I don’t mind much paying for streaming (although that’s increasingly more and more annoying and I still tend to just download whatever I actually care about) but until and unless I can pay to “own” a movie and they just provide me with a DRM free video file of some sort, I will never “purchase” digital content like this.

If you tried this kind of bullshit in just about any other context, even normal people would think you’re crazy.

Normal Person: “hi there, one blender please. I’ll take this one for $25.”
Sales person: “Cool here’s your receipt.”
NP:: “It says here at the bottom of the receipt that you can just come in my house and take this blender back whenever you want or maybe never?”
SP: “yep.”
NP:: “And you don’t tell people that ahead of time?”
SP: “no when you buy it you agree to that by opening the box and it is on the receipt you get after you bought it.”
NP: “you fuckin with me rn?”
SP: “afraid not, and would you look at that corp says I need that blender back, thanks.”
SP: “oh, shoot. I see here you also bought a toaster from EvilCorp sold in one of our EvilMart locations a couple years ago, we’ve decided to license that brand instead to our new partners FukUMart, so we’ll be taking that toaster but if you want you can head to your local FukUMart and buy that toaster again for more than you paid the first time.”
NP: spontaneously combusts

I mean, I’m not sure why this conversation even needs to get this far. If I write an article about the history of Disney movies, and make it very clear the way I got all of those movies was to pirate them, this conversation is over pretty quick. OpenAI and most of the LLMs aren’t doing anything different. The Times isn’t Wikipedia, most of their stuff is behind a paywall with pretty clear terms of service and nothing entitles OpenAI to that content. OpenAI’s argument is “well, we’re pirating everything so it’s okay.” The output honestly seems irrelevant to me, they never should have had the content to begin with.

I still have more subs for these than I would like, but I generally download anything I actually want to watch anyway. Like, the fact that justwatch.com even exists is an indictment of the way this works.

This is a fairly fundamental misunderstanding of anything related to monopoly or anti-trust law. Maybe, maybe the iPhone, and even then it’s a stretch. edit: at least in the US.

Jefferson Davis and Robert E Lee were some of the few that were barred from holding office until like, the 70’s, when it was reversed posthumously. As with all things Trump, entertaining the question to begin with is pretty fucking stupid.

Indeed. Gun control is actually extremely popular if you just look at polling.

“There is simply nothing we can do! Far too busy stopping women getting a dead fetus removed from their body before it kills them! Oh hang on I have to take a call, someone is trying to make sure that kids get food. Not on my watch!”

• Republicans, shortly before explaining how they’re “pro-life.”

The only thing that I think is a little complicated these days is make sure that you’re not reliant on a particular Windows-only app. For the vast majority of common apps, you’re going to be fine, and it’s sounding more and more like even gaming on Linux is not only fine, but getting to the point of being the best way to do it. If you do have a particular app you rely on, I’d look into the various ways that you can get Windows apps running on Linux (which can be a little tricky, but usually not too bad.) But even like 10 years ago, I built a machine for an elderly family member, put probably some flavor of ubuntu on it, and I never had to troubleshoot that machine.

This tracks. I have recently gone back to running a Windows desktop machine for gaming, and now I have to actually shut it off because:

a) that fucking thing never stays asleep. Clean install with nothing other than Steam and a couple of games, sleep settings mean nothing. Just wakes up, stays awake forever.
b) Fortunately I have an enterprise license key so I don’t get as much random bullshit, but every update there is some new fucking thing I don’t want.

My machine is a desktop, but I can’t image how this works well on laptops.

Copilot is their AI thing (which I think is just a wrapper for ChatGPT.) As for why you need it, fuck if I know. Love MS just adding another key that’s going to piss me off when I’m in a game.

For point 1, that’s absolutely not getting past the 1st amendment, and it really doesn’t matter that it’s called news. People treat their crazy uncle’s conspiracy Facebook posts as “news” and labeling doesn’t really do much if anything to discourage this behavior.

For the idea of critical thinking and education, this is something that democrats should be campaigning on and promising, although obliquely. It should probably come in the form of increasing funding for schools (MASSIVELY) and then add in media literacy courses and such to the curriculum. Although, that said, there are already schools that do this in some form or fashion, but the problem is that far too many school boards are overrun with nuts, and this ties into point 3…

Religion being tied to governance is a real, real problem. Teaching kids critical thinking is going to teach a lot of them, especially Republicans and Evangelicals, that they are being fed a steady stream of bullshit. We still have enough religious association that even getting this across to Democrats and left leaning in a major way is going to be tricky.

On a hopeful note, the most zealous of this population is dying out. Levels of religion have been steadily dropping for a while now. I think as more of this magical thinking dies out, we’re more likely to see positive improvement. Of course, we have to not become a fascist state in the meantime.

