When this happens it’s often because a backend component gets rewritten and somebody decides that it’s too much work to re-implement some features for the new backend. It’s much easier to come up with a PR spiel for why removing the features is actually a good thing.

TIL. The wikipedia article with some more detail.

OCRmyPDF is what I use as well, had good luck with it on boardgame rulebooks that sometimes come with missing or partial embedded text. Combined with recoll and the Emacs pdf-tools mode I have it all indexed and at my fingertips.

On Android it’s the only reasonable choice so no question there.

On desktop I used Netscape/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox/Conkeror for many years but switched to Chromium when I had to start over after the XUL-apocalypse. But lately I’ve been maintaining my Firefox setup more or less in parallel with Chromium and this week as it happens I am trying to make the switch back again. Mostly just to wean off the Google stuff. Will see how it goes.

Another (less-critical) motivation is that Chromium takes over 10 hours to build on my machine. Firefox is under 1 and it gets done way faster even if an LLVM or Rust build is involved too.

I’ve give up on the Youtube homepage long time ago. Only the Subscriptions view (with shorts filtered using a userscript) and search results are usable for me.

And why not phones too if the user prefers it that way. Can we have our user preferences back please?

This is such a simple ask and yet it seems almost impossible with modern search engines. They all seem to insist on second-guessing you. It’s a lack of respect for the user: “We know you are dumb but don’t worry, we will figure out what you really mean. Oh and don’t forget to watch your ads.”

My other pet-peeve is that they will almost never admit that maybe they just don’t have any good hits for the query. They insist on pushing some irrelevant crap in your face instead. I guess it comes down to needing to show the user something so that they can mix in those ads.

x86 Macs are not the greatest example of longevity at this point.

archive.org link to the r/modnews thread. Needless to say it’s not going down great.
edit: updated link with a newer snapshot

So you see YouTube, the thing is, I’m not gonna watch those stupid ads. I don’t care how short or long, it’s just not happening. No, not even the tip. I can use the site without watching the ads and maybe send links to my friends and they might give you some ad impressions. Or I can go do something else, get mad at Google and never spend another dollar at the play store and stuff. What do you think?

That looks neat! Remind me of the Keyboard Covers Samsung had for the S7 and S8. Those worked by covering up part of the screen and the physical keys were triggering the touchscreen and a special touchscreen keyboard driver. Worker pretty well and it was nice to have the flexibility to have the cover on or off. It could be stowed on the back of the phone when not in use.

We had actual form-factor innovation back then, for a while phone designs still dared to try something besides the slab. Some real work went into that G1 slider mechanism.

You can still get them if you care enough, some of us still use them. There have always been at least a couple reasonably modern physical-keyboard Android phones available, there are a few choices today too. I never had to resort to a non-PKB phone since the G1.

I had both as well. The G2 had more powerful HW for sure but the keyboard was worse: no dedicated number row, no physical Back button (and the Home button was pretty sad too) and the slider mechanism wasn’t as robust.

That keyboard was excellent and the slider mechanism was solid too! A lot of the later pkb phones don’t have a dedicated number row. And I really miss the physical Home and Back buttons, even pkb keyboard don’t have those these days. My only complaint is about the trackball. It was ok for some things but not accurate enough and got flakier with use.

I also loved early-Android UI. The modern stuff might be smooth but ergonomically it’s crap. For me the G1 represents a golden age, I am sad that I gave it away.

I guess 2023 is the year of enshittification.

You might want to skip forward about 40 more years to be on the safe side.