I think it is deeper than personal want. i have a feeling that the more people communicate to each other about something, the more they value their personal experience to be relatable. Every customization makes your experience less relatable.
842 karma · joined March 2, 2022
this part is a pro for S3 not a con. In this analogy OP is trying to store the information held by the punch-card, not the punch-card itself. So giving the information over to a business means they will preserve your binary data by moving it from punch-cards to HDD to SSD, etc - they will handle the hardware changes and redundancy.
Your first point stands strong though
or he could have not watched it at all, told no one, and you would have 0% instead of 20%.
Pirating at scale is a real problem, but an individual pirate is just an opportunist. There is a difference between taking something off the shelf vs picking it out of the trash.
There is a small volume of "piracy" that could be considered "picking through the trash". Some (a lot) of entertainment looks like trash to some (a lot) of people and the only reason those people watch it is because it they get to watch it for free. And then when they are pleasantly surprised, they tell people about it. This is the heart of the "i wasnt going to pay for it anyway" argument. Its the type of person who wouldnt pay for a donut, but if you were about to throw them out theyll take one.
Id be curious to see statistics that shows the relation of being successful in the pirate world and successful in the real world. Because that is ultimately related to the argument you are making. that the current state of piracy is hurting your industry, not helping it - since you say this specific pirate is hurting you right now.
it certainly hurts the transactions bottom line when isolated to viewing your bottom line with or without pirate sales - but thats an incomplete financial scenario (this type of thing is my job). you shouldnt assume a gain of x% sales of pirates that 'would have paid for the content if they couldnt get it for free' without also subtracting y% of sales from people 'who only bought it because pirates started the conversation that ultimately led to their purchase'.
Sometimes the marketing for a movie sucks, and not a lot of people are interested in seeing it. There is a small time frame of relevance and pirates might help overcome the shortcomings of marketing efforts and make the movie more relevant which helps it reach more people than it would have.
In all of your discussion, you seem to presume that the pirates knew about and had an interest in your film to begin with. You assumed successful marketing of your film. maybe you're right, and it probably does 'hurt' (tax?) the biggest blockbuster of the year... but 'people who only watch things online for free' is a real community of maybe significant size and i dont know if there has been any work done to try to measure the impact of what penetrating that community has on the financial success of entertainment media in general.
"all theft is bad" is a nice story, but it ultimately is not always true. sometimes companies allow theft on purpose as a form of marketing. They do that as an observational response to the fact that the cause and effect of 'influencers' exists outside of the intent of the people involved.
This leads to a hypothesis that pirating is a form of marketing for your industry. If it were to become too easy to perform or too widespread, it would likely cross a line into being actually damaging. But if the people pirating it are mostly a small group of tech savvy, relatively intelligent, movie enthusiastic people (due to the technical requirements needed to pirate) then maybe when they pirate you they might be autonomously servicing your industry as an influencer. I know it sounds asinine, but if you want to talk money - there are a lot of factors to consider.
So are they stealing? sure. Are they taking money OUT of your pocket? very debatable; unclear. They are influencing with the pool of money that ends up in your pocket, and it isnt so black and white what their actions have on the size of that pool due to the complexity of your industry.
--------------- Sorry for the long post, and it isnt an attack on you or even a support of piracy in general (it might read that way) - i got caught up in mentally exploring the underlying financial model at play in the current market. fwiw im too lazy to pirate, but i still feel there is an incredible difference between people who pirate for themselves vs people who make it easy for others to pirate. People who invite some friends over to watch something they pirated, vs someone who distributes pirated content on common low-tech household media formats like USB, CD, etc.
