Andy Valencia @vandys@mastodon.sdf.org

I'm digging this article/manifesto on Brutalist web design. Shout out to @gcupc for hipping me to it: https://www.brutalist-web.design/

it is pretty incredible the degree to which corporate enterprises have exactly replicated the governmental bureaucratic hell they were supposed to liberate us from

She has no shame. #catsunningnap #cat #cats #catpics #kitty #kitties #kitten #kittens #mastocats #catstodon #catsofmastodon #bot https://redd.it/bktog2

How do people use Tumblr? I tried to make a new account after years of being away, and it was going okay, but the tutorial popups never stopped. The same ones just kept popping up again and again no matter how many times I dismissed them.

Eventually I admitted defeat and deleted the account.

Hamsters running together. So cute!

https://www.reddit.com/r/hamsters/comments/apeym4/they_move_as_a_pack_even_when_they_have_all_the/

But it's not going to change, because the manufacturers want to sell more flagship phones, and the Play Store is flooded with un-optimized cash-grab apps that want to run advertising and analytics in the background 24/7.

I'm so grateful to the FOSS community for offering an alternative to this madness. #LineageOS and #FDroid are the best things that ever happened to my phone.

Clearly those sort of specs aren't necessary if you de-Google and use F-Droid apps. But people who don't want to do that shouldn't feel pressured to buy phones with the specs of a PC just to run their apps reliably. It's just ridiculous to force users to pay that sort of money to have a decent user experience.

The Android phone industry encourages heavy, bloaty apps so that users will constantly seek out more powerful phones to try to make their apps run properly.

I'm all for people buying badass superphones if they want to, but the other day I saw a discussion on /r/android about how you *need* 8GB of RAM to make your phone not unload apps randomly.

I also moved to LineageOS minus Gapps on Android. Turns out not running Gapps really improves battery life, so my phone ends the day at around 50% now instead of 15%.

Also F-Droid apps are so good, and ask for fewer creepy permissions than Google Play apps do!

Sometimes I miss the simplicity of using a Google Chromebook. But Chromebooks seem to like to fall apart within a year or two, and of course Google is a little too scary to trust these days.

I've moved to a refurbished Thinkpad running Devuan. It's way more durable than my old Chromebook, and has way less Google! Yay.