I got into the digital stuff around 2002ish with eDonkey. There was a big MST3k trading community at the time, and I had access to an OC-48 line back then. All the 90 minute episodes were sized to CD, so I had a whole spindle of episodes.

Maybe it’s my frame of mind (I’m not “discovering” new music, I stopped paying for streaming when I realized 99% of what I was listening to was recorded in the last millennium) but I can’t fathom how this would “turn free users to paid.”

2026?

Some folks have a bit more practice and never let their skills go cold

I’m enjoying the “look how many federal felonies we can publicly confess to,” part of the AIpocolypse.

Step 1: Degoogle

The only theater pirate I ever knew worked as a projectionist and took full advantage of that.

My experience with Netflix shows tends to go like this: I hear about a new show from people at work (or maybe here). I watch and enjoy season 1. I never hear about the show again until someone mentions that there sad it was cancelled after additional seasons I never heard about.

Personally, I find it hard to watch things when I don’t know they exist.

Your pizza party has 6.2 minutes remaining, continue merriment for the prescribed time.

Proprietary tech with no existing laws telling the companies they have to keep supporting it, all so I can make a rich person richer? Where do I sign up?

A FOSS alternative would likely be missing or have meh performance from many of the streamers. All the big ones use proprietary codecs that are expensive annual licenses. And even then the streamer controls what various access methods are allowed to see and at what quality. I think netflix still limits web browsers to 720p, for example. And straight web access isn’t great, you want an interface that can ideally be controlled with about 6 - 8 buttons (4 directions, OK, and Back are the minimum) which might require API access to these services, which introduces more access control. Netflix (and maybe others) even have hardware installed at the ISP level that give them a lot of control over individual access as well.

Basically for a full featured FOSS service you’d need to start with getting grants to buy to codec licenses, and then you’d need to hire people just to maintain your relationship with the streaming services to stay in their good graces while they know you’re working against their bottom line.

Like most Shakespeare villains, Ted Cruz has a single redeeming quality. And it’s that he both understands and vehemently supports free speech.

cite its sources

Just so you know, an LLM isn’t capable of actually citing its sources properly, that’s not how vector engines work. When you ask it to do so, one (or more thread) spits out what ever the algebra says is the best answer, then another thread tries to best fit that output to some article in its database. If the first thread was fully committing plagiarism, then the link is accurate. If it “reasoned” anything then it may not be.

What do you do when courts start to decide that you actively and willingly give children PTSD to make them psychologically addicted to a your trauma feed? Hire Momfluencers, of course.

I degoogled as a Covid project. Mostly it just made me feel a little bit better… and then GenAI hit. Hopefully I’ll go my whole life without ever having used Gemini. And hopefully, if they ingested any of my pre-pandemic emails, photos, docs, etc to train with, pulling it out of cold storage will at least have cost them extra time and money.

How could anyone limit themselves to 50 posts on apartheid-fan-boi.facist?

Are they going to remake that 1 mobile billboard that’s been doing laps of the LV Strip for at least 30 years, with the same 3 bikini-clad women?

I didn’t need more reasons to not go to Disney*, but I’ll add this to the pile.

Thankfully ublock works just fine in Firefox for android and its derivatives. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t use the mobile web either without it, and then my phone would exist only to mfa things at work.

I’d imagine ublock origin could forever close that pop-up.

I’m too lazy to take pictures, but I have a synology sitting in an Ikea Kalix and an older laptop mounted to the other side of the wall (that the kalix is against), which is a bathroom in my garage.

We had contractors working last summer and let them use the garage bathroom. After the 3rd day I overheard a few of them developing conspiracy theories for why we have a closed laptop mounted to the wall and with fans that would occasionally cycle up.