joecot

Are they not ad free with youtube premium? I pay for premium to not get ads in general, getting 3000 ad free movies is just a plus.

If you're running a community you want to actually grow, you don't have much of a choice besides be on discord. It's replaced both Facebook and Meetup for events and building Internet groups. Even open source projects moved to Discord. Is it more FOSS to use an open format? Yes, absolutely. But a Discord server is what any younger person will join, frictionlessly, from their phone.

There are numerous cases where stuff does not work in Windows. The difference is the support.

If your device doesn't work in Windows, there's usually a help line to call for it. They might give you the runaround for an hour, but they'll try to help you, and if they don't they might end up giving you a refund. Or you can take your computer to a tech support person, even Geek Squad at best buy. If you are technically illiterate, there are people to help you.

If your device doesn't work in Linux, it's probably not supported by any company. There are some linux distros that offer paid support, but people don't think to look for that. Even though your device is probably supported by Linux, Linux is not supported by the manufacturer, so if you have a problem, you're on your own. Your support is community support, reading forums and discords and github issues. Your only recourse is if you bought your computer from a Linux first company like System 76, but even then the support extends to the computer itself, not every random device you might buy without checking if it's supported on Linux.

There used to also be local support for Linux, in the form of Linux User Groups and Local Community Teams for Ubuntu. But as Linux got more popular, it stopped being a hobby, so the volunteer work (and corporate assistance in that volunteer work in Ubuntu's case) disappeared.

> I have yet to find anyone outside the tech industry who actually knows or gives a crap.

Lots of school kids who get mocked for being "Green Texters" with crummy images and videos in their group texts. They really want their parents to shell out for an iPhone so it stops. Just because non-tech people don't know the cause, doesn't mean it doesn't affect them.

They almost certainly would have standing. Banning their app from the app store clearly directly affects them.

But they could instead just allow people to login on the mobile site and install it as a progressive web app, instead of forcing them to use the app so they can track people better.

The #1 cause of me remembering I have tinnitus is seeing articles about tinnitus.

They made the same calculation with Google Play Music and "merged" it into Youtube Music. Not to worry, they migrated all my music over! Except most of the Youtube "Music" was people's personal uploads of dubious quality. I ended up moving to Spotify instead.

> Every new open source company should start with these anti-Amazon licenses from day one.

Then it's not open source software. Either your code can be viewed, used, modified, and redistributed by everyone, or it isn't.

Yeah, it's going to be an easy sell to regulate VPNs more strongly when Nord and others actively advertise that they can be used to avoid regional licensing of content.

I tried to leave Spotify. I tried to switch to Tidal, which boasts better sound quality, and most importantly, better payments to artists.

I switch between listening on my phone, my computer, other computers, and my google home devices all day. With Spotify, I can choose which device to choose to from anywhere, and I can also control it from anywhere. I can play music from my laptop, then change songs from my phone, then send it to my google home speakers whenever I'd like.

Tidal didn't have that. Didn't even have google home integration. Didn't even have a desktop app on Linux. I switched back in less than a day. As annoying as Spotify's app can be sometimes, it's the service that works across all my devices, and can switch between all my devices.

Build baby build doesn't work when Black Rock and so many other private equity companies are content to buy as many houses as they can and then hold them to raise prices further or rent them out. 44% of all Single-Family Home Purchases were from Private Investors in 2023. A huge portion of the problem would be solved immediately by 1) a vacancy tax, 2) banning the purchase of single family homes by corporations.

The point of a company should be to benefit the people who work for it. Reinvesting money into a company can help with growth, but as they say, it's a risk. The point of the company is the workers, so there's nothing lost by just ... giving the money to the workers. If it's time to look for growth, they can reinvest it. Being profitable gives that flexibility. But if you're not an investor driven or publicly traded company, contrary to popular wisdom, the line doesn't always have to go up. Sometimes sustained customer base or just slight growth is enough.

