This is one thing I actually like them doing. I’m a social watcher and also have other things to do; I want to talk about an episode with friends afterwards, and the phenomenon of racing to binge watch an entire series in one or two sittings ruined that. (As well as forcing me to stay away from half the internet until I’ve binged the series myself due to spoilers). I don’t like being “forced” to binge, much rather savour it one episode at a time as it’s produced, really take in and enjoy and discuss the details of each one. Really makes you appreciate it more IMO.

I see your financial argument though, I guess you could wait until a series is over and then subscribe for 1 month and binge away. Or, of course, yarr.

I’m with you on the high seas ever since Star Trek bounced around from place to place. When you’re thinking “uhhh which do I watch this particular spinoff on, is it Netflix or Amazon Prime or…” it’s already too much like hard work. Then they decided to make the latest exclusive to Paramount, yet another subscription. Eh, nah, at that point it’s time to make like Tascha and Yarr it.

However in part I think the comparison to cable (or would’ve been Sky here) is psychological. With those big services you’re still effectively paying to watch a few shows a bunch of different “streaming services” (channels/networks in that case) but as it’s all bundled up into, say, £60/month, you don’t think about it. Or, the average person doesn’t - personally I’ve never justified that much to watch TV. Now that it’s split out into different payments, £10 here for service A, £10 there for service B, the waste of paying so much to so many different services just to watch a few shows becomes more apparent.

Was going to say piracy then realised you said the general public. I don’t think piracy will ever be as prolific as it was when you could just physically hand your mate a VHS tape - torrenting etc is a bit complex for most, as well as the risk of your ISP getting in touch. Those in the know use VPNs and the like but this is a bit techy for the general public.

I think they’ll just cough up. Most average people don’t micromanage their finances so they don’t notice how a tenner for this streaming a service, a tenner for that streaming service etc ends up adding up to more than their cable/satellite/etc subscription did. They just see “a tenner for Paramount” (or whatever) in a vacuum and figure that it’s not much, rather than adding them all together to work out what their monthly TV cost is.

Huh, wow, someone talking sense on the subject and not getting downvoted to oblivion.

Some instances will be more averse to legal risk than others. Some will also lean more towards “censorship” (showing bigots the door) whilst others will be “free speech encouraged” (full of them). That’s the beauty of the fediverse. Pick your poison. Why go all pitchforks and DDOS attacks etc against an instance that doesn’t share your values when it’s piss easy to just switch to one that does?

(I’m somewhere down the middle on the piracy subject. I believe in supporting small individual developers trying to feed their kids. But Adobe and the like can go fuck themselves)

I keep trying to be charitable and think of it in an “incompetence rather than malice” way, but Linus lying, twisting and tripling down isn’t making it easy.

There’s a lot of [citation needed] here, as for touchscreen I can see Apple’s point also, I’ve never had any desire at all to sit there with my arm outstretched poking a PC display (and covering it in fingerprints too). I’ve played with touchscreen laptops and it feels just as arm-tiring and unnatural as they said.

I can see an eventual future when the cores, RAM and storage are all on one IC or something which would also be great for performance (I just bought a desktop processor that does some clever stacking of extra L3 cache on top of the cores). As others said though we’re not quite there yet.

Ever since Steve Jobs (I think perhaps as a way of coping with illness making him thinner himself) Apple has done this thing of telling consumers that they want thinner, thinner, thinner at all costs (and other manufacturers following Apple because of course they do) but I’ve seen no real evidence of consumers actually wanting this. I for one (and I know I’m far from the only one) don’t actually mind a bit more thickness if it means a bigger battery, using an M.2 slot (oh no a few mm difference) etc.

Agreed, a lot of people get into sustainability and rush out to buy sustainable stuff. Even with something like a plastic bag, it’s better to use it for as long as you reasonably can than to throw it away and rush out to buy an organic cotton one.

I don’t any more because of this kind of thing but I can understand. A few points at the top of my head

• Great desktop OS (note how Windows and Linux still to this day have inconsistencies on high DPI displays, to name just one example!

• Integration between them is good

• Security and privacy practices are great

• The phones are very consistent with camera quality and battery life

It’s so annoying. I want to love Apple, heck I’ve been there and HAD Apple everything. They have a great *nix OS, well polished ecosystem, very good security and privacy practices… but hostility towards repair, along with planned obsolescence, ended up turning me off. One aspect is sustainability. Repair is more sustainable than recycle. They have good recycling credentials but that should be last resort.

My point about still being able to charge stands. I’ve seen OSS do it - if you want it quick and convenient you pay e.g. through Google Play store or official website. Yes cheapskates will compile it themselves or fork it or grab a free version from F-droid etc but they were probably going to pirate it if it was closed software anyway.

You do know that it’s possible to charge for, pay for and financially support open source software, right? There are even things like Patreon as well.

Let’s be honest though, when everyone is shifting to the fediverse to avoid corporate shit, they’re more likely to gravitate to other things that are free and open and be less interested in something closed and for-profit

Connect seems good enough to me

Wow it’s ALMOST got a slice of the operating system pi!

I literally saw it everywhere on Mastodon, like, I honestly never saw anyone say it directly, just “birdsite” or a censored version. So I adapted to be polite. And sometimes forget which form of fediverse I’m posting on.

I may be misremembering but seem to recall them being early to Tw*tter too. Good sign

Yeah that’s the worry I was alluding to in my second paragraph and I don’t know what the answer is. Probably that it’s a fundamental problem with capitalism.

The recent climate scares shook me up, I’m embracing whatever we can do to reduce our impact. A lot of it is small, but it’s voting with the wallet.

Thing is, the whole economic system relies on a steady stream of “buy a replacement”. If you make something that lasts forever, the maximum number of sales you can make is around 8 billion (usually less). So stuff needs to wear out and break. I’m sure as heck going to challenge it regardless.

And honestly a recent sustainable purchase was a toothbrush by Suri (my old brush broke. It’s still greener to use what you already have if it works). As a very sleek, quiet, well designed product that feels of a high build quality it’s debunked the thought of sustainable meaning “same thing but with sacrifices”. It proved to me that some sustainable stuff can actually be better.

I’m a bit less worried after reading this comment, which explains things like how they DON’T want it to be “DRM for the web” and the proposed measures to prevent it. https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/issues/28#issuecomment-1651129388