I don’t mind much paying for streaming (although that’s increasingly more and more annoying and I still tend to just download whatever I actually care about) but until and unless I can pay to “own” a movie and they just provide me with a DRM free video file of some sort, I will never “purchase” digital content like this.

If you tried this kind of bullshit in just about any other context, even normal people would think you’re crazy.

Normal Person: “hi there, one blender please. I’ll take this one for $25.”
Sales person: “Cool here’s your receipt.”
NP:: “It says here at the bottom of the receipt that you can just come in my house and take this blender back whenever you want or maybe never?”
SP: “yep.”
NP:: “And you don’t tell people that ahead of time?”
SP: “no when you buy it you agree to that by opening the box and it is on the receipt you get after you bought it.”
NP: “you fuckin with me rn?”
SP: “afraid not, and would you look at that corp says I need that blender back, thanks.”
SP: “oh, shoot. I see here you also bought a toaster from EvilCorp sold in one of our EvilMart locations a couple years ago, we’ve decided to license that brand instead to our new partners FukUMart, so we’ll be taking that toaster but if you want you can head to your local FukUMart and buy that toaster again for more than you paid the first time.”
NP: spontaneously combusts

Just for clarities sake, there is one big sticking point here that I want to make clear. Pay, hours, etc cannot incentivize a fix to this system because it’s not about attracting good people or bad people or dumb people or smart people, it’s about the system. If cops made $120k starting with 5 weeks of vacation and only had to work 32 hour weeks, we would not see significantly different outcomes because it is simply the institution and systems and culture that are the problem. Honestly, that would probably only increase the problem since it just further removes police from the normal humans they’re policing. Probably also instead of attracting people that are mission driven, it attracts mercenaries, basically. This is how we get billionaires; they’re mostly not evil, just so far removed reality and doing one of the most human things possible – rationalizing our own behavior for our benefit.

The idea that there are purely good or purely bad people is mostly a myth. There are people that we could objectively define as purely good or purely evil, but they’re the outlier. Nazis for example. The truth is even scarier than the myth. In most of our depictions, nazis are homogenous blob of pure evil. While nazi’s certainly had some purely evil people, the truth is the vast majority were just average people exposed to a system that creates an evil outcome. Of course, there were also purely good people in that as well, but the system often led those people their graves, or they had to be the right combination of good/smart to resist and stay alive. But most people just participated or closed their eyes and went about their day.

The problem is not the people, it is the system and pay and benefits aren’t going to fix it.

Now all that said, the Uvalde cops clearly over-index on little tiny dick bitch ass cowards and kinda blow a hole in my thesis. I wouldn’t call them evil, but just speaking statistically you would think even one of them out of the scores of cops there would have had even an underdeveloped backbone. The cowardice shown here should be something that lives into myth and legend and the way people say “Benedict Arnold” to mean “traitor” they should say “Uvalde cop” to mean “coward.”

Indeed is reporting that the average starting salary is like $50k, and the average in the US is $60k. Policing also isn’t even in the top 25 most dangerous jobs. That link is also talking base salary, but even in the situation you’re describing, you’re talking overtime in the $20k+ range.

The problem with bad cops comes down to two main things:

• they’re not here for public safety or here to protect and serve, they’re here to protect capital.
• well, it’s really just the first one, but keeping that in mind, the system is setup in a way that the only outcome can be a corrupt police force. Legal civil forfeiture, qualified immunity, overly powered police unions (the only time I’ll complain about unions), deliberately low standards in hiring, deliberately not require the police to even know the law they’re supposed to enforce and probably a dozen things I’m forgetting. Police aren’t there for us, they’re there for capital.

Finally, police funding and increasing the number of cops has almost nothing to do with crime rates which is what calls to defund the police actually mean. Police are basically systematized violence where pretty much the only tools in their literal and metaphorical toolbelt are increasing levels of violence. The call to defund the police is more about funding the things that actually reduce crime – better education, economic outcomes, and people trained to deal with the types of issues that police are probably less qualified to deal with than the average retail worker like mental health crises. Advocates for defunding the police are instead advocating for spending to be allocated to people who are qualified to actually deal with these problems.

