Bluejay

Maybe this isn't contributing much, but I'm trying to put myself out here to keep the community active. I always would hesitate before commenting my opinion on reddit, lol.

My job borders on the tech industry (environmental modelling, so we use a lot of the framework that programmers do but most of my work is environmental work), but I've always had a really great interest in tech and gaming.

I had a couple of different Android phones, like I really tried - some LG phone but also a Samsung Galaxy S3 - and I felt like they aged quickly. If I installed one too many weird apps it would start running slow like the PCs I used to pirate on in the 2000s. That has literally never happened to me with an iPhone. The ease and seamlessness of messaging and facetiming with other iPhone users (80% of people in my life) is great enough that I can kind of shrug my shoulders and say 'There's no ethical consumption under capitalism anyways.' Plus the seamlessness with the Apple Watch and being able to keep my phone in my bag and know if anything important comes up by looking at my wrist? Honestly has helped me kick the phone habit.

I had a Mac for a while also, but ended up selling it when I felt so limited in the games I could play and apps I could use. I find that Apple's computers are pretty worthless to me, but if I had the money to spend and wanted a reliable, fast browsing and general computing experience, I'm sure I would gladly spend the money on it. But this is coming from someone with a $3000 beast of a home machine lol

I think a lot of us here see and appreciate all yall need to do. I saw the coding request a few days after it was posted - I work from home during the week and would be happy to donate some time to help keep things up and running. I'll keep an eye out - remember there are probably lots of genuine people here that would be happy to help!

Thanks for the push - just put in my first donation and will set up a recurring one after my next paycheck. Trying to do my part by 1) being active(ish) in the community and 2) monetarily

Hahaha that is amazing! I was going to go for my cryptic variation of '1bluxjay' only to realize that I can have the actual username. Been a long time since I've been able to do that.

After the subreddits go un-dark I will probably still use this for searching until there's a LLM set-up to "replace" google searching (which Bing is Still Not, imo).

I saw that too - hopefully the changes will show in the next “up” cycle. Apparently the bots are out to play as well.

I do wonder how this will shake out. While I personally won’t be participating, lots of my friends (older gen z) deleted/abandoned their twitters but kept instagram. Some of them even use that little “status” thing that can show up on the top of your messages.