You were talking about the streaming platform specifically as an industry.

it’s an industry that’s earning literal billions every single year…they absolutely don’t need to have ads, they could serve their paying users a good ad-free product, and still make money. They choose to deliberately annoy their paying customers because they’re fucking greedy.

It’s okay to be corrected.

Fake news. Netflix is the only one making a profit. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/17/hollywood-streaming-profits-struggles.html

I don’t know why lemmy users love spreading misinformation that all streaming platforms are taking in profit hand over fist.

Look at the reuters article cited: https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-companies-lose-190-billion-market-cap-after-alphabet-microsoft-report-2024-01-31/

Jan 30 (Reuters) - AI-related companies lost $190 billion in stock market value late on Tuesday after Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab, Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O), opens new tab delivered quarterly results that failed to impress investors who had sent their stocks soaring. The selloff following the tech giants’ reports after the bell underscored investors’ elevated expectations following an AI-fueled stock market rally in recent months that propelled their shares to record highs with the promise of incorporating the technology across the corporate landscape.

I don’t know that I would say this has anything inherently to do with AI…

The reuters article for AMD specifically: https://www.reuters.com/technology/high-flying-chipmakers-hit-after-amds-forecast-falls-short-2024-01-31/

Jan 31 (Reuters) - High-flying semiconductor stocks slipped on Wednesday after Advanced Micro Devices’ (AMD.O) disappointing current-quarter revenue forecast added to investor worries over sluggish demand for non-AI chips

…

That overshadowed the company near doubling its AI processor projections to $3.5 billion for 2024.

TV economics are hard. I think where basic cable and network TV make it work is that the content was filmed in a way to have natural ad breaks to make it less disruptive to the viewing experience. That becomes terrible when you shoehorn ads into places they don’t belong. On the other hand, watching that content without ad breaks that was filmed with ad breaks also plays out weird because you’ll have that commercial cliffhaner music/scene that is quickly followed with resolution before you have time to wonder “what is going to happen?” So shit gets weird when you have a tier model where some people get ad breaks and others don’t because your content isn’t made to satisfy both use cases.

TV is expensive to make and these are businesses that make money. A simple reductive “if user pays any money they deserve no ads” problem. It’s a challenge of things like “The business needs to make X dollars per user and if we have ads we need to charge Y bucks where Y = X - expected ad revenue.” The other challenge is in order to have an ad business you need to convince advertisers you have ad viewers they want to reach. Well, advertisers like rich people with lots of money, and they probably don’t have the cheaper ad supported tiers. So can a TV company really support a completely ad free tier? Or do they still need to serve some, but less ads, to make sure their advertisers know they can get their ads seen by the platforms richest users?

“Google and Apple should manage consent, but let me manage payments directly so I don’t have to pay them.”

I don’t see how these small state specific regulations can work. California is the only state big enough, and the EU as a whole does GDPR type regulations uniformly. Regardless of what they regulations are, I feel like it needs to be US federal level regulation to make compliance practical

It really depends on redundancy. Does Amazon have people that can do what iRobot staff does. For operational or sales teams maybe. If Amazon becomes the only store where you can buy a roomba, you probably lay off folks responsible for wholesale. That probably also means you lay off some marketing. But the core people that make the stuff probably have less redundancy. These layoffs are probably impacting the people that actually make and design the stuff, since they no longer or going to make all the stuff they planned. The hypothetical layoffs for acquisition would probably be smaller and impact different people at the company. And because it’s an acquisition, there may have been negotiated more favorable severance terms,

iRobot said it would focus on margin improvements, reduce spending on research and development, and pause all work on “non-floorcare” products, including its air purifiers and robotic lawn mowers.

I doubt it. If you are stopping r&d and killing whole product lines, it makes sense to lay off the teams directly tied to those product lines. I’m guessing they needed Amazon to help them break into the market for areas outside of floor vacuums?

That’s not what the article says. The article is saying that was true last year that the hiring spree was over optimistic and needed correction. Now that is not the case, but there’s a weird knock on effect where the market has rewarded this behavior companies keep tightening to continue being rewarded. And there’s a heard mentality where if company A gets rewarded by the market for layoffs, company B faces scrutiny from major shareholders not to do the same.