God. We already have to deal with them idolizing fucking Reagan. And yeah, as long as he is alive and not in office, the chances he goes to jail go up every day.

Ah perfect. Sets up a strawman, completely misses the point of my post, says one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard (reddit being an alt-right website*) and then immediately moves to block in response to me saying this place is a hostile echo chamber. 10/10, no notes, illustrates the point I was trying to make better than I did.

Just to be clear for other readers, I was not saying that any of those things are bad I was saying that this place has a purity test that borders on stupidity which this post illustrates well.

* just how does one come to this conclusion? It’s less lefty than Lemmy, but not by much. It’s alt-right communities are usually either banned, quarantined, and regardless of the technicals of the website or how the admins run it, they’ve always been outcast and if you say “vote for trump” in any but the clearly right echo chambers, you’re going to get downvoted to hell.

As someone who went from a daily user of reddit for a decade and now hasn’t used reddit basically since the app’s red wedding, I really don’t think this is it. As much as I hope the fediverse and Lemmy take off, currently I’m extremely pessimistic about that because if anything the problem is the reverse of what you describe. My current front page on Lemmy (all/active):

• an article whining about Elon
• an article about Fox News/trump
• a post complaining about charging for XBL/PSN
• an article about Tesla being banned from driving schools
• an article complaining about DoorDash

and so on. And to get to this great non-rage bait content, I had to go through the trouble of even figuring out how to use the fediverse and which instance to sign up for (and then still hop instances a few times) and spend my first week just blocking like I was getting paid for it because language settings on this site mean nothing, more or less, and there are a few “communities” that pop up here that provide all of the intellectual stimulation of jamming a q-tip too far in your ear.

And if those posts alone don’t paint a clear picture about who the user base is here, heading to the comments will. Most of the comments read like they’re posted by “lefty white linux bro” or “communist trans linux they/them” who have decided that those are their entire identity/personality. While none of those things are bad and I tick a lot of those boxes myself, it creates a real echo chamber that borders on hostile to anyone that isn’t in that category. The other side effect I’ve seen on this is that this place can offer up some real doozies of takes in a way that is likely to make anyone who actually knows anything just up and leave. I saw one the other day that was talking about greatest people in the FOSS space and uncritically lists RMS that was heavily upvoted. At least someone brought up why that’s problematic in the comments, but imagine hopping over to the mainstream sites and talking about best musicians and seeing R Kelly on the list…

Anyway, while I don’t mind an echo chamber now and then, if Lemmy in particular is to grow and be useful for anyone outside of this base, I’d suggest the community adopt something closer akin to “reddiquette” which is probably the main reason why reddit was able to get somewhat past this in the early days, and some of the “niche” communities were able to grow. I put niche in quotes here, because as it stands now Lemmy doesn’t have even very vibrant communities for fairly mainstream things (music and TV, movies, etc.)

So while I personally choose to spend my time here instead of on reddit, that’s mostly an ideological choice and I view as a sacrifice because I’m missing out on tons of other content that I enjoy. Even your post is a form of this – “reddit bad” (sure) “because of bots” (also sure) “and Lemmy has less outrage content and fuels engagement” (uh, no.) Lemmy has as much or more, and it’s only fueling engagement on those that don’t immediately bounce off, but since you posted “their team bad, our team good” you’re getting upvotes and probably will continue to.

Treating Trump with any sort of legitimacy is how we got here. We have laws designed exactly for him. He shouldn’t go on the ballot. The right is only emboldened because they’re constantly getting away with fucking everything, skirting the lines of the law if not outright breaking them. We should entertain him being on the ballot like we’d entertain someone who’s 20 or wasn’t born in the country – it’s absurd.

Android phones from major manufacturers, and Apple phones: doubt it.

Bold added for emphasis, Apple claims privacy as a feature and OS control of the mic to prevent this exact sort of thing. Not only would someone have found it, it would be a news cycle on the mainstream news, and basically just the wallpaper for any tech-centric website.

I mean, fucks sake, iFixIt alone would find mics in places they shouldn’t be and this would be a story.

Unfortunately, the truth is more boring, and basically pretty much every app/website most of us use are tracking us in some way unless you really seek prevention. They don’t need the mic.

“if I were a corporate shitbag, how would I implement my shitbaggery?”

In this case, it would be pretty hard. We have wiretap laws, which would mean you have to tell the user you’re doing this. Even though no one reads the ToS, someone does, and it would be news if someone was doing this.

