I think we can probably also toss in demand from the pandemic. Lots of people suddenly had need for a new computer and now with return to school/office lots of those machines are probably seeing a lot less use. A couple of years ago the articles were "record demand for MacBooks."
whofearsthenight
joined 1 year ago
What features has Spotify cut? I've had premium for like 5 years and I think I've seen a dollar raise in price.
I think there are certain aspects of the modern internet that make it a worse place, even for all of the massive benefit and improvement from the early days. I'm mostly going to stick with social media, because initially it was a really interesting thing that quickly turned toxic and tbh I think when historians look back at this period, they'll probably be able to point to a significant amount of societal damaged caused by it.
Like in the early days of myspace and even Facebook, it was a legit helpful way to connect with friends and catch up with people. Where I think it goes off of the rails is when you get to algorithmic timelines. Facebook in particular I think is very nearly directly responsible for a lot of the political divide we see today because of this. If you poll just about any issue, you'll find that the US is trends about 70% left/progressive. Most people want universal healthcare, reasonable gun legislation, etc. But on Facebook, which probably has more of a representative sample of Americans than anyone else, you would frequently find that 7-10 out of the top posts were conservative wack jobs. One of the things that drove me to stop using the site entirely around 15-16 was that my friend group of mostly lefties somehow led to half or more of my TL being the small fraction of family or work acquaintances with right wing fringe nonsense takes.
You can kind of see this happening with reddit in real time right now. In 2010, you stared with the subs you wanted to see, things were democratically upvoted, and there was no algo outside of the users to speak of. Reddit has slowly been moving away from that, often surfacing things that you have no interest in because "engagement." I have a pretty strong suspicion this was one of the driving factors in killing third party clients - they still mostly presented content the old way without shoving a bunch of crap in your face. Twitter went through the same. People used to complain about twitter being a cesspool, and I never had that because I always used a third party client and just followed people who's stuff I wanted to see. And if they ventured too far into the sort of lunatic fringe, pruning them was easy and I could continue seeing the type of content I wanted. Now with no third party clients, there is just no way to not see this kind of nonsense on twitter, hence I haven't for many months now.
Now, this is just not the way most people are going to engage with things on the internet. Like, just look at most people's phones for fuck's sake. A zillion notifications and badges for things that no one should care about. It doesn't occur to most people that you can even avoid this kind of thing.
Anyway, lots of cool things about the modern internet, the type of social media most are using ain't it though.
Precisely. Tbh I would be comfortable paying more but only if it went to artists. At some point there will come a time when I go back to the 7 seas for music (especially given hdd sizes and the ease of streaming from your own library) but I feel pretty far from that at the moment especially as it's the free tiers mostly that have been getting enshittified. But I think that's roughly the lessons of the 2010's - free products on the internet are either a loss leader to get you subscribing, or they're probably selling your data to everyone.
Even then, the free versions of Spotify/Pandora are miles ahead of radio when I was a kid. Pick one of three stations that caters entirely to mainstream normies and then have a third of your time spent listening to ads and shitty DJs.
Just having the freedom for literally anything. I have a stable, boring job that sucks, but it keeps a roof over my head (barely) while also leaving little time for anything else. I’m nearing 40 now and I definitely wish I’d gone back in my 20s and taken a lot more risk before I had responsibilities. Even then, I don’t want to be a wandering hippy, but a 30 hr work week with 3 weeks mandatory vacation? Sign me the fuck up.
When I was a kid, I would go buy a CD basically every paycheck/allowance, for probably around $15-$20 of '03 money. 12ish tracks. I would add basically about 30 tracks to my collection per month for $30-$40. And even though I owned those (as long as my little brother didn't fuck up the disc), I could only access the handful that I could carry with me. If you told 15-17 year old me, that for $11 a month I could access basically any music I could think of instantly, anywhere, I would've been like "sure, and then we'll listen in our flying cars, right?"
There are lots of things that absolutely suck about modern life and the enshittification presented here, but music fans have it pretty good.
Every tech company right now?
Fundamentally microblogs are different than all of those things. RSS is too nerdy for regularly people, who are already struggling just with the idea that they have to pick a server on mastodon, and RSS readers are not at all designed for short-form content like it. Email newsletters are roughly the same, and I really don't want every tweet in the form of an email, that would get real, real annoying. Then you toss in that both are one-way communications. And finally, you have to go seeking all of those things in a significantly different way than when you than just saying "I'll search twitter for GE, I'll bet I'll find them there, and they're going to likely be more responsive than any other channel because it's all in public."
Generally speaking, I really hope that outfits like NPR and the brands and such don't all just go to Threads and instead choose to really own their identity and self-host on federated services.
What double sucks about this is that every time I've seen something like it, it's some middle manager who fights tooth and nail to try to get their team anything and is given a budget of $6.37 and whatever they can find in the break room for 100 people. I have unfortunately been that guy a few too many times and had to explain to absolutely clueless managers that doing nothing instead is preferable.
I think you're right. I didn't get too specific but that was the part I intended in the "small subset" comment I made, along with others like FairPhone, who I assume offer this.
It will cost them money, but I'd guess they did the math on whether it was worth it to stop fighting this one and potentially have a bill go through that cost them even more. There are also some things that seem to be carve outs that feel practically written by Apple's lawyers.
Anyway, I will defend Apple against some of the absolute dogshit takes people have about them here, but Apple's stance on repairability and right to repair is absolutely dumb. They spent a not inconsiderable amount of time on the action they're taking to fight climate change and getting the Apple Watch to carbon neutral in the last big keynote and I couldn't help thinking the entire time that if they just made it so that anyone with opposable thumbs could replace the back plate, screen, and battery in 20 minutes or less using tools you can find in any junk drawer, it would do far more than any recycling program or charging during off hours or whatever else.
Ditto for just basic support and software lockouts. Apple is generally pretty good keeping software support (5 years is entirely common) but the arbitrary cut offs are fucking dumb. I have an Apple Watch 3, and they cut software support for that last year which is fine. The form factor has aged out, it was bordering on under-powered a year or two after it launched, and it was time. But I also have a 2015 5k iMac that is just humming along running just fine and that a group of volunteers can get running the latest, no problem. I have no doubt that if that Apple Watch wasn't locked down to hell and back, someone would figure out how to get it running debian or something so it isn't just landfill fodder.
I'd really, really like to see legislation that addresses this. When I pay off a phone at a carrier, I can unlock it and take it where I want. When a manufacturer gives up on supporting that device, they should be required to at minimum unlock it, if not provide source for at least base level of user-space.
This is just not correct. Keyboard support in particularly is a checkbox or two in prefs, and then you have out of the box support for mapping/remapping any menu command, remapping mod keys, text expansion macros, remapping all kinds of OS controls like spotlight/mission control, etc, easily typing your favorite symbols like º or ® just by holding a modifier... Toss in Keyboard Maestro and Raycast/Launchbar/Alfred, and you're going to have difficulty finding any GUI OS that handles keyboards as well.
This is another just purely nonsense statement. "Real" Linux is itself an open source reimplementation of Unix, more or less, and macOS is posix compliant. Idk what this comment is even supposed to mean - open a terminal, install whatever packages you like, carry about your day. I've had to spend a significant amount of time in linux/macOS terminals, and in practice all that I usually have to remember is which package manager I have to use or whether it's bash/zsh.