Anyway, tl;dr – if we offer cops better pay and better hours, we’re just going to be getting more expensive cops stealing our shit, incarcerating us at one of the highest rates in the world, and murdering people with less consequence than the cashier at Target gets for not upselling credit cards enough because while plenty of good people* become cops, policing as an institution in the US is corrupt.

* “Good” people and “bad” people are mostly a result of the systems and culture they exist in and very few are truly “good” or “bad.”

The game has been hyped since like 2013, and the final game is quite a bit different from the hype. Personally, I didn’t follow any of that and just tried it when it came out since it seemed up my alley, and I thought it was pretty good, but buggy as shit for a full release.

Anyway, it’s a pretty great game now. I really enjoyed the narrative, and the rebalancing of the game I think was wise as well if nothing else for removing the weird armor ratings from clothing.

Oh god yes. There is now a blanket rule in our house that we only buy one system of storage. At some point, we revisit. I think on our next revisit, we might just go to deli-tainers.

As for socks, and I must state for clarity, this has been done against my will, we have at least, at least, 17 different types of socks. I have made clear, that the first thing we do when we win the lottery or whatever is declare sockruptcy, throw those all away, and just buy one at-least-ok sock.

My god. I mean, it’s probably a fair price to pay for no mass shootings and universal health care, but still wild.

I live in a small town in Oregon. A few years ago, it was $7. Now it’s $10.

I mean, it’s a bummer when the bougie burger places do this, but when the taco trucks and teriyaki shops near me started costing more than $2 a taco or $10 for a plate of yakisoba, I knew shit was getting hard out there.

Yeah, this is def a thing that is a big sticking point for me. I have a hard time supporting a company these days without a clear revenue plan because it’s just kind of a bait-and-switch otherwise.

Hey don’t forget about the other half of the posts, which are in a language you don’t understand. Seriously, my block list is long because language settings here mean nothing, and while I’m sure that’s quality content, uh, I can’t understand it.

Gotcha, thanks for the info. I’m def behind in following the goings on there. Do you have any insight on the revenue plan?

I am skeptical of Bluesky. It’s led by Jack and we’ve already seen how that goes. Second, there isn’t really a good technical reason for it to exist as it’s own protocol outside of the fact that they want to control it given that Fedi/Mastodon was already there and they could have just as easily contributed to that with the things they wanted, they just wouldn’t have had full control. Similar to Threads promise to federate, I will be somewhat surprised if they ever do it.

Were Bluesky/Threads not a corporate effort, I have a feeling that it would have followed a similar pattern as the fediverse - build the protocol and release that, then the clients will follow. Bluesky still isn’t federating even with its own protocol, and Threads isn’t either. Given that’s stuff that tiny teams with far, far fewer resources than the corps have accomplished, it’s a little wild that neither have gotten there.

Especially with Bluesky, there doesn’t seem to be a stated plan for how it’s going to make money. And we’re talking about a lot of the same people that destroyed the Twitter API and started locking things down even before Elon killed it completely and they’re trying to convince us that they are pushing for an open environment.

I’m sold on user replaceable batteries, just not necessarily like they are the Nokia’s of old. Especially with phones, they’re mature enough where the end of support for them is either a choice a company makes, or just purely because the battery is dead. Batteries don’t necessarily need to be hot-swappable, but they should be able to be replaced by most people in-home, with tools you probably already have.

I don’t think that even the languages are the problem, it’s the toolchain. While certainly if you went back to C or whatever, you can design more performant systems, I think the problem overall stems from modern toolchains being kinda ridiculous. It is entirely common in any language to load in massive libraries that suck up 100’s of mb of RAM (if not gigs) to get a slightly nicer function to lowercase text or something.

The other confounding factor is “write once, run anywhere” which in practice means that there is a lot of shared code and such that does nothing on your machine. The most obvious example being Electron. Pretty much all of the Electron apps I use on the reg (which are mostly just Discord and slack) are conceptually simple apps that have analogues that used to run on a few hundred mbs of storage and 10’s of mb of RAM.

Oh, one other sidetone - how many CPUs are wasting cycles on things that no one wants, like extremely complex ad-tracking/data mining/etc.

