A golden age of consumer convenience is passing
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I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up.
You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit. That's real convenience. Oh, and the show or movie never gets taken away because some execs decided to be greedy.
Although at this point I'm so fed up with most modern media that I've lost any interest to watch it, even if it's free and in a convenient format. Most stuff doesn't even seem interesting enough to pirate.
The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end. I'm hopeful that the future will be a mix of locally crafted consumption balanced with a healthy mix of content creation.
it's privately owned
and by someone that loves video games that was already wealthy when he founded the company
It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller handling, some bug reporting, cloud save handling, voice communication handling, even some space to host game related content. On the whole, more value added than taken by paltry ads. The bigger value minus is the "Steam DRM" - requirement for an online connection to use the downloaded application. And providence help you if you post inflammatory comments under an account that owns game access licenses. You will lose that.
The other ones don't do it quite as effectively, esp. the suggestions part. Being a game library and download service is not what makes Steam in particular good, though it is an essential part.
Everyone else in gaming is fighting for the newest releases. That's the battleground XBox and Playstation use, and that's where newcomers like the Epic Game Store try to beat Steam. Steam meanwhile is pretty toned down on new releases, and is going for long tail sales instead.
Also, Steam does have an offline mode. You just have to ping the mothership every few weeks iirc.
As a freelance developer I would run vmware with a dedicated partition for the VM. The VM was linux and the partition itself was either ext3 or reiserFS (can't remember).
Since Windows didn't recognize the partition, the DRM for witcher repartitioned that drive so it would have a "secret" partition to track who knows what.
That affected my ability to earn money and was doing things to my PC I would never have accepted if asked.
compared to that, steam is a godsend. I understand people complaining about steam, but to this day I'm still a huge fan of steam for what it forced the gaming industry to accept.
I still prefer GoG due to its policies, but steam is fantastic.
Here are a few links referencing it.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/33250/discussions/0/558752451...
https://www.gog.com/forum/the_witcher/tags_drm_in_the_witche...
The tradeoff is handing over the control of my game library to a company. I can see how that tradeoffs can be compelling to some and not worthwhile to others.
Anyway gog is really great :)
It's not a requirement. It's to the discretion of the game developer on whether or not they want to require it to play their game.
Streaming ads are annoying because under no circumstances I'd be thinking of picking up tampons while watching a football game.
Setting aside the ease of dismissing - would you be willing to give up some data to allow them to be smarter (having more context)?
That i get ads for camping gear when i'm looking for information on the French second restoration, and when that ad takes my whole screen, i get fed up and reinstall ublock.
It's easy. I know one person who made a lot of money from blogging. Affiliate links + direct ads to Festool or a know paint company. It beats adtech by a mile five years ago (for revenue at least). I think it doesn't work as well now with Intagram and tiktok, but he still get money from that.
Or you could just go straight to Wikipedia, whose only ads are for Wikipedia fund drives.
The video equivalent is the sponsored segment, which producers insert because they know people block ads and they don't make enough from YouTube alone. These can be good if they're actually relevant to the content. The problem is when I'm watching a video about coffee and the presenter tries, for the umpteenth time, to sell me Squarespace. Usually the product in the video is also affiliate-linked in the description (plus all the AV gear the producer uses) In contrast, I'll watch someone like MarcoReps shill me JLPCB because he's using the boards in the video and they actually look good.
In both cases, I think targeted affiliate advertising can work if it's done well, and it's a lot better than generic follow-me advertising that has no relevant to the page content.
I personally do not mind the idea of targeted ads and data brokers but as a software engineer I know my data is not safe due to ignorance or incompetence
They don't need to answer to faceless shareholders at the end of every quarter. They can settle for making whatever they consider to be "enough money" without chasing endless growth.
And empirically they are still growing at rates [1] not common among any class of companies, so someone there is certainty pushing for incredible growth.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/308330/number-stream-use...
Apple going from 1 trillion to 2 trillion valuation is much more valuable to shareholders than Apple paying out 100 billion in profits. But if the stocks aren't publicly traded then the main pay-out are the profits, so they try to maximize profit over growth, which is probably much healthier for the economy overall.
The two are intricately related.
As the buffet bet made clear, and as the majority of advice and investors do, long term ownership outgrows those chasing short term returns, despite pop belief.
I think you vastly overestimate the dollar amounts behind stock owners.
Every 401k or other investment place I've seen allows either taking dividends or reinvesting them. I've never one seen a fund that picks only divide free or divided providing stocks as a choice.
And every big fund also provides all sorts of general index funds, which certainly contain both. And individual stocks themselves decide to pay dividends or not, and routinely change so.
I don't think your distinction is at all a relevant factor in these funds to nearly any end buyer.