I think the initial correction of layoffs kind of made sense a year ago, but this article makes me think there is something not cool happening as it keeps continuing.

Will there ever be a day where I can just buy a smart watch strap to attach to my mechanic watch to get biometrics and what not?

So it’s not so much what data is shared, but how it’s triggered to do this at unnecessary times is where the intent is likely nefarious.

Data includes ip addresses, etc… is that a surprise? How do most notifications work? Is the device client polling status updates to retrieve status changes to trigger a notification? If that occurs isn’t it obvious the user IP would be known?

Try hunt showdown. It’s kind of an anti battle royal game and a smart person’s thinking shooter and not a twitch shooter. Civil war era so no spray and pray. 12 man servers instead of 100 so it’s more tactical and strategic with our randomly dying all the time. And it’s a carrot instead of a stick; no shrinking map to create a funnel of conflict, but hunting for a single boss on the map that you must kill and then attempt to extract with the trophy it drops best sound design I’ve experienced in a shooter.

Basically any game where crafting is a central mechanic. Why do people love repetitive boring tasks and looking at grids of items for hours on end.

For music it’s cut and dry. In 2004 I was spending somewhere between 15 and 25 bucks for a an album on CD which might have 1 or 2 discs. I was buying something like 2 to 4 albums a month. How is it possible today you can pay a monthly sub of a single cd 15 years ago and just have unlimited access to all music. That is insane to me. I still buy albums on vinyl a lot, but keep my spotify for convenience and discovery purposes.

I am pretty sure back then when I purchased the box set of band of brothers on DVD around the same period it cost something like 60 to 80 bucks for 10 1 hour episodes and extra. Max today costs 10 bucks a month today.

FWIW, I did not remove my subscription, but I did respond to the recent price bump by downgrading to a lower tier, and we’re still sharing it (if they ever shut us down for that I’m certainly not paying a second sub, but so far the locations are close enough and it’s used rarely enough in one of them that it’s never been an issue).

You kind of switched between “we” and “I” speak. So I interpreted it as you paying the full sub fee but someone else had access to it. You mentioned that you would not pay for a second sub, but what if you PW sharer was willing to cover just that cost? I feel like there are 2 kinds of PW sharers. Some that PW share as a gift. And others that split the cost for a single account. It’s hard to tell when people say what they (the individual) are willing to pay for in terms of cost if in practice they are splitting the bill.

I remember watching this PBS Frontline segment on plane maintenance 10 years or so ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0b020OFj4

I imagine we still have those problems and the recent news of counterfeit parts entering the market is scary.

Good thing these recent incidents ended up with no serious injuries or death. Perhaps this timing is good in some really weird way as the Supreme Court starts considering powers of regulatory agencies and concerns around government funding to highlight the importance and need for this government role.

May I ask why? If you are paying the full sub yourself, but the person you kindly share the sub with gets cut off, why would you stop paying? If you enjoy the content and service for the price, why does it matter if you lose the ability to share if you are the only one footing the bill.

Add in that the 737-900ER has the same door plug design, it makes me wonder if it is rational to fear the Max 9 specifically. I would actually prefer to fly a max 9 that was forced to have a recent inspection instead of the older 737-900ER that recently had scrutiny for the same door if my fear was the door plug itself.

Flexibllity is the key. Let the teams decide how they work best. Mandates, one way or the other, are silly.

I think that’s where it breaks down and the people in the office get the worst of both worlds. It’s actually less constructive to be in an office where you are taking calls all day with multiple remote employees that could be in the office. I don’t go into the office at all anymore, but I would be happy and happier to be back in the office 3 days a week if I knew the teams I worked with were also in the office. Pre pandemic I had a very flexible in office policy where the norm was to be in the office 3 or 4 days a week. But folks that had long commutes were able to leave the office early and work from their commuter trains to wrap up the day. Folks on the team would roll in anytime between 830 and 11am. I think the unfortunate thing about RTO policy is that coming down from HR in a 1 size fits all approach makes it less flexible and terrible with badge swipe counting and what not. And in order to be fair, some type of written policy must be in place, but teams, managers, etc. should have flexibility to make it work for their teams.