Yeah I was thinking Idiocracy...

I think that movie was prophetic - the issue is that they were way optimistic in their timeline for how long it would take...

http://www.davidmcelroy.org/wp...

But yeah maybe some strange love child of Max Headroom, Idiocracy and Johnny Mnemonic.

I'll switch to AppleTV 4k and maybe just a vanilla Rapbian OS for light youTube use...

I really like(d) my Rokus - I guess I've gotten my money's worth out of them -paid a one time price for each and used them for years to let me watch the various streaming services I used

YouTube
Nebula
Curiosity Stream
Wondrium (Formerly The Great Courses Plus)
NetFlix (now unsubscribed)
Hulu (now unsubscribed)
I think I set up Disney+ and Paramount when we would turn them on to binge stuff).. or that migh ahve been the AppleTV can't recall - depends on what room we wanted to be in

Point being they were way way better than the "smart TVs" (which we just disconnected because of privacy and shitty UIs - preferring to use them as dumb monitors) and way better than the very spammy feeling FireTV. -

AppleTV is ok though I preferred the Roku

but with this - this is a bridge too far - I just refuse to be advertised to - I get it - if they need recurring revenue they could have said "hey you need to pay us a small yearly subscription to pay us to keep the platform up to date, etc" and I'd be OK with that but I am so gorram sick of everything trying to advertise at me in every blank space / moment.

Windows 11 is looking to put ads (recommendations for windows store apps for now...) in the start menu.. and just ads are every-effing where...

Just waiting for ads on my chopsticks... and for someone to try and get me to sign a EULA that agrees to let them tattoo ads on the inside of my eyelids with glow in the dark ink.. geez

I'm so sick of Idiocracy proving to have been a true work of prophecy in so many ways - except they way way over estimated how long it would take... /sigh

I know some folks who work in the industry and had their show binned specifically for this reason -

For their pilot they put in hundreds of hours of their own time with no guarantee it would ever make them a dime - they got picked up after getting good peoples choice votes and the series got greenlit but of course that means the network got the rights and then when it wasn't making boatloads of money RIGHT NOW they shitcanned it for tax reasons after 1 season.

It was worth more to the network as a tax write off as a total loss than to keep the rights and consider releasing on DVD in the future or sell the rights back to the creators to let them continue it elsewhere

But when a studio writes it off like that they can never use it again due to the rules (or they can get in big trouble tax wise)

This is why some really great shows that could have become cult classics just never got DVD / Blu-Ray releases etc...

Late stage capitalism sucks. The whole system sucks.

Frankly I'm surprised they are still willing to work in the industry at all. Then again if I had an ounce of their talent.. maybe I'd be playing a different toon (bad pun intended).

Honestly, for me it's more about piece of mind when I'm away that "all is quiet" at home... I can kind of review things - see that the cat sitter stopped by, the neighbor's kid once again chased his ball into the yard for the bazillionth time but nothing untoward.. nobody skulking around.

Also once caught a person doing door to door canvasing on behalf of a politician illegally putting things into US Mail slot (that is a serious no no)

BAAH I meant FOSS not OOS

Seriously, the more enshittified Google and Alexa and even HomeKit stuff gets (and as much as I like to bash on Apple, they've been some of the least enshittified to a point if you are willing to drink their Kool-aid)

but yeah the more enshittified they get the more it becomes clear that with Thread/Matter devices and the improving FOSS voice assistant that the only smart move for a smart home is going to be away from commercial offerings.

Yeah, I know not for everyone... a lot of folks want stuff that "just works" but when vendors feel they have you locked in and start jacking up prices, when digital libraries can just decide "that content you 'bought' is no longer available" the more they abuse their customers the more willing to look into the open source alternatives people will be.

maybe. I suppose never underestimate folks willingness to not have to think about it... /sigh

Thinking of all those AI images with "writing" or extra fingers or weird anatomy... all those "hallucinations" like entirely confabulating non existent case law

so I am terrified of the idea of AI mapping..