Please provide a citation as to why you think your claim is true.
Steam is moreso lucky that the PC market was pretty much ignored by all the large game publishers for a very long time and had very little competition. We will see what happens in another 10 years now that even Sony is launching it's own PC launcher. PC is now more important (even Japan is finally opening to the gaming PC scene).
Well, Youtube's ad problem comes from the fact that it is run by the largest internet advertiser. Netflix--video streaming in general--suffers from the fact that there are very few major content producers, and after seeing the monetary success of Netflix, the content producers decided to create their own streaming platforms and deliver their content only via them.
While there have been attempts to build alternative video game platforms than Steam (notably Epic Games Store and Origin), they haven't been able to enforce an exclusivity deal of the kind that showed up in video streaming. I'm not entirely certain why, but it seems to be a mixture of the lack of centralization in developers (so must-have is much less a factor in video games as it is for movies), the need for multi-platform distribution anyways to reach consoles, and the necessary social media integration (you need friend lists to be able to invite friends) making fragmentation more painful for users.
At the same time giveaways mean very little for existing Steam audience. Piracy was always easy on PC and gamers choose Steam over piracy not jusf because of law or moral reasons, but because Steam is more convinient and offer tons of features.
EGS is simply lacking a lot of niche, but importanf features. Most people likely only ever 5% of Steam features, but you soon find how useful are some of them when you try other platform.
I'm sure the rest of the code is top notch as well :D :D
Thanks, Unity CEO.
A games launcher is a lot more complicated. A few publishers have tried their hand at it (EA Origin, Ubisoft Uplay) and for the most part they suck.
You may recall they were patting themselves in the back by adopting this strategy of minimally viable programming. Well, Disney got their shit together and turns out people want to watch good TV. Whatcha know?
It’s a management failure and the ad pivot is a bigger failure. If there was a board with a clue, they would fire the management and start over.
It's also why people prefer app stores or package managers, because they give a predictable distribution experience over hunting for scattered software.
I'd say the problem with Steam is that it should have a community-run alternative/competitor. There hasn't been much push for one since Steam isn't a walled garden and Valve has historically been pretty ethical, but still...
Indeed. Steam is the original package manager of Windows. It's so good that nobody really remembers what it was like before Steam. They don't remember downloading and manually applying half a dozen incremental patches to their games. People are used to its incredible convenience now.
As far as DRM content licensing digital fiefdoms go, it's certainly the least bad. It's easy to forget that we don't really own anything on Steam. It certainly pisses me off when other studios start launching shitty alternatives to it that are even worse in every single way.
I think the only thing that could do that is a degree of general poverty so great that mindless consumption immediately impacts survival. And even then some people would choose intoxicants over food and shelter.
Is this as true as it once was? It seems most of the old trackers are offline or dead now. I’d guess because of the success of streaming services finally meeting the market demand. It’s also possible I’m just old and out of the loop now.
Also if you happen to speak a language outside the big Western languages, then it's all trivial and a simple search anywhere will yield even better than above.
[1] - https://torrentfreak.com/images/Notorious_Markets_Submission...
10+ years ago you could get a well seeded torrent anything by googling "anything+torrent". Nowadays you can still get anything but you have to be way more tech savvy and have to break out of your comfort zone. This could mean invite only sites,Russian speaking sites,Fiddling with baidu download scripts etc.
Seeing how much activity peak mininova had[0] compared to the public tracker offerings of today makes me a bit sad. There are still great places to leech some warez but "the more the merrier" is always true for p2p based sharing :^)
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090114215808/http://www.minino...
Everything is in private communities now. Almost all the content you can think exists on usenet, but all the good indexers are invite-only (and often pay to play. My usenet subscription + the yearly fees to various private trackers was just a little less expensive than Netflix (up until the most recent price hike).
Alternatively, invite-only/private torrent trackers are as good/better than the old days.
Way harder for regular folks to break into the scene, but it's far more "professional"(?) now
Of course, you’ll need to wait for me to open up my client every couple weeks, but you’ll get it eventually.
The DVD/Blu-Ray season sets cost 85-90€ each(!!!) for 13 (~20-22 minutes) episodes per season. That price to me is simply unacceptable, since that's more for one season than the entirety of series like "Friends" or "House, M.D.", either of which provide vastly more content and are WAY more popular than any anime.
As it stands now, I'll probably just wait until the last six episodes of this season become available then use the free "test period" for the "aniverse" channel on Prime Video, on which I arbitrarily can't watch 1080p HD because I have the absolute audacity of not using Windows (a problem which downloads from certain ... 3rd-party sites do not share).
Which is why they can get away with charging less per copy.
There are potentially many market equilibria-- selling 200 copies at $100, 400 copies at $50, or 1000 copies at $10.
