babypuncher

And the reality is that with most price tags ending in .99, retailers will actually round down to .95 to preserve the psychological benefit of not crossing a dollar barrier.

I have blu-rays for all the movies mentioned in the article. Today, there are some very powerful tools for processing digital images to make them look like film, going as far as letting you mimic specific film stocks.

It might be a fun experiment to make custom rips of these movies that look more like their theatrical releases. I'm curious how close one can get without needing to source an actual 35mm print.

Less money and competition in the entertainment industry means less total content production and less impetus for funding riskier productions.

If you look back at American TV in the 20th century, so much of it was samey and bland because there were only 3-4 programs to choose from at any given time. It was hard to get networks to greenlight anything that didn't fit an already proven formula.

This started to change with cable and streaming. Consumers suddenly had a lot more options, and were also spending a lot more money. You had a lot more networks trying to stand out, and they put out riskier shows that rejected decades of TV norms.

Now that the industry is consolidating again, networks and studios are back to being much more risk averse, and that is hurting the quality of their output.

Personally, I don't think the answer is more all-you-can-eat subscriptions, it's frustrating for consumers and even moreso for creators. I wonder if some kind of usage-based compensation would work, where users can choose between watching a show with ads, or paying 25 or 50 cents per episode to watch ad-free.

My concern is that it deflates any impetus to actually solve the problems of regulatory capture, profiteering, and other corruption.

Not everybody can afford the up front costs of installing solar + battery storage, plus replacement when the PV cells and batteries inevitably reach EoL. These people will be left behind on a decaying grid nobody with political capital wants to fix or at the mercy of landlords.

I really don't like this attitude we have in America where we realize "thing is broken" and advocate throwing it away instead of trying to fix it.

Of course, but it's easy for them to give into that when the worst possible consequence for royally screwing up is a comfortable early retirement.

The economics of shoving the entire output of the entertainment industry on a single $15/mo streaming service don't work out. It arguably doesn't even work that well for music. Ask any musician that doesn't rake in platinum records how well Spotify works out for them.

"Let the AI check its own homework, what could go wrong?"

So much about Brave raises scammy red flags every time I look at it.

However, my main reason for ditching Chrome years ago was the fact that I think a browser engine monoculture is bad for the web as a whole, especially if that engine is primarily controlled by a single corporate entity.

Manifest v3 and other Google nonsense came later, and are extra reasons to stay away from Chrome, but I still feel strongly that a good alternative needs to use a different engine.

Or just skipping the predatory gambling crap entirely and selling the skins directly like every other live service PvP shooter these days

I think this is a pricing and billing problem more than a "people only want free shit" problem.

All the paywalled news agencies want a monthly subscription. But I, as someone who doesn't like getting all their news from a single source, am not interested in signing up for news subscriptions because the cost would pile up fast, and to be honest I don't read that many news articles in a given month.

I think we need some kind of usage based billing system where participating outlets can set a price per article, and users can agree to be billed for that article when they go to view it.

Firefox had 30% market share in 2010, I would hardly call that "niche", especially for a browser that didn't come bundled with your operating system or have the marketing power of the world's default search engine.

It also had an outsized impact on the web because it was a popular with developers for doing web development.

I like rainbow parentheses and this is already a common feature in code editors.

Every example past that was just worse for readability. I think you're right about density not being the only important metric here.

I've found games running in Proton to provide better long-term compatibility than many native games. Despite Steam providing a stable runtime for native games, I have a few titles from their first major Linux push back in the '10s that are now crash-happy or exhibit substantial performance problems, but work perfectly fine when I use the Windows version with Proton.

Telling people not to even think about using their favorite piece of software is a good way to make sure they don't consider switching. A lot of popular Windows apps run perfectly fine in WINE. I've been using foobar2000 in it for a decade at this point, and have yet to find a native alternative that gives me the same feature set. So why shouldn't I keep running it?

Any backdoor fundamentally breaks the promise of any end-to-end encryption.

