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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • There is a small sliver of Google that wants you as a customer. Maybe that’s the sliver that makes the Pixel line, but Pixel phones are not Google’s business, Google’s business is acquiring your information and selling it or leveraging it to increase ad revenue. Google is not a hardware company, though they sell hardware. Google is not an entertainment company, though they will sell you movies and music. Google is not a consumer software company, though they do provide software and services targeted at consumers and businesses. Google is an advertising company. If you buy hardware from them, and you like it, that’s great, but they are less concerned about your experience as an end-user than they are about acquiring your data to further their ad sales. If making a quality experience for you as a user Improves the likelihood of acquiring more data, they improve the quality of your experience. But if an improved experience hampers their ability to acquire more revenue through ad sales, they will hamper your experience or shut down a product that isn’t directly increasing their data collection and add sales. See: rolling everything content related into the YouTube brand and increasingly hampering the experience of those who use ad blockers or privacy focused browsers.

    You may consider yourself a customer of Google, but until you’re giving them millions of dollars every quarter, you are just a user. Google’s profits from every hardware device they’ve ever sold is just a rounding error on a single quarter of the massive amounts of money they make selling ads.





  • Blu-Ray discs can carry offline updates that blacklist other discs. All players must support these updates as part of licensing the technology. All your blu-rays may play today, but if an update comes along to revoke the license on a title and you play a disc that carries the update that enables that revocation, it won’t play back on your device. It’s occasionally been used to disable known pirated discs, and so far hasn’t been used on licensed materials, but “so far” is never much assurance.


  • Blu-Ray discs can carry mandatory software updates that change the functionality of playback devices, add “protections” against “piracy”, and could potentially revoke licenses of content on other discs.

    Media companies are prepared to screw you over regardless of wether or not you but content from them. I do believe in paying for content, but I don’t trust any modern distribution to last, so I have a couple backups of all the media I’ve ever purchased. And for formats that make it difficult to back up, I sail the seven seas.





  • I think the general public isn’t stupid in this instance, I think they’re just cheap. I have a friend who filled his house with Echo speakers and bragged that it was less expensive than a couple HomePods or Sonos speakers. When I pointed out that Alexa made shopping suggestions after a request he made, he kinda brushed it off, but a few months later he disconnected them all when he noticed private conversations around the house were influencing his Amazon recommendations. He’s fortunate enough to have learned from his mistake and been able to afford to fix it. A lot of folks see a 4k streaming device for $30, compare it to something like the Nvidia shield or the Apple TV, and think it’s a great deal. When they find themselves frustrated by advertising a couple days, weeks, or months later (or maybe desensitized to it like a frog in boiling water), it’s too late. They’ve already spent their money, and/or assume that this is just what all streaming devices are like, so why spend more for this experience?

    Stupidity? Probably not, just cheapness and an ignorance of how low cost hardware stays low cost.







  • What are you on about? Somewhere else you said that Firefox alone causes “your” 8gb Mac to stutter.

    That’s bull.

    My personal Mac is a 32GB Macbook Pro, but we have an 8GB M1 iMac in our house that I actually use frequently. We picked it up as an open box item at Best Buy about a month after it came out. Just a couple of weeks ago I edited a wedding video on it when I’d accidentally left my Macbook at a friends house about an hour away. Final Cut handled three streams of 4k video just fine on 8GB. We are constantly using it as the primary slicer for files for our 3D printer. My kids run games on it using both Dolphin and Wine without issues.

    And I’m not the only person who has done these things. There are people all over YouTube (especially two years ago) who were benchmarking and using the entry level M1 Macs for things just like this without the issues you are describing.

    Just one very early example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUXZBVLFNfY

    If you genuinely can’t even run Firefox without performance issues there’s something wrong with your machine specifically.