If they switched to a bargain-priced model, you enable tsundoku-style purchasing-- put up a big display of "here's a hundred back-catalog series, 13 episodes on two DVDs in a flimsy cardboard sleeve for 1000 yen each", people would be willing to take much more risk on buying them.
Arguably, there's a lot of information being lost because they only see purchase data of people hardcore enough to pay the current high prices. (I wonder if to an extent this impacts anime's tendency for fanservice choices-- they're chasing an artificially narrow market)
There's still the opportunity for price-discrimination for fanatics with limited editions with better packaging, extra content, and feelies.
It's interesting to contrast that the price of manga was almost impossibly low. In Japan, (at least it used to be) like 1/3 the price as in the US for a 200-page volume, and the omnibus magazines were pretty cheap, which made it more amenable to risk-taking purchases.
Anime though is often way way cheaper in the US although that may have changed since Sony started buying up most of the players. Although this does have some downsides as US releases are usually hard-coded to have English subs on when using Japanese voices, no Japanese subs etc. to try and discourage reverse importing. But yeah easily a 5th the cost of collecting the whole set from the Japanese releases. Only Aniplex (who Sony owned) would do the garbage $80 for 2-3 episodes in US.
Anybody with any insights into Japanese culture/business? I've always wondered why this was, or if it's something as simple as inertia.
To me HN feels like having a conversation with an interesting friend. It's not necessarily the most productive thing to do, nor it has any other major goal inherent to it, still at the end of the day it doesn't feel mindless or time lost.
To compare, if I use Twitter for 10mins, it's 1min of entertainment at best and 9minutes of bullshit/flamebait/doomscrolling/shallow crap that makes me feel dizzy by the end of it.
I got into a bit of a twitter rabbit hole and ended up realizing my heart was racing, knuckles white and teeth grinding.
I was furiously pounding on my keyboard to reply to what was probably a bot before I came to my senses and closed the page.
I can see how that shit is addictive.
Rage is a hell of drug.
But that's on us.
I really wonder why anyone would dump $100 or more on cable TV any more unless perhaps they need to watch sports channels.
Commercials are dull as well, the way they repeat "accidentally"... ugh.
It will eventually burn out once the pandemic isolation is all over.
It's really going to be a drought for blockbuster entertainment, At least we have plenty of 90s movies and music to fall back on, It's a good thing I kept my old DVDs, Mp4s, Mp3s, and my DVDr drive... No commercials at all unless I want to see them. :)
The golden age of movie piracy has already passed. It is becoming quite hard to pirate 10y+ movies at a good quality. Also, streaming services do offer remastered film versions rarely available for pirates.
How so?
It's high quality, financial news with a European perspective (vs the WSJ which is very US-centric). I assume they keep the prices high enough to support their operations without having to dilute their coverage for the mass market who will want their celebrity news, daily outrage fodder, censorship etc.
Home video and taxi-cab service are very different sectors.
Uber has engaged in some pretty "creative" (i.e. unethical) business tactics to muscle their way into the taxi industry while avoiding both regulations and the payment of decent wages. They moved fast, but it was only a matter of time before government regulators (and their own reputation) caught up to them. Transportation is, indeed, something that's going to go back up in price in the short-term, if only because Uber and the Uber-wannabe's were using a business model that was never sustainable. I'd expect considerable contraction of this market as multiple companies fight each other for dwindling profits.
Home streaming, on the other hand, is simply coming off of a pandemic boom. When people were stuck at home, surprise surprise, they watched a lot of TV. Demand will correct to no less than what it was a couple years ago. The problems streaming providers face are entirely self inflicted. e.g. Fragmentation. It's going to remain hard for any single streamer to make as much as Netflix did when Netflix was pretty much the only streamer. Expecting consumers to pay five different companies on a monthly basis for what basically amounts to "channels" is not a delusion likely to persist much longer. We might see cable-TV style aggregation of streaming services take over, enabling users to pay a single monthly bill for all their streaming needs. Unlike transportation, there are free alternatives to streaming (i.e. piracy) that consumers will turn to in increasing numbers if streaming providers stay on their current course. This alone dictates that streaming must become more convenient in the near future, not less so. Showing ads on a service that isn't free is outright suicidal.
I want to push back on calling Uber's methods to avoiding regulations to be unethical, separately from discussing the wages. When they were starting, taxis had regulatory capture with their de facto monopoly. Lobbying over many decades prevented fair and healthy competition for out-of-date reasoning (like medallions and landmark tests). To break this corruption required illegal (and gray area) techniques, but I don't think it's unethical to destroy something that is unethical itself. Not all positive change can happen from following all the laws. Had they gotten shut down in the beginning, I think that would have been a major societal negative, and other ride-share companies coming on their coattails would not have happened.
