These companies seem to forget that the main thing holding them afloat is the ability to watch it simply at a low cost. Pirating is very easy and there are plenty of tools to achieve this same goal if prices keep going up.

I’ve already abandoned Netflix. I would rather pirate shows I hear are good than mindlessly scroll on that platform while paying $240 a year or whatever.

This is wonderful to hear. I hope this helps move people away from google and their products.

I prefer Rectangle. Free and fast.

My thought exactly. Really enjoyed this article. Thanks OP! I’m excited they are releasing more about their findings. I would also like to know what questions the new technology has answered beyond more dynamic pictures. I guess this photo wasn’t possible with Hubble?

Same here. It brings back some nice nostalgia. The new memes sometimes don’t do it for me.

Pay moderators and app developers that help make communities thrive? Hell no. Pay people to contribute content? Yes! That’s the way! Force the community with money. Yes!

I feel old when I think “kids these days” but I do wonder if there is a deep, fundamental problem with TikTok, Reels, YouTube shorts, and such. I taught in the HS for awhile this past year and I felt like the students had a very short attention span. How are they supposed to give sustained focus to learn something when they are training their brain for short, 90 second (or shorter) bursts?

I’m glad it’s not only me that feels this. Google has lost a lot of my trust. I am not inclined to try something new that launches as it’s likely to be short lived. Why invest in something they will shut off in a year or two or change the name (what’s it now, Google Talk, Hangouts, Duo, or some other shit?).

This article is well written, but the intense focus on TikTok is strange. I don’t understand how TikTok can be a source of true information or a town square for that matter. The videos are incredibly short and then the next one comes. You see a lot of dumb shit and stupid memes. It’s sometimes good at making people feel like they are learning something, but when you ask those people what they learned, they can’t synthesize or explain what it was they supposedly digested. To me, TikTok seems like pure dopamine hits without any sustainability.

Twitter, with its short character count, wasn’t any good for debate or sustained learning either. It was good for being a dunk tank—a place where people try to dunk on each other. It also became an echo chamber that helped polarize people politically. I don’t really understand the appeal of Twitter.

The interviewed protesters sound a little whacky. Maybe the cars are doing surveillance with the police, but that idea seems far fetched and unrealistic. Maybe I’m wrong.

I agree with more public transportation, bikes, and so forth, but I also agree with self driving cars. I dream of a future in which all cars are driven automatically without human drivers. Humans are very fallible and we all know, in almost every city, how many shitty drivers there are. Autonomous vehicles could fix this.

Maybe I’m missing something, but who would want a self driving car that monitors your eyes, forcing you to look at the road? The purpose of self driving cars should be that you don’t have to look at the road.

Regulators: “We will approve self driving cars, but only if there is a driver acting like they are driving.”

I’d rather not as I’m done talking about COVID in my life. It’s evident, I think, that there were a lot of disagreements on what the response should be at various times. I think we can also agree, no matter which side of the political spectrum we fall, that COVID was not, on the whole, handled extremely well.

It’s easy for Threads to take off because a bunch of people are posting about it on Instagram, which is extremely popular.

Watching so many people get threads on Instagram is, for me at least, like watching the millions of people blindly accept all of the whacky government requirements during covid.

The vast majority of people aren’t critical thinkers.

I thought it worked well, but these homes aren’t “typical,” they are on the higher end. Most of them looked like million dollar+ homes, though I recognize many would be cheaper depending on the location.

Meta is sickening. You have to have it for promoting events, artists and such, but it’s toxic and needs to be replaced.

As a music artist, I don’t know how to avoid platforms like Instagram and such while still promoting my art.

You can also include your passport ID and bank information in the “extra notes” field. Thanks for all your data! 🙏

I understand why developers want subscription models, but I simply cannot pay them monthly in perpetuity based on a promise that they will update the app so much that it’s value will increase in accordance with the monthly payments.

Mimestream was promising in beta. The subscription model is too much for me though.

Outlook is good. Apple mail is good. But I still like Spark the best, I think. But I dislike Spark’s terms of service and feel like they don’t respect my privacy or data.

Yes, it is. There are a lot of academics that have fallen prey to post modern ideologies like anti racism. But there are also academics that haven’t, like myself and John McWhorter.

Yes, I have a Ph.D., you will encounter grievance studies and post modern ideologies when you pursue this path. I have indeed studied the philosophical foundations of these ideologies. I don’t agree with post modern ideologies, nor do I agree that you can state that something is purely constructed by a culture. An individual is defined both by their physiology and their societal structure. It’s physiology and culture. Post modernism denies objective truth. I believe in objective truth. I also believe in intentionality, which post modernism denies. We could go on. Stop using the “have you actually studied this” argument and actually engage in productive debate. An appeal to academic authority is really not useful here.

It seems some forget, for instance, that the native population of America benefitted greatly from their encounters with colonial people from France and Britain. They sold and traded items. They learned knew technologies. Hell, many native tribes fought alongside the Americans during the American revolution. They also fought alongside France. The whole situation of the American colonies is really messy. Anyway, colonialism is not a black and white issue.