I know why this is the case, and ease of development does enable us to have software that we probably otherwise wouldn’t, but this is a thing that I think is a real blight on modern computing, and I think it’s solvable. I mean, probably the dumbest idea, but improving translation layers to run platform-native code can be vastly improved. Especially in a world where we have generative AI, there has to be a way to say “hey, I’ve got this javascript function, I need this to work in kotlin, swift, c++, etc.”

Lots of stuff -

On the internet, more open standards and community driven stuff. It’s currently really, really annoying that on my mastodon there are a lot of people sharing bluesky codes, as if that’s not just punting the ball for another couple of years. Although this will hopefully be a better outcome than straight up silos like the old social media, fediverse still should be the default way we think about connecting humanity (or something like it, the underlying tech isn’t really that important.) Also, far more things should just be like, a dollar a month or whatever instead of having a massive amount of privacy invading, user experience destroying ads.

In software in general, more privacy. It should be assumed that unless I explicitly opt in, my data is just that, mine. This is a tricky one because I remain hopeful about generative AI and that needs data to improve the models, I’m leery of sharing my data with it because so far the more pedestrian uses of data mining have not been used for things that I can really support. I remain extremely leery about GAI that isn’t explicitly open source and can’t be understood generally.

On the hardware side, computers have mostly been good enough for a while now. Tech will always get better, but I would like to see more of a focus on keeping working devices useful. Like, at some point, technology products will cease being possible to be useful in a practical way because it can’t run modern software, but we’re leaving a lot of shit behind where that’s not the case. Just about any device with an SSD and a processor from the last 10 years (including phones!) should be able to be easily repaired, supported longer, and once support ends, opened up for community support.

Pretty much. SW is a very “hero’s journey” story. Somewhere else in this thread, I posted this:

And although I would say that Andor is proof you can do cool things with a Star Wars background, at its heart SW is a conceptually fairly simple. Young person with the help of wise wizard and plucky band must master his powers to face down the evil tyrant. Now, is that the OG trilogy? Prequels? Sequels? LoTR? The Matrix?

That, but in a space samurai/western backdrop. Andor not only respects the canon, it explores it. Sure, it’s not telling a hero’s journey tale, but it’s grabbing a piece of existing canon and enhancing it if anything.

This is where JJ I think fucked up with the Trek canon.

Although I do really like both of those and would probably put them at the top of the current generation of SW, they feel much less like SW properties and a lot more like they’re wearing a SW skin. Which, you know, is fine since it’s actually good and doesn’t destroy the property. Even if you don’t like Andor, they’re still making a ton of just regular Star Wars shit.

JJ basically derailed Trek for those of us that actually like the type of thing Trek was doing for nearly a decade. Basically took until SNW to get an actual Trek show.

Honestly, just move away from it in the timeline. Legends canon has a a few thousand years to work with, and one of the funny bits about Star Wars is that even though the Old Republic and New Republic exist extremely far apart, the vibes and aesthetics are all fairly similar. And although I would say that Andor is proof you can do cool things with a Star Wars background, at its heart SW is a conceptually fairly simple. Young person with the help of wise wizard and plucky band must master his powers to face down the evil tyrant. Now, is that the OG trilogy? Prequels? Sequels? LoTR? The Matrix?

JJ at least got this part, the problem is you have to add enough flavor to the story that it doesn’t feel like a complete rehash, which JJ failed at with TFA even if that was the closest the sequels got. No idea how Rian made it out of the pitch meeting, pretty clear he had no interest in making a SW movie, and basically just went “never mind all that” to TFA. And then JJ has to land the plane that was basically rebuilt into a railcar midair, and it went about as well as could be expected.

Home Assistant allows you to select the source, so I tend towards using that. There are other remote specific apps that allow similar.

I think I found this in the Home Assistant forums, which are generally a great resource. I’d also warn that you might want to be careful going this route. It wasn’t quite as straightforward as just popping the SSD in and installing an OS. IIRC, and I know I don’t recall why, I had to DD a disk image to it. That said, there are lots of these thin clients all over ebay where it is literally that easy.