Nope. Uber doesn't get a pass.
Uber could have confined themselves to the secondary cities with terrible cab service. Basically that's any city in the US other than New York and Chicago. People would (and some did!) have greeted them like liberators. For example, taxi service in Las Vegas was horrible until ridesharing showed up. San Diego taxis to the airport never showed up on time before ridesharing. etc.
Had Uber built up a commanding service in these secondary cities, they would have had all the momentum they needed to run over the incumbents in New York legally.
But, no, Uber decided they couldn't simply be a profitable business. Oh, no, they have to be unicorn-level and that wouldn't happen unless they were in the biggest cities right off. And then, when they showed up, they didn't even try to follow regulations with a fig leaf and were operating blatantly illegally.
And this is all on top of the fact that Uber and Lyft are skirting minimum wage laws.
Because your "long tail" of poorly functional taxi systems consisted of cities like Los Angeles, Houston, and San Diego. These aren't tiny even when compared to New York. "Most impact" should be the largest city without a functional taxi system. THOSE should have been the focus and then you would have had demand pull into New York and Chicago.
But, no, Uber wanted the "growth hack" of burning VC cash to transfer a bunch of people from the already functional taxi system into the ridesharing system.
> If Tesla et al. had the same impunity and legal cover as Uber, they would be selling everywhere, and we would all be better off.
Laws exist for a reason. Sometimes, such as the case of Tesla, those laws go out of date and should be changed. The medallion system, however, came into existence to avoid malfeasance by drivers. And, as we have seen, as Uber has reduced pay to the drivers, we are getting the exact problems medallions were put in place to solve.
Let's not pretend that it's limited to EVs. EV makers are just the only ones who think they're special and shouldn't need to follow the law. shrug
They've improved certain qualities of cab service here in Austin (like availability) but they've also severely diminished other qualities (like knowing that your driver won't drive straight past the exit because they don't speak English and don't know the roads and don't look at their GPS; or like demand-based pricing).
> People would (and some did!) have greeted them like liberators.
Yeah, because they were running a huge loss-leader to make themselves seem better than the competition until the competition was gone.
I agree that they don't get a pass but... ugh. Their practices, ignoring all law and regulation which apply to them, were not/are not okay no matter where they took place.
That might be true in some areas, but it certainly isn't in others. And nothing was stopping Uber from being a regulated taxi operator. Instead they were just friends using a networking platform to give each other rides (imagine heavy air quotes throughout that sentence)... while the networking platform set the prices and set the costs and took a large cut...
And in reality Uber et al are already far more expensive than taxis were before they took over. They're also subject to most of the same regulation... except the ones that kept pricing down and predictable/plannable... as taxis were, to boot.
Uber did everything they could to hide the true cost of being a driver. Tons of sneaky fees. Gray area for insuring your car. Dropping drivers wages just after they bought their vehicle from a Uber financing program.
There’s a reason the quality of Uber drivers went down, the good ones realized that there was no money to be made once you accounted for all the hidden cost.
So a few got a highly inflated "decent" wage and the people that desperately needed this work are just out of luck because they can't afford a medallion?
Streaming really has no right to not be “convenient”. The only reason it’s reverting to inconvenient is because of beaurocracy and aggressive licensing and copyright enforcement. One can argue that it costs money to make movies and producers need to get that money back, but even older movies which have already been released and made huge profits are no longer available or available on different platforms. Then there is region locking and overlooked movies which are flat-out unavailable. Because of all this, there is widespread piracy, and afaik if you have a good pirate setup streaming is still very convenient.
On the other hand, the convenience and low price of ride-sharing and delivery apps was unsustainable, temporary, and didn’t even really exist in the first place. When you get an Uber it costs like $10 for a 10-minute ride on a good day, and the delivery fees are often as much as the cost of your meal itself. Yet Uber doesn’t even make profit (I don’t know how that works and they’re not bankrupt, they have external funding but are allegedly losing money every year on their actual services). You can’t pirate a free ride or meal.
Streaming services are akin to channel packages from traditional cable. You get an aggregate of content for a price per month. The issue is the point of aggregation is meaningless to the consumer for the popular services (Netflix, Apple tv, prime).
In traditional cable it's done by topic (movie package with HBO, showtime, starz or sports package). With these more popular streaming services it's aggregated by production company and other arbitrary things that are meaningless. Leaving me with 8 thousand movies on a service where I only care about 10, but I pay either way.
The Crunchyroll model of "this is an anime streaming service" has it right for VOD in my opinion, as does WWE.
I think a micro payment setup would work better for something like Netflix. Something like pay $1/month to watch stranger things. $40/month gets you 40 shows per month. Free to watch first 5 episodes or something. I can't think of any better way to truly gauge what's popular than to let people vote with their wallet directly.