> single digit percentages used to be a thing on platforms before Valve moved the Overton window with Steam

I think people really underestimate the customer value of Steam. I have a library of 20 years of game purchases. From numerous different game companies. I can install all of them on any computer, now including my Linux machines, or a Steam Deck. If a device can't run one of those games, I can stream from another machine with Steam Link, including now to my VR headset. If a game uses Steam's multiplayer networking, multiplayer just ... works. No worrying about ports, NAT, anything. It just works every time, unlike every other multiplayer system I've used. If a game uses Steam Workshop, mods are available right in the same program, no extra tools required.

Besides the hardware and the game purchases themselves, all of that was free for me, the consumer. I get that Valve takes a big cut, but the value add of Steam is almost immeasurable from the consumer end. I've bought games from GOG but the experience isn't even close. Every game I've had to buy through Origin or Ubisoft directly had made me grit my teeth at their bloated launchers. Most of the physical games I've bought outside steam have been lost, damaged, or deteriorated with time.

If someone had told me 20 years ago, when I was signing up launch week and it kept crashing, that Steam would be this ubiquitous, useful, and free, I wouldn't have believed you. Steam is an incredible value add that makes PC gaming a tremendously better experience than console.

Snaps are self contained packages of software. They are mounted as a separate isolated file system when they start.

The good: Snap packages run on almost any Linux distribution, so they're an easier target. Distribution specific packaging can be tedious, and often involves a distro having to maintain packages themselves by repackaging the "upstream" package or software. With software that updates frequently, snaps theoretically mean a lot less work for distro package maintainers, because one package works on every distro. Snap packages are also sandboxed and have less access to the host system.

The bad: In practice, they don't work very well. Snap programs are slow to start up. Because of their sandboxing and universal nature, their integration into the distribution can be lacking.

For example, when I upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, I was automatically moved to Firefox snap. It is painfully slow to start. Instead of the normal Ubuntu file browser when I went to upload or save a file, it uses a jarringly different file browser. I switched back to using the firefox PPA, and now this new package directly from firefox.

I also moved to the Slack snap, which also works terribly. I apparently can't upload and download files from it reliably, so I have to open it in my browser to do so. There appears to still be an official deb package, but they've hidden it on their site because they want you to use the snap.

Snap started as a method of packaging applications for servers, and that's still where they're most useful. Slow startup time and issues with desktop integration are not concerns for server side snap packages. For desktop graphical applications, Flatpak will likely be a much more useful universal package system.

As someone who uses self-checkout machines effectively, this happening is fine. I have a moment of confusion, then find the code, then move on to the next item. What is terrible is when instead of the self-checkout machine throwing a warning about it not being scanned correctly, so I can find and input the code, it just locks up the machine and says "Customer needs assistance". Then I'm in the same boat as the clueless folks, because the machine won't trust me to correct.

It's not. The entire purpose of Tor was for US spies overseas to be able to make anonymous secure communications. They opened it up to the rest of the world, because if the only people using Tor are US spies, it's pretty easy to tell what someone's using it for.

Governments also run a lot of relays and exit nodes for a similar reason. Not to make it easier for themselves to identify traffic. For no one actor to have a majority of nodes, which would make it a lot easier to identify traffic.

That could keep track of feeds you're subbed to, but the problem is keeping track of which posts you've already read. Once you're having to sync all of that, it might as well be a web app.

Also pressure from middle management. Many managers have no skillset beyond "walk by people's desk and see if they look like they're working." Once workers were home, they couldn't keep track of whether they were productive or not. Yet they were still productive. In lots of cases they were more productive. While the obvious answer is that it was clear companies need less management positions, if you're one of those managers, it makes sense to convince your superiors to get everyone back in the office so you can walk by their desks again.

There are also plenty of websites that either won't accept webp images or don't handle them very well. For example Facebook will not accept webp on mobile, on desktop most of the time it thinks it's a gif. While jpeg works everywhere

I'm pretty sure they were being sarcastic about traffic jams of EVs as far as the eye can see being an improvement.

I have an ad blocker and it didn't stop me, but I got 2/3rds of the way down the page before it stopped me and said I had to join to read the rest. Basically the same sort of tactics that they're complaining about Youtube using.

Open source projects are made and managed by software developers. Not by graphic designers, not by UI/UX experts. Developers will make something that works, that scratches their itch. But it can take years if not decades for a project to actually look polished, be easy for a casual computer user to use. For most open source projects, the way to contribute is "make a pull request", which usually involves more programming than a design person can or wants to contribute in order to make things look good. For a project to be user friendly, it needs people besides software developers working on it.

