tjhart85

Losing access to personalized YT would suck, but losing decades of emails would suck even more (when I initially got GMail, I imported all my old emails in … I guess I should probably look at making a backup periodically, like I used to). I share your sentiment that I fear what these companies are going to do next in the pursuit of more money they can burn and/or give to shareholders as they continue to tank their reputations.

I, personally, don’t see that happening, but I can easily imagine them making it a TOS violation to use adblock and then killing your account if you continue to do so :-/

Same with Google’s ads in general. For a long time they were whitelisted by default on just about every adblock list out there because they were so unobtrusive it didn’t make sense to bother blocking them, especially when you compared them to the other ads that were common at the time. They were also generally relevant ads, so people actually did click on them and use them since it actually related to the thing they were searching for.

They’re obviously more profitable now, but you have to wonder by how much and if they’d be a more trusted company today (and what’s that worth monetarily) if they hadn’t gone down this race to the bottom.

ETA: Part of what I mean is that now they create things like Stadia and most people didn’t even bother trying it because they knew it’d hit the Google Graveyard in a few years. Had Google been a more trusted company, people may have been willing to give it a try and they could possibly have printed money since by all accounts the service was actually pretty good.

When I installed fdroid from their website a month or two back it was like 2 or 3 clicks. Then whenever I want to install anything from there it’s an extra click or two over what it would be from Play.

I’ve seen people click through way more complicated processes than this without even knowing they did it. Modern computing has taught people to just keep hitting whatever the approval text is (yes windows, I really do want to copy all of these god damn files. Yes, really, I still do! Yep, again, ALL of them!)

Ah, my apologies for the assumption, it’s been almost a year but I’m still too used to Reddit apparently!

Yes, the default launcher had ads, the SHIELD itself didn’t, but I also didn’t like any of the 3rd party launchers I used but I don’t remember specifically why. Then, the SHIELD stopped booting so I didn’t want to buy another one and went with the ATV instead.

As I mentioned, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to someone who knows they’d regret not having the cast functionality, but, if you just want a device that works very well and doesn’t ever have so much as a hiccup during navigation, it’s been great!

I would still recommend the SHIELD for someone that wants cast or who wouldn’t have a problem with (mostly) relevant ads being shown on the device (stock).

Yeah I used to have a PC and a Harmony remote that would send macros to a custom script and Kodi would do different things or it could switch to Netflix and … Like, we just want to watch a movie or TV show not have to perform tech support whenever Netflix changed their webpage!

My SHIELD would just randomly restart itself until eventually it stopped coming back online.

I definitely got my monies worth out of it, but didn’t like that a device with no ads all of a sudden became a device with ads (and this is a Google thing not an Nvidia one, but still)

You specifically said you use a 3rd party launcher. You know why you specifically mentioned that.

We’re a non-iPhone household and went with the AppleTV when my Nvidia SHIELD died.

Ads were getting put on the SHIELD and I definitely didn’t want to buy another one because of that and it has been a while since its had a refresh, so went with an AppleTV instead.

The device itself is fantastic, the UI is so smooth and so much nicer. OTOH, I miss being able to cast to the TV more than I expected. It works decently with the Macbooks though (we’re a weird household … like Macs, hate iPhones).

So … if ya’ll have iPhones or don’t care about casting, I’d definitely recommend an AppleTV with Plex (the Dropout, Youtube, Disney+ apps are all good too).

ETA: Apple is also making some pretty awesome TV content as well and IIRC you’ll get a couple months free with the purchase … verify that yourself though in case they’ve removed it, but Foundation, Severance & See are fantastic shows if you’re looking for something to watch.

As long as you’re not talking about throwing Molotov Cocktails at their CEOs, I don’t really see how that would matter

This scene for me (you can skip to 1:20 or so) showed that it’s at least feasible, but it definitely takes a lot more than glasses, which is where many of the non Christopher Reeve’s portrayals fall flat. They always play Superman in both roles but it’s just Superman with glasses.

Christopher Reeve on the other hand showed that Clark Kent is the perfect disguise when portrayed correctly and it’s at least understandable that especially the people that know Clark would never suspect for a second that he’s Superman because they’ve never seen anything but a quiet, weak and easily frightened man who is nothing like Superman at all! Superman is also way taller!

Watching him stand up straight and put some confidence on his face, voice and transform into Superman over the course of 10ish seconds was one thing, but watching him deflate back into Kent in under 2 seconds was another altogether! That shift was jarring for me and showed just how good the disguise was and how good of an actor Reeve was.

On KBin I believe that it is (or at least was a bug that became a feature). There have been posts about it strongly urging Ernest not to change it and he’s said he’ll open it up to discussion before making major changes to it, if my recollection is accurate.

I think aliens would be horrified by so many things we do (or don’t do!) that wearing an entertainment device on your face wouldn’t even break the top 100.

ETA: The guy in the cyber truck though. That might get shown as an example in some of the other items in their list.

From what I understand due to the way that Lemmy handles federation, it doesn’t (currently?) have a way to handle an instance changing its domain name and still being able to communicate or even an individual user changing their instance and retaining their comments/votes/etc… (this might be more ActivityPub limited since the way Mastodon does it still seems pretty hacky and just a work around for underlying issues).

From a website perspective, yeah, just change some settings and you’re good to go and accessible on the web, but that doesn’t mean that anything regarding Lemmy is going to actually work.

For me, it’s the refusal to demontize them that’s particularly bad. I can understand free speech absolutists (in theory anyways, in practice you’ll find that they VERY rarely actually are and will happily censor people they disagree with like LGBTQIA+ or sex work content), but that doesn’t mean you need to actively be funding them!

Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content

Quite a few organizations and lots of individuals are now starting to migratev away from it and if any of the money made by visiting goes to Nazis, many of us would prefer to avoid the place when possible.

Firing the people that do the work to make the company money is just good business! They’re a dime a dozen, just hire another 2 managers and a couple marketing execs and soon you’ll be printing money! /s [these companies are freaking dumb]

It’s crazy what you can get away with when you have some money and no sense!

For the people that don’t want to read the article, this seems especially relevant:
But much has changed since 2022: Embracer, which owns Gearbox, bet the house on a $2 billion deal with a Saudi investment group that fell through in 2023. Ever since, its many, many properties have been hit by layoffs on a near-monthly basis.

I mean, kind of … I have file servers, download servers, documentation servers, syncthing servers, backup servers, vaultwarden servers, etc… that are all linux VMs/containers and my main machine is a Macbook, but I do still have a Windows machine in the living room for gaming (yeah, Steam has pushed us far in this regard, but, when I get time to play a game, I just want to play it, I want the best chance it’s going to work the first time and that’s still, sadly, Windows). I have another windows machine running Blue Iris as my NVR because I didn’t have a good experience with Frigate, Shinobi or a few others. I’ve got a few other systems floating around that do various things and some of them are linux based and some are windows based depending on what’s easier/possible.