leftzero

Streaming is bringing unskippable ads and surveillance.

Torrents bring neither and are higher quality and more user friendly.

The internet is making things worse, not better.

No, it's not. Before the Internet you could only watch what was on, when it was on.

Now you can torrent anything you want to watch, whenever you want to watch it, and in much higher quality than TV used to be. And, again, without ads, which TV has always been riddled with.

That's infinitely better, on multiple metrics.

Or use NewPipe if you don't need to sync with your Google account.

Not as much as going from coax to RJ45, or from PATA to SATA, or from PC/AT to PS/2 to USB or Bluetooth, or from D-SUB to DVI to HDMI or Display port, or from the old serial and parallel ports to USB or Bluetooth (I mainly skipped SCSI), and I sort of miss having to turn the connector 360° around for it to fit...

2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kubrick gave them fucking iPads. In 1968.

Blade Runner was very much a product of its time (though Syd Mead's visuals were outstanding).

There was something floating in the late seventies / early eighties zeitgeist that would become the cyberpunk genre, and it sort of condensed in several spots simultaneously.

William Gibson had just published Burning Chrome, and was finishing writing Neuromancer (which would be published in '84 and be considered a foundation of the genre).

Ridley Scott and Syd Mead independently adapted a (very different from the film) book by Philip K. Dick into a film that looked and felt like it was set in Gibson's Sprawl.

In Japan, Kasuhiro Otomo had just begun publishing Akira.

Frank Miller was probably in the process of writing and conceptualising Rōnin, which DC would start publishing in '83.

Bruce Bethke had come up with the term cyberpunk in 1980, but that short story wouldn't be published until '83.

Over the next few years many other authors would create other works clearly set in the same genre, though at this point they probably had some influence from Gibson and Blade Runner and each other.

Mike Pondsmith was drinking it all up and coming up with a role playing game with that title, to be published in '88.

And, all over the eighties and nineties, the genre exploded, and was everywhere.

That's their end goal: no choice whatsoever, you watch 30 minutes of ads, followed by the 30 second video the algorithm wants you to watch (which is also an ad), 30 more minutes of ads, and so on.

And, since they also own chrome, you can't go to any other page without first spending at least six hours watching youtube.

One letter for one sound is a lot less complicated ðan two letters representing two sounds.

Most languages that use alphabets have digraphs representing different sounds than their composing letters. It's trivial to understand that ‘th’ represents a different sound than ‘t’ or ‘h’.

Most sane languages, on the other hand, don't use the same letter or digraph to represent half a dozen different sounds (and when they do they use diacritic marks to distinguish them... which English only uses, without explanation, in borrowed words like fiancé or façade, which might actually be more confusing to native speakers than to ESL ones), or half a dozen letters and digraphs to represent the same sound.

you clearly didn't check my profile

I've got enough of a headache from deciphering your posts, thank you

asshats

Pot, kettle...

They can be written now though

Yeah..? Then tell me why in fuck's name (or should it be facks?) ‘oo’ can represent six different sounds (food, book, door, blood, cooperation, brooch), for instance, and how to tell them apart, or why the letters ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘o’, ‘aa’, and ‘ea’ are used to represent the same exact sound in the words father, sergeant, body, bazaar, and heart...

Let me assure you that this nonsense is many orders of magnitude more confusing to people learning English as a second language than the ‘th’ shit!

If you're going to use ancient letters use pre-vowel shift vowels too, you half assed coward.

You know what a turtle is? Same thing.

people need to use these tools responsibly

Have you met people..?

My boss just had me change two coworkers' passwords so they wouldn't be able to log back in.

I keep washing and washing, but the blood won't come off.