See, for example, Mastodon and Lemmy. They're excellent federated social media, they should replace Twitter and reddit. But I heard someone say the word "Federated" at a bar last night while describing them, and I pegged them instantly as a software developer. Federation? Choosing an instance? Casual users glaze over. Without a dead simple onboarding process, they will never replace corporate social media.

As a long time Ubuntu user, I get annoyed at the way they've moved towards kiddy proofing a number of things, but I can tell they're doing their best to make it usable by more casual computer users. It's still not 100% there, but it's way closer than it has been, and it's one of the most user friendly distros.

If you spent 30 years struggling, and now everything's running well, do you really step away in the hopes that the next person doesn't immediately bring it crashing down? Because the fastest way to destroy a company is the wrong CEO.

Making websites into single page applications / dynamically javascript powered separated the frontend and the backend, and made the backend significantly easier. But it made the backend easier by pushing a ton of those previously backend concerns to the frontend. And then we wonder why the frontend is so complicated.

It can't be proven, which was the entire point.

I think back to Ellen Pao at reddit. Ellen was brought on as CEO, and was the face of a number of very unpopular decisions. All those decisions had one purpose -- jettison the things that made the site rough around the edges, and find ways to monetize, so they could make investors happy and work on going public.

The backlash was staggering, and much of what they tried was rolled back. Ellen Pao took the blame for it, but it wasn't actually her fault. The founders just scapegoated her in order to make changes they needed for investors -- and depending on how cynical you are, they picked an asian woman so that they could channel internet racism and sexism as part of the distraction. Years later, they did the same thing, making multiple unpopular monetization changes, but this time the CEO taking the backlash is Steve Huffman himself, not a scapegoat put in front of him.

CEOs don't make decisions on their own, not really. This pricing change was the direction the company wanted to go in, and they got put on their heels, but only temporarily. They're still going to try to find ways to aggressively monetize.

There are multiple class action lawsuits and settlements with Nissan over their CVTs. My Versa with a CVT started dying around 70k miles. It had all its scheduled service. I brought it to a Nissan dealer, and paid for a transmission inspection, and they said it was totally fine, even though I regularly experienced it failing to shift (or slide, I guess) between gears while accelerating. Around 90k miles it stopped switching out of 1st gear while I was 400 miles from home. I brought it to a family friend mechanic, who showed me that the transmission fluid plug was covered in metal shavings.

CVTs, at least from Nissan are a black box. You can change the fluid, you can hook it up to a computer, but that's about it. There's no fixing them. When it's done you have to replace the entire transmission. I limped the car another 50 miles to a dealer and traded it in for a Chevy Cruze. I looked it up, and I was the only year model not to have a class action yet. Later there was, and I think they settled for a 500 dollar voucher towards a new Nissan. No thanks.

1) I expect a lot of people saw the site and didn't realize it was satire, 2) as a Leftist tech person who reads Hacker News, whenever there's a discussion on here that is even slightly political, and I see the responses from a lot of HN users, I remind myself I read Hacker News for the insightful tech discussion.

Privacy.com works like it does, giving consumer protections, because the consumer with the bank account is the customer. Plaid works like it does, letting companies take your money with no restrictions, because the company is the customer, and the consumer with the bank account is the product.

If a company offers you a service and that service is free, you are not the customer, you are the product.

In the US, it's because of federal subsidies. Air travel is federally subsidized, to get airlines to maintain air travel to less populated areas. Otherwise the flyover states would literally just be flown over.

Air travel is subsidized, airlines pay to use but do not pay for airports. Highways and gas are subsidized, drivers pay tolls, but drivers and car manufacturers don't have to directly pay for all road maintenance. Railways are subsidized, but nowhere near to the same extent.

The Federal government has subsidized Amtrak 30 Billion over the last 30 years. It's subsidized freight rail some, and Amtrak and other services can use those rails, but freight trains have priority. It's subsidized air and highway travel by 1.89 trillion, including around 1 trillion to build most of the airports you see today.