you found one?? please share
many new games are free and rely on in-game transactions tied to an account outside of steam
There are no restrictions on the games I bought through steam that actually get in the way of me playing them - and there are a lot of conveniences offered like having access to my entire library on any machine with steam installed, or playing the games installed on my machine pretty much indefinitely offline. And being able to verify my game files and have them automatically fixed / updated
The games i bought a long time ago and still play have more than earned the money i spent on them anyway. if steam dies and i need to buy them again, i will and i will be happy to. if i cant find them anywhere because the games themselves died, ill make an image of my PC before upgrading it or uninstalling them and play them offline in a VM
there might be an itch here or there i cant scratch for whatever reason, but i can always buy a new game inspired by the same genre which is usually more fun than trying to recreate a nostalgic feeling anyway
I've been using steam for over a decade and have always enjoyed that it works the way i expect a computer application to work. i can right-click on things to get to their properties and other options, i can point it to games i have installed that i didnt buy through steam and they appear next to my steam games in my library seamlessly
the store UI is.. not the most intuitive thing for me, but it seems consistent. it is very rare that i am browsing steam store to begin with, though. I am usually searching for a specific game directly, which i never have trouble finding if it's in their collection. I also like that i can add any games im interested in to a wish list and they notify me when it's on sale
i used to edit my settings in a config file in counterstrike, which required "tampering" with local files but in a way that ultimately resulted in compliant files. Finding that file was an obscure path to navigate, ill give you that - but again the organization is still consistent. all files for one game can be found in one folder with the games name on it. you can manually delete that folder and effectively uninstall the game. you can even do a custom reinstall by selectively deleting files from that folder and ask steam to replace the missing items and it will. For example, to reinstall a game without losing your save files.
Not trying to invalidate your experience, but your comment caught me by surprise because your dislike seems to be well rationed and thought out - ie genuine - so i just found it interesting
I think this highlights their entire UI goal design i think. They constantly pressure you to watch new things. They want to inflate their unique viewer counts on as many shows as possible. They want to hook you on something new before you finish what you're watching.
>The noise thing, I believe, has to do with your settings
makes sense, ill check it out. maybe there is a setting in there for continue watching priority too
interesting point. maybe there was some benefit to building the cnn+ infrastructure prior to their merger, and they did it because they figure they'll need it eventually
Only the news channels dont interact directly in front of the viewer so it's like a courtroom where you only listen to one lawyer talk. You have to go to a different room to hear the other lawyer talk, and they are probably talking about the topics in a different order and with a different kind of focus
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-enci...
so now i have to drop $700 on an iphone for a text messaging app. fucking ridiculous, but i want better communication with my friends without telling them what to do
Am I crazy, or should it be expected behavior that if I click nothing but "ok / enter" after opening the app that I should end up on the last thing I was watching?
Also it's always making noise or doing something and the only way to shut it up for a minute is to play something and pause it
Compete with you on what? using the public goods you created? I still think that is the point. If they can utilize the public good more efficiently and offer its service to users at a more competitive price point than your small shop - that benefits the user.
>I'm interested in getting paid repeatedly without any additional effort on my part, rather than getting paid per hour.
A plumber doesn't get paid every time water runs through the pipe. Coming up with clever solutions to the operational problem is part of the $/hr of doing work.
I guess what it comes down it is are we talking about literal code, or are we talking about something higher level that you want some level of ownership of?
When it comes to code, the logic of the code itself is not where the value is. the reason multiple payments are made for the same set of logic / code is because the value is in the time and place of execution. Owning the overall system the code lives in is all that matters for value. Code itself has literally no value on its own. The value is in the execution.
The thing people pay for is to have others execute code for them. development is part of that.
you still bring up an interesting payment model idea though. I'm not sure how it could work, but there might be a feasible way to have multiple developers work under the same umbrella, with all code being proprietary and owned by that umbrella, and instead of paying them a flat wage they each work as contractors who get paid whenever code they developed gets executed. The umbrella could service FAANG as customers through typical SaaS API model so FAANG never sees the code and the developers themselves get paid on execution instead of FAANG management
Basically what you describe, but as a closed ecosystem - not sure how feasible it would be to insulate it from the general ecosystem though.
Isnt that the point? Your contribution is freely accessible to the community. If your work gets used, then you contributed
If you want to get paid for your work, set up a contract beforehand. Get paid to work on GPL code upfront - dont try to get paid for how it is used after. How it is used is heavily effected by not needing to pay for it in the first place.