This isn't a problem of process like requiring warrants and just cause. Even if said process is designed to be perfect and is executed flawlessly, it is still hinged on a fundamental breakage of the security model a given chat software is built on. If a trusted government has a magic password that can read anybody's encrypted text messages, then it must be assumed more nefarious actors can figure out that password and use it themselves.

It creates a single point of failure that would compromise literally everyone.

Early betas of Windows 8 had a refined Aero style that I still think looks great today. https://postimg.cc/dL3rxwvF

Something about this statistic is setting off my baloney detector

This depends entirely on who you trust more, your government or tech oligarchs. Tech oligarchs are just as liable to influence how their LLMS operate for evil purposes, and they don't have to worry about pesky things like due process, elections, or the constitution getting in their way.

If there's one thing I've learned watching the trajectory of social media over the last 15 years, it's that we've been way to slow to assess the risks and harmful outcomes posed by new, rapidly evolving industries.

Fixing social media is now a near impossible task as it has built up enough momentum and political influence to resist any kind of regulation that would actually be effective at curtailing its worst side effects.

I hope we don't make the same mistakes with generative AI

I think it's still up in the air whether a decent non-Apple laptop/desktop class ARM chip will come to market before Intel and/or AMD narrow the efficiency gap enough that the hassle won't be worth it.

Google is evil and Mozilla is incompetent. Ladybird has the potential to be a third option with neither of these attributes.

The "nice defaults" of Ubuntu and Omarchy cater to completely different audiences

If views aren't being counted, it will still hurt their revenue from YouTube Premium subcribers. Premium views pay out a lot more than ad revenue from "free" views so that can hurt a lot.

This is my biggest problem with a lot of modern desktop search.

Search in the Start Menu has been doing this by default for years. If I wanted to search the internet, I would have used the search box in my browser that is already open 24/7.

This doesn't add any convenience, it just pollutes search results with irrelevant garbage.

But the goal with these things isn't to provide a better user experience. It's to juice engagement metrics, because our industry sucks.

Combine this with desktop-tui[1] and say goodbye to graphical desktop managers forever!

1: https://github.com/Julien-cpsn/desktop-tui

Ultimately, stolen cryptocurrency doesn't cause real world damage for real people, it just causes a bad day for people who gamble on questionable speculative investments.

The damage from this hack could have been far worse if it was stealing real money people rely on to feed their kids.

Well at least the billionaire class got their massive tax cut, that's what is important. Buying food may get more difficult for the rest of us, but at least Jeff Bezos can buy another megayacht, and I'm happy for him about that.

I'm starting a rebuild of my now ancient home server, which has been running Windows with WSL2 Docker containers.

At first, I thought I might just go with TrueNAS. It can manage my containers and my storage. But it's got proprietary bits, and I don't necessarily want to be locked into their way of managing containers.

Then my plan was to run Proxmox with a TrueNAS VM managing a ZFS raidz volume, so I could use whatever I want for container management (I'm going with Podman)

But the more I've researched and planned out this migration, the more I realize that it's pretty easy to do all the stuff I want from TrueNAS, by myself. Setting up ZFS scrubbing and SMART checks, and email alerts when something fishy happens, is pretty easy.

I'm beginning to really understand the UNIX "do one thing and do it well" philosophy.

I would argue that Gen Z is worse at computers than Millennials specifically because we put too many guardrails in place to make computing easy for the illiterate. Now we are all paying the price, as user agency is continually eroded away to further protect the dumb from their own unwillingness to gain a basic understanding of the very tools critical to their daily life.

I used the internet every day in 2000. Bubbles happen with useful technologies not because we decide they aren't useful, but because we were over-sold on what they could do before they could do it.

A lot of AI investment right now is hinged on promises of "AGI" that are failing to materialize, and models themselves are seeing diminishing returns as we throw more hardware at them.

I think algorithmically curated social media feeds should be regulated the way we do tobacco. Massive education campaigns and obnoxious labeling laws so that everyone and their dog knows it's toxic. Maybe take away their safe harbor while we're at it. The algorithm is a form of editorial control after all, so it can no longer be argued that these sites simply function as a "public square".