I agree the “brain-rot” is real. I don’t even watch TikTok or Youtube shorts but even normal 10 minute Youtube videos now feel way faster and more condensed than a few years ago, and it’s definitely harming my attention span.
I’ve been going out of my way to get back into more long-form content I enjoyed before and not get suckered into watching hyper saturated media.
I haven’t witnessed it with keyboards yet but Razer required their software and an account to use their USB Mics & Headsets even a few years ago.
I haven’t bought from them since then and will gladly boycott any peripheral company requiring extra crap to be installed on my PC.
Man I wish, I kicked up a stink about it at the pharmacy and even phoned the doctors office just to be told the same thing.
I live in the UK if that’s any context.
It’s the stupid dares you’d witnessed on the playground but brought to a global scale. Bigger the audience, bigger the stunt.
As an older GenZ I’ve learnt not to underestimate the power of clout or what people will do for it.
Part of it depends on where you grew up. born 1998 in a rural English village, We had computer labs or a crate of laptops but they weren’t a focus for actual lessons and more of a treat between real classes.
Wasn’t until I got to college that lessons actually started requiring you to use a computer.
My pharmacy recently told me I HAD to get their app in order to get my prescription, despite the fact I could just hand them the paper copy up until a few weeks ago.
Ashamed to admit it took me way too long to realize smart phone keyboards were just built in keyloggers. I switched to OpenBoard a while back but phones in general are just built from the ground up to be a privacy nightmare.
Worse is went you’ve already paid for a lifetime license and they pull the rug out saying they’ll no longer honor it after a certain date.
That’s the quickest way to to get on my ‘Always Pirate’ list
My tech illiterate mother recently had a problem were her car wouldn’t let her access the GPS because a driver for the bluetooth (that she doesn’t use) failed to update.
First time in my life I heard about a car needing driver updates, let alone failing to do so.
I use my headphone jack everyday, I’m way more obsessed with music and audio than I am about photography. My phone camera is for taking pictures of my dog looking goofy 95% of the time, I don’t need multiple 4K cameras with pro grade lenses for that.
This is becoming a real concern for me even though I have no plans to replace my current phone, I already got slim pickings in the current market and doubt the trends gonna change anytime soon.
Thug Pro for Tony Hawk’s Underground 2.
Plutonium for multiple older Call of Duty games.
IW4x for Modern Warfare 2 (2009), IW4x was DMCA’d semi recently but the mod still works, it’s just no longer being maintained and the server browser has a few bugs.
Even for games I’ve bought off Steam I still use community run multiplayer mods a lot because they tend to either add more functionality or replace dead servers for older games.
To all the people who didn’t see the point in moving away from Chromium browsers, THIS IS THE POINT!
I’d like to throw in Youtube Redux.
It’s main function is to restore the older desktop look/feel of pre 2016ish Youtube, but it’s insanely customizable and good for cutting down on random buttons or features you don’t care about.
Only downside is it’s being maintained by one guy and it’s abit slow to be updated sometimes.
Been trying to switch to Linux but sadly back on Windows 10 after using Pop!_OS for the previous month. Half my issues were with the Nvidia and audio drivers the last one was my system randomly not booting and not letting me load a previous restore point I had saved on Timeshift.
I still want to get on the Linux train since I’ve been unhappy with Windows since 8 and it’s just getting worse and worse. There was a lot of stuff I really liked about Linux from testing in it VMs and my month with Pop!_OS.
As a 98 baby I feel this. I tried to get my hands on any piece of tech I could growing up and everything evolved so fast (but wasn’t always reliable)
But I got friends not much younger than me who will throw out perfectly good phones/laptops/etc over simple errors that couldn’t be fixed by rebooting…