For a moment, it seemed like the streaming apps were the things that could save us from the hegemony of cable TV—a system where you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn’t want to watch so you could see the handful of things you were actually interested in....
Going back to cable isn’t the answer. It’s a failed model and needs to die.
Defined narrowly enough, yes, that old model is dead.
But more broadly, as an economic matter there will always be a business model for having a basket of content, with some portion of historical content (classic movies and tv shows from decades past) on demand, some ongoing/current on-demand content (last week’s episode of some scripted show), and live broadcast (sporting events happening right now). Build up enough of a catalog, charge a single price to subscribers for access to that content, and people will pay for the entire bundle. And because each subscriber is interested in a different portion of that bundle, the mass of subscribers essentially cross-subsidizes the fat tail of niche content: I don’t mind paying for your niche if it means my niche gets to survive.
The technological and cultural changes have deemphasized the importance of cable’s live delivery mechanism of 100+ “channels” each with programming on a specific schedule, but the core business model still will be there: subscribe to content and you can get some combination of live channels and a catalog of on-demand content.
The content owners, through either carriage fees with the cable/IPTV providers, or through the streaming services, or everything in between, are trying to jack up the price to see what the market will bear for those bundles. They might miscalculate to the point where the subscriber count drops so much that their overall revenue decreases even with a higher revenue per subscriber (and I actually think this is about to happen). And then instead of a market equilibrium where almost everyone pays a little bit to where there’s a huge bundle of content available, the little niche interests just can’t get a subscriber base and aren’t made available, even if the content is already made.
How fucking stupid is that? Sorry, but not having a good morning. This is like when I found out you can’t set the number of rings either. Sometimes I just want to smash all my tech and go back to rocks, sticks, and leaves.
That’s not a complete solution, though. If it relies on the phone to implement the block, then blocking wouldn’t work when the phone is turned off or otherwise unavailable (not within service range, in airplane mode on an airplane, etc.).
The general recommendation is to configure your system to allow the use of the minimum number of privileges. If you don’t have the need to use software that doesn’t come from a trusted repository (like the Apple App Store itself, but also things like homebrew), go ahead and turn off the ability to run software from other sources. If you’re coding, make sure your code is properly sandboxed, and that you’re not blindly relying on untested packages (see compromised npm packages). Don’t give apps accessibility or other rights if they don’t need them, etc. And then stay current on all software updates.
Even zero-days often rely on certain configurations, and you can always lock down the built-in apps to not auto-run or auto-preview things they receive. Some of it requires an active user maintenance to decide how to balance convenience versus security on your own system.
We’ve known that the iPhone is switching to USB-C for a while now, but there was always a possibility that Apple would stick with Lightning for one more year. Based on the latest leaked images, however, Apple is all-in on USB-C for the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro models, with USB-C parts for the iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, and...
The 12" MacBook had a great form factor right at the time that Intel CPUs really started to struggle with performance at lower power consumption, so the design turned into a huge weakness for thermal management. If they had similar performance per watt as the base M1 later showed off, that device would’ve been perfect for an ultraportable laptop, the spiritual successor to the discontinued 11" MacBook Air.
Been trying to buy a house because my rent is going up(and it will continue to do so) and a mortgage would be around the same as what my rent will become in a few years anyway so I figure I might as well build equity and have a house for my family....
When COVID hit, builders basically stopped building houses. But- people didn’t stop reproducing.
That’s basically a drop in the bucket, as they started building up again pretty quickly.
The real problem goes back further than that. Builders really slowed down in 2008 and never really picked it back up. Meanwhile, construction costs have soared (both labor and materials), so a lot of construction starts have gotten delayed as the lag between housing starts versus housing completions started to stretch much longer than the historical average. We’ve got basically 14 years of backlog against the expected household formation (kids becoming adults and moving out), while also shifting economic activity even more urban, with regional migration trends towards the Sun Belt. That has led to some areas deepening their economic malaise (certain rural and small town areas, especially in the Midwest and Appalachia), while white-hot housing markets elsewhere completely wreck prices for new buyers.
Meanwhile, policy has a huge role to play, too. The difficulty building in some cities/states prevents some homes from ever coming on the market, while a growing population competes for a fixed number of homes. Other more subtle policy decisions around property tax rates (especially those favoring incumbent homeowners getting grandfathered into old rates) prevent those homes from going on the market even when the home no longer fits that homeowner’s needs (empty nesters, etc.).
