With Discussions, search results on Brave Search are augmented with actual conversations related to the query, pulled from popular forum sites like Reddit. This allows users to easily see what the community is saying about a topic, rather than just reading content curated by websites.

Introducing Discussions: Real Human Answers in Search Results | Brave Browser

Cool new feature for Brave Search, which I’ve started to use a lot more recently.

Even better is this tidbit about an upcoming feature:

But Discussions is just the first step in Brave’s mission to make search more neutral and open, and to counteract bias or outright filtering of results. Discussions will soon be followed by Brave Goggles, which will allow users to create their own result filters, and rulesets to constrain a searchable space or alter result ordering.

Rather than a single, secretive way of ranking and “curating” results (as there is with Google), Brave Search Goggles will allow for an almost infinite number of ranking and filtering options. All driven by the community of users. And together, Discussions and Goggles will offer a powerful set of tools to counteract bias and Big Tech’s unseen influence on our information.

Sign me up for a personalized search experience. Hopefully they can get better at local search, too, as that’s where Google (with Google My Business) truly excels.

The average quality of the average Netflix original just isn’t very good compared to their competition — not enough to justify the highest subscription prices in the industry.

Daring Fireball: Netflix Shares Drop 25% After Company Reports Losing Subscribers for First Time in a Decade

A thousand times, this. We’re a streaming household and we often do turn on/off various services as we work through different shows. I started to realize recently that we watch Netflix the least and I somehow continue to receive notifications from them about price increases.

It’s just not worth it anymore as an auto subscribe (like Disney+ is) when there are so many alternatives.

You can now select and copy text fragments that span multiple blocks.This is a step towards bridging the gap between Gutenberg as a block editor and Gutenberg as a text editor. While blocks enable powerful page-shaping capabilities, they also compete with text for selection and clipboard space. Gutenberg 13.0 is a step towards an editor where blocks and text coexist frictionlessly.

What’s new in Gutenberg 13.0? (14 April) – Make WordPress Core

Hooray! Kudos to all involved on this one.

DuckDuckGo for Mac does not fork Chromium (or anything else). Instead, we use the rendering engine that comes with macOS, which is created by Apple and the same rendering engine Safari uses. By building off the macOS rendering engine, our browser should also be most compatible with the Mac system (the same as Safari). Technically, we don’t have to “fork” any code to do this – we just call an API provided by macOS.We are building everything else from scratch. So beyond rendering, all the code is ours – written by DuckDuckGo engineers with privacy, security, and simplicity front of mind.

Introducing DuckDuckGo for Mac: A Private, Fast, and Secure Browsing App

I signed up for the beta list to try this as soon as I learned about it. Perhaps it can unseat Brave as my browser of choice. If nothing else, it’ll be great to have a non-Chromium based alternative.

You might remember us from 2012 we launched Pebble on Kickstarter and raised over $10m from 68,000 people around the world. This was our first breakthrough (a classic 5 year overnight success!) Over the next few years, we sold 2 million watches and did over $230m in sales.

Success and Failure at Pebble. We launched Pebble on Kickstarter 10… | by Eric Migicovsky | Apr, 2022 | Medium

I remember Pebble’s launch being a fantastic time online. I feel like it launched both the wearables category and Kickstarter itself.

In 2015, I attended a Pebble party at SXSW in Austin as they were gearing up to launch new models. I happened to be there for work, but didn’t want to miss out on an opportunity to see this excitement in person.

Later that day I took an Uber to the local Best Buy in Austin and purchased one of the original Pebbles. I wasn’t a watch wearer at the time, but it converted me. I preordered the first Apple Watch not long after in April and have been a happy user ever since.

I wish Pebble had found more of its own niche and lasted longer, but I do thank it for showing me the potential of this product category.

The single feature that makes Castro so compelling to me is its

Overcast Should Steal Castro’s Best Feature

… sideload to Castro share extension from YouTube. Excuse me for making a slight edit to Matt’s post. 🙂

*On a sidenote, I’m just now realizing Matt redesigned https://birchtree.me/. Looks great.

Share your authentic self with Wabi, a WordPress block theme designed to help you tell your story best.

Meet Wabi, a WordPress block theme for writers and publishers — Rich Tabor

Feeling a bit inspired with WordPress 5.9 recently, I ran through a quick redesign of my site. More to come perhaps, but Full Site Editing with Gutenberg really makes things easy and it all functions much better than I thought it would in a version 1.

I’ve settled on Wabi, from Rich Tabor, as my base block theme. It provides a lot of flexibility in how you present your content even with my stripping it down to mostly black text on a white background.

You should give these new features a try if you haven’t yet.

I like new hardware ideas; it’s no fun to think that the phone is the last device we’re going to need. But I can’t see why anyone would want this. At least when Amazon and Facebook tried making their own branded phones, they were actually phones that did everything we expect a modern phone to do. Who wants a phone-sized remote control for their phone?And as a dedicated device mounted on your car dashboard, how is it not an invitation to be stolen? It looks like a phone that was left in the car.

Daring Fireball: Spotify’s ‘Car Thing’

I didn’t expect John to have this harsh a take on someone trying something new. There are at least a couple thoughts that came to mind when reading this:

• If someone is only concerned about music and doesn’t want the potential distraction of their phone when driving, this might help.
• Weren’t GPS devices similar as a dedicated device mounted in the dashboard somewhere? Seems to me this Spotify Car Thing would also be simple enough to put in a center console when you park. I remember friends doing this with the faceplate of their CD players.
• This could be especially useful for folks with older cars.

Again, seems cool that Spotify is trying something. If it doesn’t work or catch on, then kill it off. :shrug:

I happen to live in a larger community with golf cart paths that can take you wherever you want to go. We have a Bluetooth speaker attached to ours and it’s really annoying to fiddle with the phone while on a joyride with our daughter. I ordered one of these to see if it’d make listening to music a more manageable experience.

The bigger question is whether or not I stay with Spotify long-term. For now, though, we’ll give this Car Thing a shot.