Remember when Apple was routing people into the ocean?

They managed to do that without LLMs and stable diffusion mucking about - I am just terrified by what kind of Seussian dystopia maps are going to enter if they let "AI" have at them..

Can we please just let some new thing of the week displace all the AI hype.. All this so called AI stuff is interesting but businesses putting it in place and relying on it this early in the game is a recipe for disaster

The problem with Fallout76 is that you can "use up" the interesting content fairly quickly - and then the "keep playing" incentive is just repetitive multiplayer stuff

The story arc and quest line/side quests are interesting enough if you go through hem once, but grindy enough that unlike Fallout 3, and 4, I had no interest in replaying fully from scratch a bunch...

So, I completed all the main and side quests in the game and was basically left with just grind/repeat for their season progress which had very little in the way of interesting rewards.

Yeah you can collect a bunch of junk to scrap to build CAMPs and some folks make meta games out of doing so - building neat houses/ collecting patterns etc.. but it's not enough to keep the interest

TL;DR: you can get the game play thorough it, get quiet a few hours out of it and then unless you like the gridy/repetitive mission stuff just walk away having gotten your moneys worth out of the base game (probably)

I dunno maybe you'd even enjoy replaying the content a few times - some of the quest lines felt too grindy for me to want to redo them ... instead, I'd rather go back to Fallout 4 and make a noob nd say "hmm this game, I'm only using pistols" or something for a challenge (scaling sucks on FO4 without mods to scale enemies)

point is I do think now that the price tag is lower get it on steam sale and play through - you can treat it mostly like a single player game and ignore the MMO aspect if you like - it's got a few fun quests etc.. but the MMO side with incentives to collect stuff for your builds / patterns / clothes - I dunno I never found that super appealing and yeah if you are worried they might turn it off and take that away - I get the point, but like .. there's certainly entertainment value in playing - it's a game and you can get fun from it but I also get what you mean - In theory I can still fire up HalfLife or Portal or Deus Ex... though the graphics really are kind of crappy unless you get one of the remastered versions - the nostalgia is weird - I fondly remember many games that if I go back now I'm like OMG did they always look that chonky?

I'm rambling, sorry.

TL:DR: There's value for the money even if yo don't "buy" a copy as we used to - not dismissing your concerns just think there's value and entertainment to be had

From the /. summary you'd think the article was saying web sites are gone and it's al doom

TFA is saying what my own experience says:

There are plenty of web sites out there but yes, it's true there's a vast amount of content being generated for and within a smaller number of big social media/aggregators

For instance, lets use Slashdot as an example - how many years have /.ers complained that folks just read the summary/respond to the summary and not TFA? (Oh look how meta, I'm doing it)

Someone could point to Shalshdot and say "oh it's a shame there are no sites anymore",... yet most every article here is pointing at a news or tech site or blog or whatever the source is -

Yes Youtube and Tic-Toc are hosting the content and folks create FOR Them - TWITx and similar are a mix of "content for that site" with links to outside but there are if anything, more sites than ever out there.

TFA mentions that we've kind of offloaded our curation/discovery to the social media sites and algorithms... and it's got a point.. The Internet is a bit of a firehose... it can be hard to drink from it. Social media algorithms do offer to help with that but of course they're optimized not so much to help us discover and delight but to drive revenue...

However I think a bigger issue is that search (yes google I'm talking about you most specifically, but other big players too) has been so co-opted by pay for play placing and also by aggressive SEO and junk content farms spitting out low effort crap designed to abuse and tickle the algorithm that you have to be actively looking for the quality to get it.

It means likely using a meta search engine like SearxNG or similar and likely sticking to desktop rather than mobile ... I know I could not tolerate the current state of the Interwebz without Firefox running NoScript and uBlock Origin.

ok babbling on

TL;DR: no there are plenty of sites - TFA says it well, the summary here not so much.