Plus macroeconomic policy of trying to juice the economy since the 2008 recession led to a sustained period of low interest rates, and now incumbent homeowners have locked in interest rates that make it irrational to sell, so those homes stay off the market, too.
We’re in a weird place right now, where there are a lot of homes in existence, but not a lot that are actually being listed for sale.
The article alludes to this problem, but Amazon has basically forfeited the consumer goodwill they used to have. It used to be that their reviews were trustworthy (and relatively hard to game), and ordering products “sold by Amazon” was a guarantee that there wouldn’t be counterfeits intermingled in. Plus they had a great return policy, even without physical presence in most places.
Now they don’t police fake reviews, and do a bad job of the “SEO” of which reviews are actually the most helpful, they’re susceptible to commingling of counterfeit goods (especially electronics and storage media), and their return policy has gotten worse.
It basically makes it so that they’re no longer a good retailer for electronics, and it’s worth going into a physical store to avoid doing business with them.
Personal background: I strongly feel just about everyone grows up and has something shitty about them. I know growing up I definitely thought and said some less-than-ideal jokes about women, minorities, etc. And while some of that was the proverbial ‘the times’, and some was growing up in a sheltered hyper Christian southern...
I try to avoid directly saying the phrase “toxic masculinity” because some have incorrect preconceived notions about what that means, and it often invites a tangent into that side discussion, but I like to still reinforce the core idea there: that society expects men to be a certain way, including by enforcing norms of telling men what they’re not allowed to do or be. Gatekeeping what “real men” are and what manhood means is itself toxic, and has done lots of harm to men. And by explaining these concepts to men, and focusing the discussion on how these outdated gender norms are harmful and dangerous to men can help open up the dialogue about how gender norms are also harmful to women, too. And about how men who have been forcing themselves to fit a particular vision of manhood are also harmful to those around them (regardless of gender), as it affects their relationships with others, and their ability to regulate emotions.
Not an ingredient, per se, but for me the game changer was the flavor compounds from the Maillard reaction. Good browning is what makes some soups and sauces and meats and vegetables taste better than others. Regular supermarket cauliflower or broccoli or zucchini or ground beef or roast chicken taste way better just from proper temperature and moisture control (boiling water tops out at 212°F/100°C so the presence of liquid water tends to keep temperatures too low for Maillard reaction to happen). It’s why grilling tends to taste better than, like, boiling, for many dishes.
Honestly, I suspect the availability of interfaces that prioritize text/comments over posts might actually naturally tip all Lemmy communities in that direction.
I saw in another thread on another instance an observation that comment activity seems to be way up after the Sync client was released yesterday. Personally, I find it way easier to read and respond to comments in Sync than in the normal browser interface.
Sure the titles themselves might be self explanatory but I’d expect the poster to actually also write something about the link they’ve posted. What did they think about it, what do they want to discuss about it.
On the flip side, I do enjoy that there’s a death of the author thing going on, where often the OP can’t actually control how the community receives or interprets a post. Giving an amplified voice to the OP makes a ton of sense, but sometimes it’s fun to just see a thread take off in directions the OP never anticipated, including/especially discussion threads kicked off with a question.
I actually just canceled my preorder for the AMD Framework. I decided I didn’t need a new device if I could stretch out the life of this laptop for as long as it stays alive. My next new machine will probably be Framework, but that might not be for years.
The learning curve is more like a vertical cliff face.
I had experience with headless servers before 2010, but lots of things have just changed, not least of which is the availability of good documentation. A big chunk of knowledge out there is in the form of informal blog posts or Stack Overflow/Quora/Reddit threads that don’t give version information so you don’t have a good sense of whether the information is still current. And then quite a few of the people doing things are just shoving everything into a container and blindly following commands they pasted from somewhere else, so it’s not clear which instructions are vestiges of some earlier process that is no longer necessary, which are just cargo cult steps done simply because they watched someone else do it, etc.
It’s kinda liberating to peek under the hood and confirm that society, like the internet, is mostly held together with figurative duct tape, that someone put there as a temporary fix that became semi-permanent. The concept of technical debt for software and technology projects exists everywhere, including in the backlogs of what our government agencies, court systems, and corporate organizations are doing (and what they simply haven’t done yet).