Right now with these services it feels like we're subsidizing content that nobody cares about leading to a big murky pool of trash content. Just my 2 cents.
Uber is also going to run into the issue that if they want to charge much more than they do now, it is often more sensible to use some other means of transportation because it will be too expensive and, well, people can trivially do the work themselves.
I use a local website run by volunteers that ask permission of publishing houses before putting every scanned & OCR'd & spell-checked book in their online library. Again, not illegal, there's a clause for distribution when you work in something like a library capacity.
I use a Twitch client to watch stuff ad-free because I don't use it so often so as to get premium. Or I just download the stream after it ends. Tough luck, Amazon, no money from me. YouTube's service is better anyway.
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The "Black Mirror"-ization of our economy has a very predictable ending but the execs are trapped in a bubble of yes-people and have no clue how the world out there works -- thus everything will continue going exactly as predicted by many. One part of the populace will remain in the bubble but there will be a lot of others -- like you and me -- that will do their own media collection and consumption, grow part of our own food, repair our own tech, craft items to use around the house etc.
Corporations know no mercy and they will not stop however. They will keep changing the narrative ad infinitum until everyone is dependent on them at birth. But they won't ever get to that point in the first place and will inevitably fail. Normal people can be swayed only so far. That's the part that they are missing -- which is quite puzzling to me, not like it's hard to figure it out.
But I made my peace with the coming events. It's like watching an avalanche: you have a pretty good idea what it does and how far it will go and the damage it will inflict but physics doesn't care that you watch and know what will happen -- the event will happen regardless.
The future is this: extreme segregation. Kind of like the big COVID-19 divide that happened even between people in the same family. That will keep happening in other areas of life. It's how people are.
C'est la vie.
I do, too. And every month I spend a little bit more time fast-forwarding past people awkwardly dropping pitches for NordVPN into the middle of their videos.
Rarely a problem for me though, I quickly filter out the sellouts.
And it's still worth it for the occasional how-to video because part of the time I truly get helped. I can stomach some promotion (but like you I do dislike it).
Personally I think that in marketing like this NordVPN are not trying to convince existing VPN users that their service is better than their competitors'. Rather, they are trying to convince non-VPN users that they need a VPN.
So it is really convincing people they need it. For those reasons...
Honestly curious: what makes you think that?
I'm someone who really likes VPNs, but in all my experience, they have some really rough edges for non-technical people. I would never recommend one to my non-technical friends or family unless they had a very specific need for it.
Using Nord as an example, since it's a popular option:
- The client takes >90 seconds to load and connect on my Win10 Intel Atom craptop.
- Apple often flags some Nord IPs (probably due to legitimate abuse/attacks coming from them) - leading to Apple Maps, Siri, and other services hanging indefinitely on iOS.
- As of a year ago, the Nord CLI client was completely borking the networking on my stock Debian 10 install whenever I went idle for a few hours. (Didn't dig super deep, but the CLI client would go totally unresponsive and I couldn't get network going again by any other means apart from full reboot.)
- Majority of banking/financial service websites block you.
- You're much more likely to get flagged/run into issues when making payments or signing up for any sort of new account.
- Many desktop apps don't gracefully handle the IP change when you connect to VPN.
Some of this is Nord-specific, but my point is that people just looking to dip their toes in the water are going to run into some form of similar issue - and that makes VPNs not very user-friendly to the general public. That's why I think most of the people who'd want a VPN already know about them.
Furthermore, it is marginal cost for the content creating peoples. They just have to read the script and roll the supplied graphics. If they get $1 from total sales then it is worthwhile if you are only getting 2K views. Maybe these VPNs offer a minimum fee and then commission on top so that there is always a payday, albeit small.
None of them seem to record bespoke content where they demo the VPN for real or show how it works.
The message has pivoted to getting content from region locked services such as Netflix.
With car insurance (the last time I was watching TV, some years ago) they had rather silly 'meerkats' with Russian stereotype characters selling the insurance, with the people collecting the fluffy toy versions of the 'meerkats'. If you renew your insurance every year you get another 'meerkat' and soon the goal is to collect the set.
Often it is the company that pays the insurance but the employee gets the 'meerkat', maybe to post to eBay...
My niece's inheritance is mostly 'meerkat' toys and a few empty beer bottles.
I am holding out with OpenVPN on a VPS until cuddly toys get given out with VPNs and they are advertised in every YT show with AI generated cuddly toys with AI accents.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
Same with the books. The library asking permission is actually good and what may make it legal. However, that is called a license and may have serious limitations.
It's a thin ice, obviously, but let's also recognize the fact that they forced us to walk on ice in the first place. They made up the rules. Had there been any sanity in these people left a lot of money would have never been expended in making examples out of regular Joes and Janes.