Glad I got one when it came out...
I had an older watch - I probably could have gone another release cycle/generation of watch before updating but I use Siri on it a LOT and the "siri now on board watch" was just too good an improvement to pass up - along with several generations of incremental battery life improvements .. I went for it when it first came out.

As someone who has suffered a spontaneous pneumothorax (collapsed lung) in the past, I actually do have more than a passing interest in my blood 02 levels - but I own a finger meter that is perfectly serviceable for the few times a year I feel I need to check up on it.. and having that tool on my watch (or not) is not a deal maker/breaker for me.

My wife also got one - I don't think she's used the 02 meter once but she uses the finger snap gesture all the time (new to that series)

glad we got ours before all this kerfuffle.

A small part of me is like "hmm I wonder if folks will start paying obscene amounts for used ones" but the other part of me says "even if they are, that is such an excellent example of late-stage capitalism gone off the rails that I would feel dirty partaking"

For what it's worth, the feature still works as of this moment - they didn't software disable it as of Watch OS 10.2

Johnny Harris (youtuber) did a great mini documentary on the whole "why are the machines always down" and it was a fascinating tale that basically said that McDonalds corporate and Taylor were likely conspiring against those guys.. it was pretty good stuff - he even did some social engineering posing as a repair tech at one point.

Yeah if the employees are miserable due to quality of life - I mean.. at this point in time, I know very few LGBTQIA+ folks who would willingly relocate to Texas and I have to think the states record for diversity and equity and inclusion would not really impress BIPOC either ..

So if your company is trying to attract the best talent and values diversity, Texas is maybe not a great choice?

I would quit my job on the spot if told I had to relocate to TX.

SO yeah if FF (Gecko) goes, we have Chromium (blink), Safari (WebKit) and Palemoon (Goanna)

WebKit already really disappoints in terms of extensions / adblocking, and while I have been a long time user of Palemoon, it breaks too many sites I regularly use - so it's very niche for me

With Google actively working to kill ad blockers, this is really not a good sign for the free and open web.

I use FF because I hate the Chrome UI

I hate how FF keeps trying to be more and more like Chrome all the time - I wish PaleMoon was more compatible with sites like FB (yeah FB sucks but that is where my friends and family all are and if I want to stay in touch with them I have to use it and with NoScript and UBlock on FF it's tolerable)

But at this point, I really am worried the day will come when web sites will just outright refuse to play with anything but Chromium or webkit. and those both totally limit/cripple extensions.

All because Google the advertising company is also Google the main browser maker and also owns YouTube the main video platform... I know we used to all complain about Microsoft acting like a monopoly but damn, that was peanuts compared to what Google's getting away with

I'm not an Alexa person, but damn this pisses me off.

IFTTT has been a really useful tool to let home users really push their smart home setups. I'm pretty sure I've heard rumblings that Amazon is not making jillions of dollars from it and thus sees it as more of a liability.. and in their quest to maximize profit, I have to wonder if they're going to eventually just strip more and more functionality as they lay off as much of their dev teams as they can ...

I've always been a passive open source supporter, but the more enshittification that happens in tools and systems I rely upon, the more I see the writing on the wall that I should be prioritizing OSS in my choices..

I bought into the Apple ecosystem because my spouse was an Apple person, and it was the path of least resistance rather than trying to get competing assistants/systems to play nice with each other (stuff like I was using Google Keep for grocery lists - which would work on iPhone but my spouse really liked using Siri and the Apple Watch to add stuff to the list.. just going with Apple so we were both using the same things greatly simplified the integration fight

I have poked around with Home Assistant and I think that I should probably move toward that as much as possible .. but it's that voice assistant thing - the apple watch and iPhone and Siri do work incredibly well for us to control the lights and such and it's my understanding that there isn't quite a "ready for prime time" solution for completely abandoning Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri yet...