But the whole thing is still pretty resilient. The individuals who make the decisions that feed into the unimaginably complex web of interdependent relationships and rules might not actually understand every detail, and mostly aren’t even benevolent actors who want the best for everyone, but the system as a whole still trudges along, mostly making life better than if the system didn’t exist at all. And once you learn how at least some parts of it work, you can make some changes here and there for the better, either for yourself or for the people/issues you care about or for the entirety of the system.
That’s great that hardware support for Windows-oriented laptops has made the progress it has!
The reason why I basically quit Linux in 2015 was because my hardware lost support from nvidia’s proprietary driver, and I never could get nouveau or the others to play friendly. That’s on top of the fact I never got bluetooth or the webcam to work (not that I ever intended to use those), and the proprietary Broadcom wifi driver didn’t seem to work as well as Windows. And the CPU/thermal management was atrocious, with progressively worse battery life over time. So I gave it up.
So my experience with a 2017 model of Macbook, using 2023 versions of all the firmware/software, is actually better than where I was in 2015 with a Dell laptop that literally shipped with preinstalled Linux in 2010. I think all I need to do is get past the initial setup of the non-standard or quirky hardware, and I’ll be in a better place with this laptop today than I was with my laptop in 2015.
If the typical off the shelf laptop available today is a one click installation with the typical beginner-friendly liveUSB installer, that’s great. It certainly wasn’t true in 2006 when I first switched, and wasn’t true in 2015 when I gave it up.
Thanks! I found that this brand of optimism was a nice counterweight to my belief that people are just generally fundamentally flawed (and often irredeemably so). But the same is true of computer systems and technology, and I realized that I can love things (technology, TV shows, books, music, websites, cities, foods) while acknowledging their shortcomings, so I can do the same for people and institutions made out of people. Once I abandoned the idea that I could only like things that were perfect (or even good), and decoupled my perception of whether something was good with whether I liked it or not, it really helped me with my outlook towards people and physical things and intangible concepts.
I thought the hard part would be switching to another email provider, but that turned out to be easy enough. Turns out, despite having my own 100% self hosted photo storage and backup solution, I still like the ease of Google Photos for sharing, especially group-maintained albums. And I haven’t looked recently at alternatives, but the keyword search and face/pet recognition in Google Photos is something really, really useful.
Now we are facing an unprecedented growth of AI as a whole. Do you think is time for FSF elaborate a new version of GPL to incorporate the new challenges of AI in software development to keep protecting users freedom?
Some portion of the “data” fed into these models is copyrighted, though. Github’s copilot is trained on code. Does it violate the GPL to train an AI model on all GPL source code published out there?
obligatory preface: we’re 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us....
I actually have a different account for each of several popular instances (including some kbin and even Mastodon instances), in large part because I want to see how the different communities grow organically in environments where different admins/mods might have different approaches to federation with other instances, modding, enabling/disabling downvotes, requirements for creating a new account, communities, rules/norms, etc.
So far I spend most of my time on Beehaw with my Beehaw account, but I am still somewhat active on a few others. If this place ends up growing to the point where it needs to implement more formal administrative overhead of things like a constitution/charter and bylaws defining how admins, mods, and users are to interact and define the future of the instance, and the admins are able to pull that off, this will probably end up becoming my main home on the fediverse.
That’s already the case with most corporate managed BYO device policies. The typical scenario is that an employer gives you the choice:
Use the company-owned and company-managed device. No root/admin access, no privileges to install unauthorized software, sometimes policies against personal accounts or files or use.
Bring your own device, but consent to the company’s IT department managing your security and potentially monitoring your use. If you’re going to connect this device to the company’s LAN (through wifi or VPN or otherwise), you’re going to let us lock it down.
It’s a legitimate concern that these types of things would normalize corporate-managed devices in our personal lives as consumers, and worth resisting in that space, but I don’t think it would actually change the status quo in the corporate world to go from proprietary device management lockdowns to some kind of public standard for lockdowns.
things are in fact going extremely badly but we’ll see if they pick up starting tomorrow night for reasons that will preclude me being here for about a week (seeing my SO)
My kid is making great progress with learning how to swim.
My job remains stressful but I had a few little victories that will make my September much easier than expected (or at least clear the plate a bit so that even if some things happen, they won’t pile onto an existing shit sandwich).
I just bought some really awesome tomatoes at the farmer’s market, and can’t wait to incorporate into sandwiches starting tomorrow (tonight I gotta go buy some fresh sourdough to really complete the entire effect of a delicious sandwich). I love tomato season!
