Technology

I talk to a lot more ai sexbots. Other than that. No change.

I switched from Chrome to Firefox completely and from Reddit to Lemmy like 80% of the time, for me that is a huge upgrade.

Redoubled my efforts to selfhost more services, abandoned reddit and generally started using the www less.

Dropped Reddit, Twitter, Spotify. Still have never been on Facebook, still have an Instagram account to stay in touch with old friends. Tubi and YouTube for entertainment

I've been using the ever living heck out of Stable Diffusion. Shit is so fun. It's another tool for me as and artist to learn and utilize.

i got off reddit

• Started renting a VPS and a domain. Now I have my own silly blog, a few services and a proxy to go to blocked sites (with the possibility to upgrade to censorship-resistant protocols if needed!)
• Among other things got an IRC bouncer, so started hanging out on IRC a lot more.
• Deleted my Twitter, Reddit and Insta (which were almost dead anyway but still).
• Went from hating IT and thinking it's just not for me to studying it in uni, as well as learning some topics myself.
• Degoogled my smartphone as much as I could with ADB (although barely noticed a difference, everything was from F-Droid anyway).

I've switched to the Arc web browser, where tabs behave more like bookmarks (and they replace bookmarks as well). It's been a game changer for me - my favourite feature is the ability to close a window and it doesn't remove any of your tabs. Just open a new browser window and they're back. My tabs are also more organised than ever.

Large Language Models, specifically ChatGPT+, are now part of my daily life and I'm not just talking tech. For example I use it in the kitchen every time I cook a meal I haven't made a thousand times before and I've been cooking better than ever. Unlike a recipe website, you can tell it you don't have (or don't like) a particular ingredient and chat about alternatives, then it will update the cooking instructions. Love it.

I've given up on streaming music services, and gone back to occasionally buying a new DRM free albums. This has been part of a general cost cutting theme to my year - especially monthly bills.

I got a subscription to nebula, since my favorite creators are on there and YouTube’s subscription costs too much.

Quit Spotify for Apple Music and PlexAmp.

Slowly starting to phase out everything Google but it’s taking some time.

I’m using Google search less and now Ecosia has become my primary search engine.

Next thing on my list is to reduce streaming services. I quit Netflix and HBO in 2023 after having it for many years.

Using a VPN more and more.

I’m using much less Reddit, Facebook and whatever the fuck twitter is now. Instead I’m using Lemmy and Mastodon. Maybe this year I’ll delete all the old accounts finally for good.

Started using RSS again for news.

A lot like before but with more crying.

AI.

Biggest productivity increaser in yonks and fun to mess around with when bored.

To save my collections of videos on iTunes, I choose to burn M4V to DVD so that they can be played on home screen.

As the market for physical discs dwindled, I started using the best dvd ripper for mac to save DVDs to my computer.

Around a month or two ago I got flashpoint and ruffle so I can play flash games on my computer. I have never really used either program before. I got ruffle because flashpoint doesn't have Nitrome games on their platform and I wanted to play a specific game. Haven't done much with ruffle since the games run kinda slow on my desktop.

Stopped using reddit, started lemmy Switch chrome to firefox

Seeing many with these same ones, but that's me!