Welcome to life: https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E
What NAS do you have?
I didn't even setup something like FreeNAS or something. I just setup ZFS and enabled SMB and NFS on top of it. This is on a spare computer that I've setup with Linux.
Then I've setup `cron` tasks that run various scripts that just download various YouTube playlists -- hand-picked and curated by me.
Nothing you'd call an intelligent software. Just hand-picked places on YouTube to monitor and sync once a day.
It's only automatic insofar as `cron` executes `yt-dlp` with a bunch of URLs.
The funny part to me is that my parents do a fire safety puppet show for children and can keep them enraptured for half an hour with zero budget. For centuries, people have been entertained by Punch and Judy shows. It makes me think that maybe the $20M/episode stuff we do now is impressive, but perhaps a bit over-engineered.
That may cover many people, but GP's post seems different. They went out of their way to "digitize their [presumably bought] collection" just to be able to avoid ads.
This doesn't sound at all like "not paying for the content", they're actually paying above the content: I don't think the NAS comes from the pirate bay.
We've actually seen this in practice: when Netflix was the only game in town and carried everything ad-free, piracy cratered. Now that all the paid providers are beginning to show ads, and you have to have 50 different subscriptions to watch what you want, piracy looks better again.
I don't watch many movies / series / videos, so I'm happy with what I get with my Prime subscription, which I'd have either way.
But now that more and more of my Spotify tracks are "not available in my region" anymore, I'm seriously starting to investigate alternatives. Spoiler: it's not another streaming provider. Rather, looking to buy a bunch of hard drives and dusting off my old cd player, so I can rip whatever CDs I can get my hands on at second-hand stores around me.
At least in Europe, there's the whole "personal copy tax" that's levied on all storage media as well as a "private copying exception" to copyright law.
I haven't really used audio CDs for ~15 years so I don't know what the situation is these days. At least the technologies I mentioned are no longer being used to according to Wikipedia. One way to tell if the disc has these kind of copy protections or not is to check if it has the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo. It's trademarked and Philips does not allow using the logo for CDs that break the specification. They do however allow setting the "no copy" bit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit). No clue if that would be strong copy protection or not in Finnish courts.
That kind of budget suggests lots of cgi which is its own problem, but that's a different rant.
It has happened before. It will happen again.
https://www.britannica.com/list/10-failed-doomsday-predictio...
Ads defeated.
Come the fuck on. This may have been true during the honeymoon phase of these services where everybody was scamming consumers with the bait part of bait-and-switch, but it has not been true for quite some time. Any of these convenience services charge dearly for the privilege nowadays, through fees, hidden menu markups, shitty subscription "deals" (WOW, I can save 30% on each order for signing up for $9.99/mo or whatever... how about cutting 100% of my order fees for your BS recurring lineitem bullshit?), and just plain general price increases.
I don't have much of an opinion about delivery apps because they weren't ever viable here.
1) Are there any devices available that allow recording effortlessly and then allows skipping adds equally effortlessly?
2) What are the non ad service options - Netflix, Prime Video, HBO, Youtube Premium?..what else?
MythTV will process the shows to flag commercial breaks, which you can then skip automatically.
MythTV looks like it’s still an active project.
I stopped using it because I just don’t watch much TV these days and I just got tired of maintaining it. Renting the DVR from Comcast is worth it to me for my meagre needs. But if you’re into TV and don’t mind some geekery, MythTV is definitely a powerful and flexible system.
Anyway, the way most of these recording engines would work is basically that they would feed the recorded video through a "script" at the end, and so within that script you could send it to another program to find the ads. This was done with [ComSkip](https://www.team-mediaportal.com/wiki/display/MediaPortal1/C...) on MediaPortal and Argus TV. From memory, ComSkip would write a txt file or similar next to the video, and that was like a metadata file letting the playback program know where the ads were.
I'm not 100% sure how ComSkip worked internally, but there are many clues in the video stream it could use to find the ads (eg. often the static logo would disappear, or the teletext end, or the volume increase). It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough. I reckon with today's machine learning capabilities, such a program could be written to skip the ads perfectly 99% of the time. But I doubt anyone will, because even I haven't used my HTPC in this manner for over 5 years (I don't even have the TV connected to the aerial any more). Now my HTPC is just a fanless mini PC stick with Win11, a keyboard and mouse on the coffee table, and I stream through the web browser.
It’s a great combo. ChannelsDVR Ad detection always finds just the right spot in my experience (UK, but heard the same from US friends).
One caveat with HDHomeRun is they had supply chain issues like everyone else recently so their may not be in stock or might be easier to find via Amazon etc.