Otherwise you are like the guy at the gas station who randomly cleans your windshield and then asks for a tip. Like yes, my windshield was dirty and you deserve to be paid for your work, but no one asked
Dont use GPL licensing if you want to turn a trade secret into profit.
I think eventually they will be paid about equivalent to a construction worker (currently $40k). Maybe less since they dont have to be onsite or in good physical shape.
Zoom has reduced leasing costs for many companies tbh
SSN alone shouldnt be sufficient for account creation so you'd probably have to jump through the usual 2-3 forms of ID to get access to your account, but then the email itself could act as another form of ID. Which would be super useful in lots of situations, especially if you lose one of your other forms.
Also there is a lot of digital user verification workaround right now that would be solved by this. I would much rather interact with a government controlled email address than scan and send a copy of my drivers license to online services
it is also possible to change the contents of what the URL points to without changing what the NFT is.
Almost all NFT's are an index. No one seems to understand that they are not owning a digital item, they are owning a reference address. Nothing about the NFT substantiates the contents of the address. that is OpenSea in a nutshell
However, some NFT's like the bored apes use a multi-variable reference and then those variables act as parameters on an open-source protocol for generating the NFT. In other words, the NFT is not a URL, but a key-value dictionary like {eyes:blue, hair:brown, hat:cap, hatcolor:blue} (i dont know off hand the actual attributes used for bored apes).
This second method is closer to what people think NFT's are in the first place, and is leagues better than the URL to a centralized server but it is still ultimately an index of some kind that relies on being substantiated by something not on the block chain.
and not a lot of other current uses for NFT*
NFT's themselves are actually a really neat piece of technology imo. I can imagine some uses for them. My imagination hasn't stumbled onto how those uses produce appreciating assets, though.
Person A gets NFT for 1 ETH. They sell it to person B for 1.2 ETH
Person B is able to spend 1.2 ETH because they traded 2 ETH worth of NFT to Persons C, D, E for 3.2 ETH total
Persons C, D, E are yesterdays Person A
etc.
People are "trading up" but only because the total number of trades are increasing. Some people are probably successful in hopping into this wave, converting a profit, and hopping out.. but they are only able to do that because the majority of activity is still running the engine. Eventually the engine will run out of fuel and a lot of people will be stuck with net negative accounts
I'm also 90% sure that most of the bigger players in the space are aware of this and are effectively competing to see who's left holding the bag
The current option of going "paperless" by way of providing a privately owned email address is a huge risk factor. Gmail should not have access to view my government related emails. They aren't accountable for network issues either that may result in personal damages. The email itself is commingled with spam streams, related filters, and other things.
We need a dedicated, government protected, digital communication line. Sending mail through it would be tied to your government identity. Behavior is then open to regulation and accountability. Which is a good thing for the specific need of two known identities talking to each other.
Google can be the contract vendor for the service, that's fine. But there needs to be a contract setup where they are simply providing the service and not owning the data / contents. Maybe Microsoft outbids them the following year, and the underlying provider changes to no observable effect to the users. that kind of thing.
As a bonus, it would be immensely helpful for people dealing with permanent housing issues and the host of problems that are associated with requiring a mailing address for things. A government regulated email address would be sufficient for a lot of those things.
I always wondered about this as a casual person with a heavy consumption rate of neuroscience. I fallen in to thinking of the "active" brain areas similar to lakes. places where activity seems to collect. if you remove the lake bed (fill it in? analogy breaks down here) then the activity will just collect itself in a different location. It might look / act a bit different from how it was before, but would still fit the profile overall - hence 'retraining' being possible.
disclaimer: just personal thoughts, not backed by anything specific
all the above describes my apartment connection in Astoria. and the neighbors were DIY tapped into it too. At any given time I lived there there was an appointment scheduled or being scheduled to have a field worker try to fix the downtime issues. they never did and i moved out
Id go to that