I made it back to the gym for the first time in a month. Lots of travel in July (mostly work, but also a family vacation in the middle) put me in hotels without room in my schedule to do any real workouts, although I guess I walked way more than I normally do while traveling (one day I hit 15,000 steps almost entirely in airports). I feel better when I’m working out regularly, so being home is helpful for resetting that part of my routine.
I’m feeling pretty great! Sending good vibes to everyone else in this thread, whether they’re having good weeks or bad weeks.
Meta conducted an experiment where thousands of users were shown chronological feeds on Facebook and Instagram for three months. Users of the chronological feeds engaged less with the platforms and were more likely to use competitors like YouTube and TikTok. This suggests that users prefer algorithmically ranked feeds that show...
I’d argue it almost definitely has to be better than engagement, though.
Totally agree. I think those who design the algorithms and measure engagement need to remember that there is a difference between immediate dopamine rush versus long term user satisfaction. User votes can sometimes be poor predictors of long term satisfaction, but I imagine engagement metrics are even less reliable.
That’s not a sustainable model, either. Zynga had a decent run but ended up flaming out, eventually purchased by a large gaming company.
That’s to say nothing of the business models around gambling, alcohol, tobacco, and addictive pharmaceuticals. Low level background addiction is the most profitable, while intense and debilitating addictions tend to lead to unstable revenue (and heavy regulation).
The TV streaming apps broke their promises, and now they’re jacking up prices (arstechnica.com)
For a moment, it seemed like the streaming apps were the things that could save us from the hegemony of cable TV—a system where you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn’t want to watch so you could see the handful of things you were actually interested in....
😡Just learned that blocking a caller on android doesn't block their voicemails😡
How fucking stupid is that? Sorry, but not having a good morning. This is like when I found out you can’t set the number of rings either. Sometimes I just want to smash all my tech and go back to rocks, sticks, and leaves.
Who cares to touch the grass? (lemm.ee)
1,000% increase in dark web threat actors targeting macOS (www.accenture.com)
Based on research across established dark web forums, threat actors are targeting macOS, with exploits trading for millions of dollars
USB-C confirmed for the iPhone 15 in new leaked images - Macworld (www.macworld.com)
We’ve known that the iPhone is switching to USB-C for a while now, but there was always a possibility that Apple would stick with Lightning for one more year. Based on the latest leaked images, however, Apple is all-in on USB-C for the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro models, with USB-C parts for the iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, and...
Buying a house is so disheartening
Been trying to buy a house because my rent is going up(and it will continue to do so) and a mortgage would be around the same as what my rent will become in a few years anyway so I figure I might as well build equity and have a house for my family....
We just lost 3TB of data on a SanDisk Extreme SSD (www.theverge.com)
Help me help a coworker not be an incel?
Personal background: I strongly feel just about everyone grows up and has something shitty about them. I know growing up I definitely thought and said some less-than-ideal jokes about women, minorities, etc. And while some of that was the proverbial ‘the times’, and some was growing up in a sheltered hyper Christian southern...
The ingredient that changed your life (www.beehaw.org)
Tell me about that one ingredient, that when discovered, it opened your mind to a whole new world of flavor possibilities!...
Beehaw lacks community
Apologies for the clickbaity title or for the messy wording to follow. I’m not great at articulating myself....
Thank you, Lemmy users: I have a working Linux laptop for the first time in 8 years! (imgflip.com)
I now have a working Linux installation on my laptop. Honestly, I doubted I’d ever be here again....
Is time for GPL v 4.0?
Now we are facing an unprecedented growth of AI as a whole. Do you think is time for FSF elaborate a new version of GPL to incorporate the new challenges of AI in software development to keep protecting users freedom?
the August 2023 Beehaw financial update (opencollective.com)
obligatory preface: we’re 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us....
Google's New Web Environment Integrity Proposal Dismissed by Brave, Mozilla, and Vivaldi (news.itsfoss.com)
how's your week going, Beehaw
things are in fact going extremely badly but we’ll see if they pick up starting tomorrow night for reasons that will preclude me being here for about a week (seeing my SO)
Meta Just Proved People Hate Chronological Feeds (www.wired.com)
Meta conducted an experiment where thousands of users were shown chronological feeds on Facebook and Instagram for three months. Users of the chronological feeds engaged less with the platforms and were more likely to use competitors like YouTube and TikTok. This suggests that users prefer algorithmically ranked feeds that show...