Well, finding the culprit should be easy - just look for someone who made a whole lot of disk orders from AliExpress over the course of a few weeks.

Correction: LinkedIn was originally just a job-and-resume posting site. And while the vast majority of its end users still treat it as such, the site's owners have been desperately trying to turn it into something else - more of a Facebook/Twitter hybrid - for almost a decade now.

I log into LinkedIn maybe once every couple of years. When I do, the first thing I always see is a huge number of pointless drivel posts that have no place on a "job-and-resume posting site", which in turn reminds me of why LinkedIn sucks so much.

Anything short of 100% is merely a cost of doing business. This is no victory, this is yet another loss in the long history of losses against corporations.

Optimization is most often a pathway to higher levels of reward. As a result, there is an evolutionary drive that has reinforced the concept of taking the path of least resistance.

Humans are fundamentally at odds with their own nature but this is amplified when you consider which humans are selected for executive positions. As a result of these evolutionary pressures an external force is required to enforce the correct prioritization.

Jellyfin FTW!

How the heck does plex have 120 employees?

As to why this was just posted now, it's because - of those 120 employees who went to the retreat, only one survived... and it took him almost 9 years to escape.

I'm not sure what idiots thought it was a good idea but it seems pretty damn irresponsible to connect vital resources to the internet. Frankly, it's past time we had a law where if the NSA can remotely knock your vital infrastructure (for civilization) offline that your company gets to pay a substantial penalty. If it happens a second time within a few years then the company executives get prosecuted for criminal negligence.

Well, speaking for myself - I may "rent" them but I also immediately decrypt them and store a local copy elsewhere.

I don't buy media I can't decrypt, one way or another.

I likely would still be using my Kindle 3 Keyboard, except my dog got hold of it at one point.

I still think that was the best form factor they've ever offered.

Obligatory.

At Walmart, extremely low quality everything is available year-round.

Well... if you've seen a dick size measuring contest and said, "those are really nice dicks" then you have likely just found out something new about yourself. ;)

You're missing the point of the AP, and it's actual composition. I worked at a daily newspaper most of my way through undergrad and knew the ins and outs of the AP better than most.

The main use of the AP was to get international news to outlets who couldn't afford to place staff in places further away from their own location. A great example is any international war, though even big national events (9/11 being a great example) are also places where AP stories are valuable.

The AP carries very little editorial content. Yes there are a few editorial writers who publish there but the volume from them is minimal compared to the objective news reporting. Some people like to claim otherwise but that is from those who aren't actually looking at the body of work on ap.org.

Unfortunately the newspaper model is indeed dying. Many of us are lamenting it and we're not sure what solution could bring it back. Printed news was supported by advertising, both display ads and classified ads. In the 90s your local daily paper likely had 4-8 pages of classified ads, every day. Now the majority of that is on craigslist or facebook. On Sundays your paper had full color printed advertising inserts from over a dozen retailers; many of those retails have since gone out of business and many of the ones who remain don't advertise that way anymore. Online subscriptions can offset a small part of this, but only a small part. Online advertisements are blocked by most readers' browsers, so that isn't productive for newspapers in many cases either.

The tabloid and editorial "journalism" you refer to is successful because it does a better job of selling crap to its audience. Don't confuse it with the professionals at the AP.

I remember a documentary from decades ago (1970s or 1980s) where they made the point that, at that time anyway, middle-class people had an equivalent standard of living in many ways to what turn-of-the-20th-century rich people accomplished only with a fleet of servants, simply because of technological advancement - we now had microwaves, toasters, instant TV dinners, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, automobiles, etc. etc.

This is mainly intended as a tangent, and is not intended to be relevant to the current discussion.

Especially since January 2025...