SPOILER ALERT
> A work of future history and speculative evolution, Time Machine is interpreted in modern times as a commentary on the increasing inequality and class divisions of Wells' era, which he projects as giving rise to two separate human species: the fair, childlike Eloi, and the savage, simian Morlocks, distant descendants of the contemporary upper and lower classes respectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_time_machine
Here the "classes" are derived from technical skill and knowledge. It might seem bizarre to us here on HN but just knowing about e.g. ublock origin let alone how to install it makes you one of the elite.
I don't really know how to feel about all this. On the one hand, it seems regressive to me to herd folks into silos and milk them (FAANG). On the other hand, people have to take some personal responsibility for their own education and agency, right? Computers aren't really that hard? No one's holding a gun to their heads to make them use FAANG products and services. Certainly, the options to live a more free and open life are there, eh?
Mickey Mouse finally goes out of copyright next year.
As for the others, there I am fully with you. They are quite aware it can be done and they just can't be bothered to do it. To me that's an informed choice and thus -- consent. They don't get to complain about squat because they made the conscious choice.
Buy an air mouse/keyboard to control it from your couch.
Here's an example: https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Keyboard-W1-Multifunctional-...
The flexible sovereign combo of a general purpose computer and a user agent.
I use a forever-docked ThinkPad x230 under my TV, which can do 1080p and 802.11n (5GHz).
What we need is a good, simple dumbtv interface for a computer with network access and a DVB card/stick. One that can also bring up a full-screen browser window to deal with streaming service DRM. Have been considering getting something together with rust+gstreamer starting by cloning my old Philips dumbtv interface while using mplayer/mpv hotkey standards for everything else.
The all-encompassing, endlessly complicated yet somehow still inflexible Kodi is a bad solution for people like me. Let's start by making a dumbtv out of a cheap linux box + a monitor.
Don't most smart TVs have Bluetooth today? In my case, the FireTV is plugged into my (dumb) PC monitor.
It's not surprising you can't cast without ads - adblock would have to be installed on the chromecast not the device doing the "casting."
I use https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext Smart Tube Next on a Firestick. I side loaded both the beta and release versions with adb. I have not seen a commercial since. If Release doesn't work, try Beta. One of them always seems to work.
>> And it's impossible to buy a dumb TV in 2022
Next best thing: I bought a Samsung TV last year and never accepted the Terms and Conditions. No ads.
Edit: fixed link syntax
With firefox and an ad blocker I don't have any youtube ads. Also netflix shows start faster on a browser than they did when I was using a chromecast.
The DNS and other Pihole stuff is a last ditch effort and a poor hack when really we should be able to inspect and alter all packets going through our networks.
And you see it. Your pihole hack doesn't work anymore. Because that was always a loophole and they're closing it now again with DoH (DNS over HTTPS).
All under the guise of privacy. Because somewhere sometime a long time ago an ISP added ads to your web pages and redirected DNS.
You can just do literally the same thing you'd do with dumb TV and connect computer to one of it's HDMI ports. "Smartness" of a TV does not take away any feature from it, unless you're so hurt by software updates - which you can simply disregard by not connecting the TV to the internet.
It requires some investment of time and money, sure, but nothing outrageous and far from impossible.
I think that convenience will get harder because the economic system in the US prioritizes everything but automation. Have a business plan where you can hire tons of people? Great! Here's your loan. Have an asset as collateral or the money itself before you need it? Great! Here's at least that much money. Have an invention to completely solve the problem of delivery because robots grow food in your backyard? Get lost!
I often think of the lyric from the Cheers theme song: "making your way in the world today takes everything you've got". Well, Millenials and Gen Z have about half the disposable income that Gen X had, and Gen X has about half what the Boomers had. In other words, it was 4 times easier to make it in the 80s than it is today. I was there, I remember what leisure was. And art and civic engagement and public works and everything else that we've all but lost today. Now our cities don't even have safe drinking water. That kind of travesty was unheard of in the 80s.
As the realities of late-stage capitalism crush down on the world harder and harder, the cost of making it will eventually pass what people are willing to pay. I think we're seeing the start of that with The Great Resignation and #vanlife.
If my feeling on this is correct, then deregulation and lower interest rates will speed the decline. Stuff like austerity backfires, and half the population knows that through experience now since stuff like 9/11 and the housing bubble popping.
So any hope of fixing supply chains powered by low-wage workers in the third world is a fantasy. They've seen the internet, they know that their best shot at a better life is not to succumb to servitude like their parents did. They're all going to organize and demand better compensation, like they should have done a generation ago.
Another way to look at this is that the value of things stays the same, but the value of currency falls. In another 10-20 years, currency will be so worthless that a home in some cities might cost $10 million. We're losing the ability to buy things because we can't hedge against that with our own ability to make things.
