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I can pick and choose which streaming service to subscribe to. I can cancel and resume at the click of a button w/o dealing with some retention salesperson. It's ad free. There's exclusive content. The apps are higher quality. I could go on and on.

Cable seems to be advertised as cheaper somehow (if I bundle probably), but I'm stuck with Spectrum in my area and I refuse to give them more money than I need to. Knowing them, they're just going to raise prices quietly hoping I don't notice.

The problem is that there are simply too many shows being made right now and quite honestly I don't think people actually have the time to watch all these shows so it's not sustainable that so much high quality content is being produced. At some point these services are going to drop down to just a few winners.

As someone who used both devices for gaming, I would say that while the iPod may have had quantity, the DS without a doubt had the quality of games. Amazing library.

I'm ashamed I haven't heard of Zelda Classic. As a Nintendo fanboy (my github handle is kintendo), I thank you!

Also thank you for this work! When WASM was first announced this is the kind of project that I envisioned we'd see more of. Instead, everything has been mobile-centric and app-centric but you give me hope.

Yes, Facebook has issues that they need to address and strategize around, but there's still a lot of positive that Facebook brings to the table that I wouldn't overlook.

There are many Facebook Groups with thriving communities of good people helping one another. These communities are Facebook exclusive and stronger than ever.

Facebook Marketplace is also the safest place for me to buy second hand goods. I never turn to Craigslist anymore.

Messenger and WhatsApp are still reliable ways to group message.

Let's not forget Facebook includes IG which while TikTok is taking its marketshare of engagement, many users still have both and IG is not just "for old people". It's still heavily used by our youth.

Great, then it should stop advertising to me what it knows I just bought.

So you want more targeted ads for tech savvy people? I wouldn’t give ad tech that much credit. Many tech savvy people have cut the cord and watch TV through streaming. Anecdotally, I watch Hulu. Hulu knows so so so much about me yet zero of the ads are targeted. They very much have this capability (engineering resources) but due to a number of reasons I can only assume (network contracts, ad bids) it just probably isn’t going to happen. I would love if I could have an ad blocklist cause one more Progressive Ad will drive me bonkers.

Cassandra has been successfully deployed at many companies. Would you care to provide some insight into your experience and why you consider it one of the worst?

If we want quality content then these news sources need to be incentivized somehow.

When it comes to SEO, the content is all there but the paywalls are usually client side so it’s harder for crawlers to dock down paywalls.

Overall I agree that paywalls are annoying. But I do want quality publications to survive else we are going to be stuck with content like USA Today

I don’t think you can make the same comparison to iTunes. No record label had the ability to reach millions of paying users like Netflix already has. Netflix has no incentive to license their original content to a different aggregate platform.

I almost bought one earlier this year and now I am questioning buying into any Google hardware product

Right, this has always been the case but it's inconvenient to do so. It's incredibly convenient to just subscribe to Spotify. If you took the convenience of Spotify away, people will go back to piracy.

The thing is, Taylor's version sounds completely different. Did Ben Thompson actually look at streaming numbers? All her fans didn't flock to the new version. They listened to it, but it's so different that the old version is still consistently streamed likely by the same fans.

Further, the new version isn't on some new platform or anything. It's not like Taylor Swift asked fans to fork extra money to listen to "Taylor's version" so nothing is really proven here regarding Taylor's so called power. In terms of accessibility, the tracks exist side by side with the original on Spotify.

The idea of NFTs is incredibly appealing to artists because the technology could allow for artists to sell music that can only be played by some client if the NFT for a track or album was authentic. Ultimately this is bad for consumers and you bet your bottom dollar that some new form of music piracy will be born if music tried to go this direction.

Actually, I can tell you that their original strategy was to have exclusive listings. Last year because Compass had so many agents, they were able to "preview" listings on their site days before MLS. Their hope was that this edge would attract users into using Compass to search for listings over RedFin/Zillow/etc. Fortunately, this practice was banned and they no longer have that card to play.

This is fascinating to me. I would love to contribute to Dream research. I also keep a dream journal and consistently have very vivid and colorful dreams. The most frustrating thing to me is that I would love to share these dreams somehow with the world but I'm not a great writer and I'm even worse at drawing.

I was fortunate enough to order one at launch through Best Buy but I had an issue with all online PS5 retailers: Best Buy, GameStop, Newegg, Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc.

I don't know anything about how any of these companies operate logistically so I can't make any comments on this. It sounds like you'd like to put yourself on an infinitely long waiting list that fulfills PS5 orders on a first come first serve basis. My assumption is that something prevents companies from being able to do this because not a single one of them has this implemented.

You're not wrong, but don't forget that there are plenty of physical goods in gaming. Every nerdy IP has merchandise and that's why GameStop acquired ThinkGeek. There are tons of nerdy merchandise and collectibles to sell. Instead of massive clearances on items that don't sell, they could offer subscriptions services like LootCrate and when you get there you're not too far off from monthly cat food.

GameStop owns ThinkGeek now and is much much worse at selling physical goods online. GameStop also made a good amount of its money through preorders, trade-ins, and resales. If they focus on an amazing web, customer, and fulfillment experience, I could see the ship correcting its course in a dramatic way.

