Ah the eternal arms race between parents and children. For me it was lights out so I couldn’t read, circumvented with a flashlight under the blanket.

I wish they would ban me. I haven’t logged in in over 15 years and even block several of their servers, and yet I still get mails that someone in there commented on something.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve heard of it, but haven’t tried yet - but I will.

I gave up on Google over a decade ago - maybe two decades by now. Way back when I was using Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Astalavista, and others. When Google came, it somehow beat them all at finding exactly what I was looking for.

Later they stopped searching for the exact words you typed, but it was okay because adding a plus in front of terms, or quotes around phrases, still let you search exact things. The combination of both systems was very powerful.

And then plus and quotes stopped working. Boolean operators stopped working. Their documentation still says they work, but they don’t.

Now, it seems like your input is used only as a general guideline to pick whatever popular search is closest to what it thinks you meant. Exact words you typed are often nowhere in the page, not even in the source.

I only search Google maps now, and occasionally Google translate.

This man walks so others can ride.

If the Internet has taught me anything, they’re 42 and 69.

You got a lot of great recommendations already, but I want to add one more indie game: Lost Words Beyond the Page. Gameplay is simple and it’s not very long, but the writing is excellent.

You should be aware that “maintaining” that PC may be more than you expect. Just this weekend I had to help my aunt because the bank’s website had a “big thing in front of it” that she couldn’t get rid of. It turned out to be a cookie banner that was just a bit too big for her laptop screen, and the buttons to close it were out of the frame.

That’s just an example of course, but depending on the person(s) using it, there may need to be someone at hand to help at all times.

Violations of privacy. Microsoft has that too though, so unless Google has wallpapers they need to step up their game.

As a late Gen X, I was completely lost. So, I guess it’s official: I don’t get your generation.

Ah thank you. I was unaware of the matrix protocol.

I’m obviously out of the loop, because I don’t know. Can someone explain?

You mean the thing that Opera had in the 90s, and Vivaldi since inception?

It was the style at the time.

It’s a reference to The Simpsons.

The man knows. The man knows everything about you. They’re always watching.

Arch? You’re way too nica. A bare Debian netinstall and a link to linuxfromscratch. They have wget, so they can get started.

Hello world.

Apparently, they didn’t know it by heart. If they had, they wouldn’t have had to spend all that time searching.

Rewind.

Exactly this. My small Reddit communities had a few posts per day. The equivalent on Lemmy have a few per year. Still, I don’t miss them enough to go back.