Those were police in the Dominican Republic. He’s a Canadian national but was living there.

Somewhat, my comment got truncated by real life interruption, sorry. But I think we need things that are more community driven than they are profit driven. Things like the Fediverse where the goal isn’t doing all these things to make bank but doing all these things because it’s something people want and how people want to engage with each other.

Doctorow wants regulations to help stave off “loss leading” style behavior and then hopes unions will also somehow help. I’m thinking ultimately that any platform run as a capitalist enterprise is eventually going to enshitify.

Yeah the shipping is now what 2-3 days instead of guaranteed 2 day. So kinda pointless when you get 3-5 day shipping free as long as you spend $35. I only get Prime when they throw in a free trial to an order I already have.

I’ve barely used the video service. There are so many cheap/free ways to pirate and have everything from everywhere all in one place these days. And without the risk of ISP letters or lawsuits that torrents had in the old days.

That’s cool and all, and maybe it will eliminate some of the worst bullshit, but it’s not going to stop enshitification. Certainly not with big tech because it’s driven by the profit motive in satisfying initial investors, going public, and then engaging in the quest to make the line always go up forever.

The only thing that’s going to stop enshitification is to stop depending on that model for the platforms we want.

A couple years of not being able to buy them anywhere close to MSRP did enough damage I guess. Plus it exposed people to some alternatives.

They’re also building quite a few in the heartland of the US. Although honestly I think they’re one big scam by the people actually constructing them – fully stocked luxury bunker for you, your family, friends, etc all on some billionaires’ dime. If shit hits the fan and you don’t let them in what’re they gonna do – sue you about it?

The billionaire doomsday prepper mindset is ridiculous when you think about it for 30 seconds. Physical control over the resources around would be all that mattered, not how much Monopoly money you had in the before times.

Depends on the context about which you’re talking.

I’m talking about accessing a service which Apple is in control of the infrastructure and has specifically put in place access and authorization controls.

In this instance, if Beeper wanted to reverse engineer the API, make their own implementation, and offer their own messaging service that’s fine. More power to them generally.

But unless Beeper comes to some sort of agreement to allow interoperability with Apple’s iMessage (or Apple is forced to allow it by government action) then they can’t take it upon themselves to use exploits or spoofing to gain access without authorization. You might think it sucks that Apple has kept their API closed and that it’s a bad idea, but that’s their prerogative. It’s just like when Twitter closed their API or when Reddit priced everyone out of using their API, except Apple never had it open to start with.

Yeah. I mean, the actual reverse engineering is something Apple wouldn’t be able to stop them from doing. But anyone who thought Apple couldn’t stop them from using that reverse engineering to connect to iMessage was delusional. And if it had become more of a cat and mouse situation where Beeper was able to keep gaining access, Apple would have sued the pants off them. Apple, as shitty of a company as they are, have every right to control access to their own APIs.

I use similar software on PC solely because it allows independent remapping of Xbox Elite controller paddles. That is, I can map them to key presses directly instead of mapping them to another button on the controller. Previously I had to map another controller button to a key and then remap the paddle to that button.

But it also happens to use a virtual controller driver that can be used with the mouse and also abuse aim assist. And thus was hit with some anti-cheat blocks recently. So now unless I want to uninstall and reinstall that software between certain games I can’t play some at all.

Edit: the software I was using was ReWASD. Turns out both Microsoft’s official app and Steam’s Big Picture Mode controller settings now do about 80-95% respectively of what I need from remapping software. (Microsoft’s implementation of Shift buttons is incomplete and theirs doesn’t work over Bluetooth. The MS app also doesn’t allow you to map different keys contextually – for long presses, double presses, etc)

I mean, as shitty as it is, there’s a decent sized market for it. Probably worth it to them to overpay so much for it to hurt the current streaming provider, Peacock.

I mean, can’t you use something like Teleparty to sync up streams in both your browsers? Then just voice chat in Discord.

And then in 5 years they’ll all settle for a few million dollars in a class action for price fixing. Rinse, repeat.

True enough. I was thinking more of the gaming use case. But even beyond AI and just a general compute workload they’re beating the pants off AMD with CUDA as well.

To be fair, in the local markets for the two teams involved (Miami and Kansas City), they were on over the air broadcast TV and thus also cable and satellite providers that carry those stations. Although of course the local markets for TV purposes are literally only the cities in question and people in a different part of that same state might get boned still.

I think they should be made to be broadcast or at least free streaming only by virtue of the NFL’s specific antitrust exemptions though.

They’re beating AMD at ray tracing, upsampling (DLSS vs FSR), VR, and especially streaming (NVENC). For the latter look at the newly announced beta partnership with Twitch and OBS which will bring higher quality transcoding and easier setup only for Nvidia for now and soon AV1 encoding only for Nvidia (at first anyway).

The raw performance is mostly there for AMD with the exception of RT, and FSR has gotten better. But Nvidia is doing Nvidia shit and using the software ecosystem to entrench themselves despite the insane pricing.

They work fine for me. The only time I’ve had to ask for assistance is for an age check or once when I double scanned something. But then I’m not a blithering idiot and I know to look at the PLU sticker on produce and that you can usually just punch in the UPC code if an item won’t scan correctly. I’d much rather do it myself than have to make awkward small talk with a cashier. And standing in lines? You’d be standing in line waiting for a cashier too.

On the retailer side, they’re either going to have to accept the increased theft rate or they’re going to have to go back to paying cashiers. That’s just the way it is – they can’t have their cake and eat it too in that regard.

Pretty sure the DMCA claims take the material down and give you a copyright strike. And not everyone has access to the other system that can affect monetization.

The only example I’ve seen of this being possible is making some unique song/sounds and putting them in the video, signing up with one of the rights management companies that does have access, and then claiming your own content. Still not perfect as they take a fee and a cut of “recovery” iirc.

The DMCA is draconian but YouTube’s system is insidious. The DMCA forces YouTube to take down content upon receipt of a valid takedown notice but it also requires it to put the content back up within 10 days of a counter-notice, at which point if the original complaining party wants to do more they can take it to court.

In contrast, YouTube’s content ID and manual copyright claim system can be more lenient in that it’s less likely to wind up in court as the rights holder can simply demonetize the content or divert monetization to them. However it’s open to a lot of fraud, abuse, conflicts of interest, and Kafkaesque appeals systems.

I have a friend who has ~1M subscribers. He specifically licensed music from an artist for his video intro and outro. Now, every few months out of the blue he gets dozens to hundreds of Content ID claims from obscure music rights management companies who have added remixes of that work to their Content ID databases. Monetization is instantly diverted to these companies. He appeals. The money is not held in escrow pending appeal – the company gets to keep it no matter what. So the first couple of appeals get decided by the company claiming the content. Usually about a week or two later he gets actual YT support to help or he causes enough stink on social media that a YT rep will look at it and fix it. But he’s lost thousands of dollars over this shit.

Only the first literary version, not the 1961 Disney film version (they licensed the rights). So you have to be very careful with what you use. The first book with Tigger included only hit the public domain this year for instance.

I can barely get them to provide basically adequate service that doesn’t meet the FCC definition of broadband. They won’t care, lol.