The only mistake Billy made is giving anything to AdBlock Plus, the people who have sided WITH the ads, instead of uBlock Origin, the true MVPs of the ad blocking world. I guess uBlock doesn’t accept donations unfortunately, but still, ABP is shady and I would not support them.

Steam Deck is an open platform because you can run any OS, launcher, etc. on it. It’s just a handheld PC. Steam itself is a closed ecosystem but the Deck is very open.

Also fork the repos. Git makes duplicating a repository simple, and preserving history with a fork is way better than uploading a zip snapshot. For best results fork to GitLab, Bitbucket, Codeberg, etc. as well.

I mean, they have the money. They could build their own fiber network. They already have the permits, pole access, equipment, maintenance network, distribution network, utility boxes, etc. that they could leverage to build a truly modern network infrastructure in parallel to their outdated coaxial one if they wanted to stay relevant in this century, but they don’t. They stick with their shitty cable and its shitty uplink limitations and let much smaller third parties spend all that money to get their own permits, equipment, etc. and build their own fiber networks that can actually deliver the performance people want. Then Spectrum cries like the crybaby they are when everyone abandons their ancient infrastructure when competition arrives. Hell no I don’t want to stick around for your lame “gigabit” cable with a pathetic 20mbps uplink.

I had to yell at them on the phone to cancel when I switched to symmetric gigabit fiber last summer after over a decade of 200/20 Spectrum. They said “but wait we can offer gigabit too” and I said that what they were selling was theoretically impossible to match what I had. Garbage company selling inferior product. I’m glad they’re starting to see real competition in more and more places from smaller fiber companies.

Do it!

The problem is that they keep making stuff that was formerly a purchase (download, physical copy, run locally, etc) into unnecessary cloud services just to justify the transition to “X as a service”. I want to download it and keep it on my home server, not pay a recurring fee to access the same file over and over from a server.

EEE and enshittification are very related concepts. The extinguish phase of EEE usually goes hand in hand with enshittification as once you’ve extinguished the competition you’re free to cut costs and enjoy a monopoly. Cutting costs leads to enshittification.

This is the norm for the “X as a service” market. Since it’s a recurring revenue stream you can offer your “product” below cost to entice people since they’re going to have to keep paying up to continue using it. Then once you’ve hooked enough people you can dial up the pricing and dial down the costs/features. Fuck everything about this. I want to pay once and own for life.

Same. I’m happy to pay for Patreons or other donation methods to creators I really like, but no way I’m giving a cent to the big tech monstrosities that have monopolized the Internet. They deserve nothing.

By that logic pencils are banned since you can plagiarize copyrighted text with them. Can’t teach kids to write, because writing is a tool of piracy.

But not in an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” sort of way. Not in the slightest.

Instead of just stating this as the inevitable future, why not join us in realizing that this is a problem and push to do something about it? We all realize that physical media and ownership of content is going away, but we can push back by not buying into subscription models and buying what physical or at least one-time-purchase digital content we can while it is still around.

Your new car may not have a CD player, but external disc drives are still readily available. Buy up a CD collection (of lossless, DRM-free music I might add) and rip them all to FLAC files and keep them on today’s dirt cheap giant hard drives. Now you can play them on your phone, car, laptop, Steam Deck, retro iPod, smart fridge, etc.

Same goes for DVDs and Blu-Rays. You have the option to convert them into whatever format is needed for the device you want to play them on because YOU OWN THE MEDIA and can do what you want with it.

Be the change you want to see. Cancel Netflix and Spotify. Buy CDs and DVDs/BDs. Build a local collection and have DRM-free content on all your devices that will be available to you for the rest of your life rather than for the rest of the month.

IIRC you can disable it entirely with Group Policy Editor which is only available on Pro. I think there was a hack to enable it on Home so you could make Defender shut up once and for all…at least until the next Windows update that reenables it because Windows doesn’t care about your configuration.

Plus they commit the biggest sin possible in video…VERTICAL VIDEO. I hate this garbage trend of everything being designed for phones. Vertical videos suck. They are terrible to watch on desktop. You can rotate your phone sideways, you can’t rotate your TV, laptop, monitor, projector, etc. vertical (at least not most of the time).

OpenPleb is such a good initiative. It would be so helpful to have documentation and standards here.

None. It’s stupid to have to pay monthly for access to someone else’s content collection when I used to be able to buy content for life and build my own collection, so now I either stream things for free on unofficial sites or download them via unofficial sources. I’ll still buy CDs and DVDs occasionally but streaming is bullshit and I’m not playing along.

Most of my media consumption is gaming. I’ll happily pay for games, but not for subscription based games, cloud based games, or game library subscriptions like Gamepass. I want to keep what I buy. This “you will own nothing and be happy” future is a dreadful one.