beepnoise

Those house prices sounds absolutely insane to me.

I’m also in the UK, but I’m in the South East, so house prices are very high. Still managed to find a “cheap” house recently due to the location being a bit rough.

For comparison, my house that I’m buying is £345k (it’s 2 bedrooms with a separate garage and 2 bathrooms). I saved up a £125k deposit by living with my parents for the longest time (I think it took me about a decade). The exception being for 3 years when I house shared - the rent was £325 per month with bills included, but my room was effectively a glorified cupboard.

I will also say that I was saving lots and lots of money with my old job. I’m a software developer, so my salary was good (started off at £22.5k, went up to £45k with about 10 years experience and being a senior dev, then our company got bought out and my salary went up to £55k). A year later and I switched jobs as the annual salary increase was £150 (for the whole year). Ended up with a £75k salary w/ bonus, private healthcare, etc etc. I really lucked out at that moment.

As to why I didn’t buy a house earlier with my deposit, there was two reasons:

• I had saved up about £100k before for personal savings, then that money went to help a sibling (call this sibling A) with their property. My parents sold a property aborad to effectively give me back the money, but the money was split between me and another sibling’s bank account (call this sibling B) because of financial advice given by my uncle. What then happened was sibling B didn’t give me back the money and was being incredibly difficult about the money, and since they have a history of being difficult in general, I decided I was going to save that money instead.
• Sibling A wanted to start their own business, but it effectively flopped for all sorts of reasons. They had amassed a loan of £15k, and I helped pay that off. This was while sibling B was being incredibly difficult.
• Main reason: At the time, I didn’t know if I really wanted to stay at the job for so long, and if I did want to stay, I didn’t want to move into the area where my job was - despite the convenience, the area was incredibly rough - almost GTA like (and that is no exagerration). I didn’t know where I wanted to live, and the places I would be interested in, I effectively had no clue as I was living with my parents at the time.

So yeah, buying a house in the South of UK isn’t easy at all. It requires a ton of patience and luck.

No, I will not change your mind.

So I’m pretty much an Apple person now. I have my iPhone, my iPad, my MacBook, Apple Watch, AirPods Max - you get the point.

But this has been the past 5 years or so. Before then I was heavily an Android person. And at the time, I was kind of into Reddit, but then I got (what it was then called) Reddit Sync.

It was absolutely phenomenal. Blew me away. By far the best user experience for reddit I’ve ever experienced.

Eventually I moved to iOS. I tried so many iOS reddit apps, and quite frankly, they all sucked - until Apollo came along. I think you know how popular Apollo is.

With that said, the guy behind it promised an iPad mode and kept promising it until this year he went “yeah actually it ain’t coming anytime soon”. All the while this dude kept nagging people to get his stupid Apollo Ultra subscription, which was incredibly aggressive. Dude really liked the subscription model.

I picked up one of my old Android phones from my mobile dev days (OnePlus 7 Pro for those who care) and opened Sync. Absolutely beautiful, but it failed to load as I deleted my reddit account the moment they announced these API changes.

I went ahead and paid for the lifetime subscription as a way of saying thanks for all the hard work over the years (Sync has been going on for much longer than Apollo and has and supports tablets too!! What a concept!!). ljdawson seemed like a genuinely nice and friendly person who genuinely cared about his app, perhaps even more so than the profits (which is so unbelievably rare).

It was a good run, ljdawson, but you absolutely killed it 🍻

Imagine a bunch of wannabe 4channers got their own mastodon instance.

That’s poa.st

holy crap, I didn’t realise he was responding to a poa.st user.

Definitely should’ve been defederated from poa.st by now…

I have a MacBook Pro which is stock macOS.

Doing software development for nearly a decade, macOS combines that ease of using widely used software tools with the stability of macOS that seems quite rare with Linux (especially in the long term, when upgrading across new OS versions). Also, things like being able to consistently sleep and wake up and my m1’s battery life keeps me on macOS.

With that said, I also have a thinkpad with pop! OS on it. It’s nice, but I have this issue that I can’t alt-tab like I can on windows thanks to gnome. It only alt-tabs the window group, rather than individual windows, and it drives me up the bend.

I don’t think the title is good, but I do think it’s notable to some extent. With people having weird, shitty opinions, it’s nice to see someone who is relatively famous in the tech community for having somewhat sane opinions and being vocal about it.

In my experience, the Linux community has got its own bunch of free speech weirdos who would reject some of these political points (especially the trans position), so I do think in that context it is kind of important.

O_O sorry, but what

Several things:

• Owned by for profit company
• Browser engine is dominant
• Said company is in the ad business, so they don’t have the best incentives for privacy
• Said company are well known for pulling stunts to get people using their browser (i.e. using web rendering techniques that is fast on their browser but painfully slow on others)
• Having a monopoly in an area is bad for us users

Meanwhile, I’m glad folks on here are very pro-Firefox as well as not shitting on Chrome users. I was afraid it was going to be thls (except replace “invented Comic Sans” with “uses Chrome”) https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html

Me whenever I see Meta in a difficult spot

Lots of engagement. One of the things that kills communities is people too shy/afraid to say something, and/or they just read posts and not contribute “content” like comments.

One of the smart things Reddit did was gamify the whole posting/commenting system with karma. Sure, it lead to a lot of really stupid and petty online drama, but it helped build the website where people engaged in it more because folks like seeing numbers go up.

I feel like lemmy needs a similar system, but I am aware that it can and will lead to some low quality posts/comments.

It actually makes me realise - back in 2016 when thedonald was constantly making its way to the top of reddit, none of the people at the top did anything.

Now with these API changes, you barely hear about them despite the threads being heavily upvoted.

I look back on that shitshow with even more pennies dropping.

Thank you for your (brother’s) service 🫡

I’m trying to decide between Dredge, Inscryption, or one of my many other games on Xbox/Steam Deck…

Damn indecision and having too many games to play :(

I’ve been on lemmy for about a year, and this is the first time I’ve seen lemmy this consistently active.

It actually reminds me of reddit in the earlier years :')

And I would walk five hundred miles

and I would walk five hundred more

just to be the man who walked one thousand more

to get the fuck away from spez

Valve has made some incredible games and hardware, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t tricky bastards.

Not specifically because of AI, but because Google was creeping me out and the search results were getting worse and worse due to pErSoNaLisEd SeArChEs which turns out is quite crap

On the steamed what now?!?!?

I used a Mac to change my Stadia controller to bluetooth. I think the only requirement is shudder Google Chrome.