Yep, I couldn’t agree more, title.
This really indicates what our economy has become. Everybody talks about the two business models companies employ; ad-supported or fee-based. These are the selling models Occasionally, piracy is discussed. While it may be a business model, piracy obviously isn't a selling model. It is a consumer consumption model though.
We do have another consumption model that is more difficult to see because it does not include any explicit agreement between a company and a consumer. This emerges from companies that begin using loss-leading (money-losing) models to gain customers, initially. They then expect that they will generate a network effect or be able to rely on inertia (what Malcolm Gladwell generalizes as "sludge") to retain those customers when they later change their model to something profitable. This fails because there is always another business trying something similar. Each of these companies has the same global reach and customers can switch easily between them so they just hop from one unsustainable bargain to the next optimizing their own costs. They are disloyal leeches. I don't say that to be derogatory; it just seems the best description.
Consumers are mercenary, as are companies, and that’s the rational way to be in an economy of scale, where loyalty is “brand loyalty”. If consumers aren’t loyal, it’s a failure of the company’s marketing.
Implies there ever was, or should have been any loyalty. Should a child be loyal to a stranger offering candy? Let's even grant the stranger purest of intentions. Should they?
I personally am not friends with any corporation, and I'd laugh at any suggestion of the inverse. It's business, the few businesses that demonstrate and earn trust will have loyalty, but it's all uphill. Because after, they're just strangers.
It's not like these little journal articles are the ultimate truth we all need to read. It's just a guy publishing his views on some topic. Views likely biased by his stakeholders at that. Views likely manipulated by PR firms if not government entities. Essentially propaganda advancing some narrative. When governments want people to view propaganda, they pay for an aircraft to airdrop leaflets. Yet we're expected to pay for the privilege of consuming their information?
Truth is on the internet if they want people to read their views they have to actively go out there and post them. They have to pay money and/or time to make it happen. They don't get to demand payment because opinions are infinite. Paid journals are a relic of the old world and its media where they had printing presses that made literal newspapers with columns on them and that was the only way to get a mass audience. That's over now. They need to deal with that fact or go bankrupt.
Hell, I don't even care about the articles posted here most of the time. I come here for the comments. I want to know what the people on this site have to say. The submitted article is just a conversation starter really. Anything notable or important in it will certainly be quoted here.
High rates of inflation increases wealth inequality over time.
Those working paycheck to paycheck (or anything close to that; ie income dependent) can't outrun it, attempt to hedge against it, or typically even keep up with it. They rapidly fall behind. Their standard of living gets demolished quickly, as they're very sensitive to price increases on staple goods, energy costs (whether heating or gasoline et al.), or rent.
The capital / asset classes can keep up with or outrun inflation however. And the impact on them in terms of standard of living is entirely trivial. Elon Musk at $200 billion isn't much richer than Bill Gates was during his peak circa 1999-2000. Inflation adjusted they're quite close. The rich have kept up with inflation because they own assets that are capable of doing so (primarily equities, although other rich-person asset classes have done moderately well also, such as art and extremely valuable real-estate), the rest of the people largely have not kept up (and never will in the case of high inflation).
On top of this, the Fed's perma low rate program, required by the US Government's debt situation, bolsters the wealth inequality significantly by artificially inflating assets such as equities and housing.
Workers primarily do well in environments of low inflation with a supply / demand imbalance for labor (in favor of labor). That environment existed, most recently, in a stable manner, in parts of the 1990s and from roughly 2014-Covid.
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One reason all these services are introducing ads is consumers’ learned unwillingness to bear the full costs of the services they enjoy.
I might argue that the true irony is grumbling about a news provider very reasonably limiting their product to those who have paid them.
They should have read some basic human psychology: it's extremely hard or impossible to take something away that was given for free for a long time. That's basic knowledge. My history and psychology teacher shared this tidbit with the class when I was in the 9th grade.
Furthermore, me and many others are not closed to the idea of paying for journalism but are not willing to track 20 subs across different services.
Bill me through my ISP. I'll pay it. Make an app tracking how much extra I'd pay the next month because I've read 5 FT, 3 WSJ and 7 NYT articles -- I want to know. Even better, put a banner beforehand: "Reading this article will add $0.05 to your monthly internet bill, press OK if you agree".
The technical and societal solutions are there. But the unfettered greed and everyone's desire to be the one and only still prevail. Hence: yes, I will expect free journalism until things change.
I'm not reading your site if you paywall it. There are too many other free resources that are just as good if not better.
Good journalism isn’t fungible — it costs money to produce. When we actively choose to not pay for media, we have no one but ourselves to blame for the awful biased or clickbait junk that results.
You could say that posting a paywalled article on a discussion board is just an ad for paywall subs.