Even then, it would be a hard enough problem that companies would think twice about it for a few reasons. Number one, processing 24/7 of all audio in your home is going to be rather difficult/expensive, so you’d have to go with something like keyword-triggers-processing the way that your phone listens for “hey google/siri” or Amazon listens for “Alexa.” It works kinda like game video sharing - they are always listening and recording for a short time frame* but they only send the data somewhere if they hear the trigger phrase. That’s not easy in itself, they’ve spent a ton of time getting the right algorithm so that it correctly hears the right trigger phrase and you don’t get a ton of false positives to varying degrees of success. And keeping in mind these are companies that are best suited to it, they still struggle sometimes with even that. The ad companies would have to listen for dozens/hundreds/thousands of triggers…

And then you get to the data retention policies. Google is an ad company, Apple is not. One of the reasons that Apple can tout privacy as a feature is simply that they don’t need the data, so they don’t collect nearly as much, and they save even less. They get the bonus of not dealing with law enforcement and all that.

So, assuming they solve that, solve some big issues with the laws of the land and physics, now we’re to the point where they have to think about network traffic. Which is going to be trivially easy for nerds to figure out and circumvent, so they would have to have their own ad-hoc network which comes with another 137 or so difficulties.

If it were, it would be pretty common knowledge and there would be several news cycles about it. I don’t doubt that they could bury it in the terms of service, but we have wiretap laws in enough places that are two-party consent that it would have had to come out by now. Not to mention nerds like me running pi-hole and monitoring their traffic, repair people who could easily regonize a mic in the device, etc.

Yeah, it’s this. The only thing innovated by DD or UberEats is avoiding regulation. This is the real cause of all of the enshittification that everyone is seeing. It’s been the plan all along; charge an absolutely unsustainable price, jack things up when you’re the only option. DD is already well along this pattern; it used to be much cheaper, and it’s still going to go up.

Piracy is not even close to the reason any of the streamers are struggling, and even then I’d be surprised to see if Amazon was actually struggling. Piracy itself is a rounding error, and is more of a function of the shitty way that most of the streamers run their business.

There is a lot going on:

Lots of these streamers, and especially Amazon, keep green lighting projects with massive budgets but then forgetting to tell a good story or hire people who seem interested in making the show they’re making. Rings of Power and Wheel of Time have insane budgets for what are generously mediocre shows. I can’t even imagine the pitch meeting for WoT. “I want to take a massively beloved cornerstone of the fantasy genre that spans 14 gigantic books and a few novellas, turn it into a TV show with 8 ep seasons, make a ton of changes to the story and lore that is sure to piss off the audience that is most likely to generate word of mouth for us, and for the low, low price of like a billion dollars. You should trust me with this money because I worked on 2 seasons of the hit show (that was on the edge of cancellation basically it’s entire run) Agents of SHIELD and a streaming show on Netflix that was canceled after one season.” By pretty much any measure, this is an insane set of decisions.

This is everywhere - The Witcher, Halo, Star Trek: Discovery (and most of Picard), Secret Invasion, Book of Boba Fett, just about every goddamn “blockbuster” Netflix attempts. It’s either they take a beloved IP and decide to do something entirely different and usually not even good-different (has anyone that worked on Halo even seen an xbox?) or they set up a project with a pitch like “Ryan Reynolds is a big star, Fast and the Furious is a big franchise, make a movie with Ryan and cars or whatever.” Insert meme of the guy getting thrown out of the window for asking “does it need a plot?”

The existence of half of these streamers in general belie the real issues. You can’t tell me that Paramount+ or Peacock should even exist. The whole premise of these goddamn things is “people want to watch 20-40 year old re-runs of Star Trek and Seinfeld, I bet we can charge $15 in perpetuity for that as long as we sprinkle in the occasional new show that makes a point to let our audience know we hate them for liking these shows.”

It’s just a massively, massively mismanaged business on basically every level. Ads is the latest in this fiasco. They should be either small, cheap networks that make a lot of small budget shows, or if they’re going to take some big swings they might want to have a proven strategy of any sort. Quite a lot of the shows that found massive success were made for basically the change you find in the couch cushions. A show like Friends probably cost about $7 for the first season, and didn’t balloon until later seasons when the cast was each making a decent amount and every other episode had a major guest star. Most sci-fi until very recently was extremely cheap. Carter: Sir, we’ve arrived on the planet, looks like the MALP was accurate. O’Neill: It’s really weird how most of the planets we visit look like the woods in Vancouver, BC. Even Game of Thrones which probably started this arms race of spending, didn’t start getting $20+ million budgets until it was a massive, massive hit (worth noting how that show tried to stick closely to the source and didn’t start to suck until they ran out of book) and even then that would be seen as “cheap” compared to a lot of these.