core complaints and concerns over modern social media.

And it’s independent, transparent and run by intelligent, passionate people. And, very importantly, Jack Dorsey has nothing to do with it!

There's always been a real stick in the mud attitude with GIMP. No matter how many people cry out about it's confusing UX it's always tried to serve the existing userbase rather than design to expand its usefulness to more people. I think this is a shame and is why GIMP never achieved what Blender has.

I remember trying to use it the best part of 20 years ago when I wanted to make animated gifs. It was so hard to use it was easier to pirate photoshop/imageready. Then a year or so back I tried to use it as I had moved to being a Linux user and was kind of astonished that the UX was still so bloody hostile.

I don't think I'm a moron (though how many morons do... so take this with a pinch of salt) but trying to figure out how to do basic things like cut and paste, cropping etc. without reading documentation just goes hellishly wrong. Any time I take the time to follow a guide on how to use it I'm taken aback by how unintuitive it is and once I'm done I forget it's idiosyncrasies immediately.

I remember "gimpshop" being a thing at one point, which I never got to use but heard it used the processing of GIMP with a more photoshop like UX. Though I believe that project lapsed.

Anyway, yeah it'd be nice in a world where things like GNOME have become such beautiful UXes that projects like GIMP have the courage to revolutionise themselves.

which is great for you, but not for anyone who has even briefly used more mainstream options

The simple solution is to change it to a BSD license and call it BLIMP

I mean if you're going to go Chromium-based at least use Vivaldi... Brave-s benefits minus Brave's shithousery

yeah this is such a thing. I don't want to replay a 40-80 hour game to access 15 hours of new content interwoven or not even that just new features on the way. I feel CyberPunk getting abandoned is actually just a weird new-speak for it being ACTUALLY finished

It's funnier than 95% of film or TV comedies. The writers are amazing.

"Mr. Evrart is helping me find my gun" is the funniest interaction in any video game I have ever played by an order of magnitude

As soon as we conceded "milk" for plant milks we were setting off on a long path of bullshit. If something is designed as an alternative to something it should be able to explain it's designed purpose.

If you're a programmer, might I suggest the brave new world of ChatGPT enhanced search via Phind.com

Even if you're not, it's fantastic. It basically takes your input and processes it like ChatGPT but then is trained to run web searches to grab further information and uses that to progress its own internal monologue. The result is a natural language response with search engine like results down the side which are cited within the main response.

My process is:

• Search DDG
• If that's not satisfactory (it is IME about 80% of the time) prefix with !sp to search googles index proxied by start page

Where did you hear this? This isn't true. If you want google without the tracking, use StartPage (if you're using DDG this can be accessed with the !sp bang preface)

DDG uses Bing as their fallback engine but also does a lot of propitiatory indexing of its own

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/