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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2023

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  • Every other year or so, but only because there somehow keep being better deals. Over the last 8 years mint mobile has been consistently good pricing even for returning customers provided you’re willing to pay for the whole year up front. That’s my baseline. From there other small carriers come along offering unlimited for less and you join for a year or two until they go bust. Right now I’m on Spectrum mobile since it’s free with even the cheapest home internet available to my address (for 12 months).


    1. Quality electric toothbrush. I can’t get my teeth feeling clean without one anymore.

    2. A rice cooker. Doesn’t need to be fancy, but it lowers the barrier to cooking substantially given how many dishes use rice.

    3, A phone with a camera that’s at least mid-range, as it’s the camera you’ll have on you most. I used to always use phones from cheap brands like Umidigi and although some of them did perform quite well others left me with gaps of my life where none of the photos I took have any detail.



  • To be fair to Netflix before other networks took streaming seriously they were charging very little to license their content on Netflix. That’s why it had everything and was so good to be better than piracy. The royalties from Netflix couldn’t be enough to fund these networks. Even Netflix themselves as the studio has struggled substantially promoting these price hikes and the effective recreation of cable TV.

    As they lose more of the licensed content they’re forced to focus on their own. Unfortunately for the just part they can’t compete with constant new mediocre shows and movies. The streaming industry as a whole has lost sight of what made it popular in the first place.





  • The Galaxy A5x series is excellent value. It’s not the absolute cheapest but for ~$300 there’s nothing it does wrong. I’ve used a Galaxy A52 (older 4g version) for the last 2 years without any issues. Before that I stuck to Umidigi phones in the ~$120-$150 range which were all great except for the cameras.

    Over Christmas I won a Pixel 8 Pro giveaway but except for in the lowest lighting conditions the difference is insignificant to my eye. I actually really miss some of the Samsung software features (namely secure folder and free-form windows).

    Having a cheaper phone is also freeing to treat them less gently. I often found myself taking photos I might not otherwise due to the fact all my prior phones were so cheap. I’m not about to hold my Pixel 8 Pro out over a cliff, but for the Umidigi phones and Galaxy A52 that was no problem when traveling.


  • Ya I used to always tip cash but stopped all food delivery entirely ~5yr ago. By turning food delivery into a live auction everybody loses except the company running the service. Drivers compete against eachother accepting the absolute lowest fees while customers need to play the game of choosing an appropriate tip for a prompt delivery while also ideally not shorting the employee who ultimately accepts the order. But since to accept the order they need to compete with other drivers it’s naturally going to lead to them accepting lower prices, allowing the delivery company to pocket the difference. Not a good system.


  • I personally had no problem with them charging for API access, the rate was my bigger issue. I suspect they were basing it off of the money and hype behind the large language models that were previously training using their data for free rather than the relatively few 3rd party app users. I don’t get how there weren’t more people using them considering how bad the official Android app is, but there’s no way it was substantially impacting their bottom line.

    Charging comparable rates or even 2-3x what they would get from users of the official app seeing ads also wouldn’t be an issue to me, paying to support software is generally good as it aligns user and developer interests. But with 20x higher rates than they’d get from the user using the official app that couldn’t genuinely be the case.