Call me weird but if I had ads at all, I prefer that they be relevant. I hate being shown something that I have zero interest for. I actually really enjoy when a targeted ad is spot on at showing me something that I would want. I can sympathize with the idea that it is psychological warfare and I think I'd rather pay for an ad-free experience over seeing irrelevant ads.

Is it just me or is Google consistently awful at product marketing? They've already had a Google TV that they killed. They've also already killed Chromecast Audio. Now this thing is called "Chromecast with Google TV". I think consumers are going to be confused.

The ability to bundle in 6 months of Netflix for $40 is so random. Why not offer a YoutubeTV bundle? Where is the product synergy?

It's nice that Stadia will come later but that the fact that it's not available at launch is a huge missed opportunity.

Having worked on large scale production apps through jQuery days, Knockout, Backbone, Angular 1, and now React, I still think this is the best tool for the job. What do you use?

I don't think spending a few hours to fully grasp an article should be the metric to deter someone from a good tool.

I don't think it's becoming a black box at all. Classes were more intuitive, sure. But, they really allowed you to write some gnarly and inefficient code. I've always felt that React lets people get away with not fully understanding JS fundamentals. It's very apparent when dealing with some bootcamp devs who never had to write production vanilla JS. One example is that you can get away with not fully understanding that with classes you're dealing with different instances of objects.

Understanding hooks did take effort. Only after I read Dan Abramov's article a few times was I able to write hooks w/ deterministic results. It is a MUST read. Don't let these Medium authors you've never heard of confuse you with their understanding and basic examples. https://overreacted.io/a-complete-guide-to-useeffect/

To me, understanding Hooks feels exactly the same as learning Physics in high school. You not only have to keep track of variable scope in your effect callbacks. You also have to keep track of function iteration. All the variables in your dependency array are like variables in a physics function and as they change so too do the variables you reference in the function scope.

I'd be curious to see the data behind these claims. There has to be artists that are successful from timeless music/instant classics.

These are good points, but the examples are an oversimplification and can present problems if overlooked.

In the examples, if a function is only ever called within one hook callback, it should just be defined in that hook callback. Doing so would expose what you're missing in your dependency array.

I have a serious question. Obviously if one were to choose between an ad-free experience and an ad-full experience, one would choose ad-free. But, if ads were needed for monetization, wouldn't you choose personalized vs non-personalized? Personally, I would go with personalized because a non-personalized experienced usually has no relevancy and frankly it is inefficient use of money in this world. From there, it really comes down to companies invading your privacy, usually they make the wrong assumptions from it. Why can't there be a way for me to tell the ad-world what I'm in the market for and have them stop trying to snoop around and guess what I want? Most may say that making a Google search is enough to tell ads what I want but I think there are a ton of assumptions made there.

I got a year of Apple TV+ just for getting a new Apple device. If you cancel early, you cancel for good. I put a reminder on my calendar to cancel at the end of a trial. I have yet to even attempt to watch anything because of poor reviews and klout. I remember during the Apple TV+ announcement that Tim Cook was using phrases like "the best stories" and "the best content". I thought it was so arrogant.

Apple absolutely needs to make their official spare parts accessible. I was in a situation where my phone somehow had the water detection strip turn red on a 6S (before waterproof). It was working fine, I just wanted to get my screen replaced officially at the Apple store. No luck. They have a policy where they won't replace screens if there has been signs of water damage. I'm forced to go with 3rd party screens. I haven't been able to find a repair shop that uses screens that feel as good as the original.

It makes sense to me because HBO doesn't really have the same type of catalog. They also don't have the data. In my experience, people subscribe to HBO because they have the content and people are already aware of their content. It makes curation way easier. HBO Max is going to exclusively have the entire Friends collection and Ghibli collection. I know and am aware of what HBO has to offer.

On the flip side, Netflix is creating their own content. People have no idea what content is on Netflix. They have to try really hard to push content and generate engagement. I've never heard of Outer Banks, but they keep pushing it to me and so I saw the pilot and now I'm watching the series. I watch one comedy show and now they keep throwing comedy shows at me so I saw and enjoyed another. Their need to create is different.

Yes, it's just regular lexical closure. I don't think his comment was literal since JS itself is lexically scoped. If you think about how `this` works in JS, it's very similar to dynamic scoping because it matters where the function is called.

With hooks and dependency arrays, similar to dynamically scoped languages, it matters where the function is called.

Thing is, people rarely write functions and use `this` is in dynamically scoped ways anymore. Remember when you had to explicitly bind function scope everywhere? With ES6 and arrow functions, I don't miss that.

Anyway, hooks forces you into that mindset now.

Not sure if this helps or is relevant, but I like to think of a component as a physics function.

For example, at t = 0, the output is one thing. When t = 1, the output is another. The same way of thinking can be applied to hooks. Some hooks only execute at t = 0, and at that time, variables x, y, and z also have specific values.

Hopefully you can think this way and your values won't intertwine so much that it becomes hard to trace.

The problem wasn't the fact that components were classes. The problems were the React lifecycle methods. People did some crazy things with instance variables, shouldComponentUpdate, and componentDidUpdate, and especially the deprecated componentWillReceiveProps.