i've never been in one and the nearest is apparently 2h away, so i'm curious about this part in tfs:

> Shoppers follow unwritten rules: move along, don't block the way, step aside to check your phone.

i find it rather hard to believe that people do this en masse because of some "behave, we're in the costco" impulse. can anyone confirm this?

> Checkout lines form orderly queues.

on this other hand, this part does not seem particularly novel or noteworthy?

Pluribus is a starkly fitting show for this moment: a dystopic wish-fulfillment dark fantasy that allows the viewer to self-insert as a character who is the absolute center of the universe and simultaneously the victim of a unrestricted global conspiracy to undermine their sanity and agency.

I cannot think of a more perfect work in this modern moment to reflect the viewership.

algorithmic feeds

We need to find, capture, try, execute, and then piss on the grave of whoever decided that the word "algorithm" was the best word for what they didn't like about Facebook. Their hasty decision, combined the word's apparent mainstream sexiness (who knew?!) is going to result in the word's loss.

The summary makes the article sound a lot dumber than it really is. But it is dumb, and the core dumbness from which the rest of the article derives is here:

I thought about setting up a self-hosted media server to stream everything to my phone. But ultimately, I got lazy

He knew real the solution to all his problems, but like he says, "I got lazy," and so he went to his comical Plan B. Despite weird statements like this..

Many folks are sick of streaming in general. They’re sick of giant corporations, algorithmic playlists, and an internet infested with AI slop.

..he actually doesn't appear to have any problem with streaming at all. It's just that he had been using a proprietary streaming service called Spotify, which does things very differently than a user-oriented approach (e.g. self-hosted subsonic API server) would do. Navidrome isn't a giant corporation, the algorithm of its playlist is "play what the user told me to play" and whatever AI Slop you play depends completely on what AI Slop you decided to add to your collection.

But by conflating streaming tech with proprietary streaming services, he gets to make up a lot of non-existent problems with streaming and sneak by the core premise of his entire article: "I got lazy."

So he decided against the obvious, and instead, went with a less convenient alternative. I particularly liked the part where he called cassettes "compact and super-portable" by comparing them to vinyl, instead of the actual media competition: flash memory, remote spinning-rust, etc.

Does Android even have a music store anymore?

Hopefully not and never. OS-specific music (?!) stores are a very silly idea.

As a [reluctant, but what else is there?] Android user, my music comes from the same sources it would come from if I owned no phone at all.

i knew something felt off this past weekend.

As a nomad traveling around with a phone and ancient Surface

Ugh, I think no matters what happens, you lose. If your car has a CD player and is the main place where you usually listen to music, then it seems you would need to keep your CD collection in the car too, and that puts an upper limit on its size. Between the back seats and trunk, I could maybe fit a dozen or two beer-cases-repurposed-as-CD-boxes, but it would completely take over those spaces. And keeping even that small of a subset of the collection organized enough to be binary-searchable sure sounds annoying.

That was always the problem with CDs as a playback medium instead of just a long-term storage medium: inserting the CD back into the collection after playback. It's not terrible when you have shelving [and enough of it, since it keeps growing] but as soon as you have to pack things in boxes, it gets pretty hard to work with. I remember for a time there, before I had all my music ripped, where we were just listening to same 30 or 40 CDs sitting out in a loose unboxed pile that I jokingly called the "L1 music cache," over and over again. ;-)

Elsewhere you mention that you live in the car and simply don't have anywhere else to store things, so I guess this general kind of problem is going to be recurring. (Where do you keep your air fryer and microwave and coffee maker and stove and your wife's decorative bathroom hand towels that you're supposed to never use, the cat litter box, and the air mattress you put out when you have company staying over at your car for the weekend?) j/k but my point is that the cars have never been really CD friendly but if the car is your house and storage shed too, then .. oy, do whatever you can but it's never going to be convenient.

Music can't be the only thing where the market isn't catering to you. I might even go as far as suggesting the housing market as the number one mis-cater!

do you see how .. the decision to take [CD players] away seems much more to do with power and selling subscriptions than practical engineering capability?

Oh, sure! I didn't know that you couldn't get car CDs players anymore (I'm admittedly very out of touch with the new car market), but it doesn't surprise me that they're no longer something you can just take for granted by default. No doubt pushing subscription services played a later role in de-emphasizing CD players in cars, but you should keep in mind that real consumer demand had been doing that too, ever since around the turn of the century when HD-based MP3 players started to get popular. Subscriptions to proprietary streaming services are a bit of a late-comer to the CD funeral.

Even if there were no such thing as music streaming subscriptions, a lot of people today would be using their phones even in CD-ready cars. They would just party like it's 2001, playing files ripped from CDs. I don't know if that would be enough to remove CD players from cars, but I bet at least some manufacturers would have.

If you don't have a CD drive, then you don't get to rip CDs. You'll have to acquire your files some other way. And/or buy a CD drive.

How can I rip CDs to a phone?

You don't. You rip them to your fileserver at home, and run a subsonic-API server on that. The phone connects to it over a VPN, and a subsonic API player plays it to the car with bluetooth.

seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

I went to a couple movies a few months ago, and I didn't see any of that. My fat American ass had plenty of room in the reclining sear, and the next row of seats was a few feet beneath me and seemingly ten feet away. The theaters have become fucking luxurious.

But it's expensive. And I wonder if that's what's keeping the obnoxious screaming kids away.

And you're totally right about the half hour of ads. That's definitely the worst part, these days.

But the seats and space .. omg those problems are over, at least here in the super-wealthy gigantic metropolis of .. Albuquerque.

Look, I know "nuclear device" is correctly generic, so that RTGs and things like them, legitimately count. But let's be serious: right around the very same time this real stuff happened, some really great fake stuff happened too: the movie Goldfinger.

And once you've watched Goldfinger, "nuclear device" is just a euphemism for a bomb. So don't go calling RTGs "nuclear devices," please.

it is pretty clear trump would pardon or vacate any fine against a right winger org.

The president does not yet have pardoning power over civil judgements. Maybe a constitutional amendment to do that is coming, but we haven't had a vote on it yet.

Some good has come from promoting more user speech online, but also a lot of bullying, harassment, echo chambers, doxxing, stochastic terrorism, and so on.

You make it sound as dangerous as a 1775 soap box that people like Sam Adams would stand upon and shout from, or a pamphlet-printing-press that someone like Thomas Paine might use, where in both cases the goal was often to rowse the rabble into protest and action.

But is the internet really that dangerous?

"The platforms" are, at best, a percent of the internet.

Sign up for a linode, put up any sort of website you can imagine on it, and explain why you would choose for the algorithms you write or install, to work the way that you fear.

It doesn't have to be as bad as you say, unless you want it. That's essential freedom.

This would result in suppression of anti Trump opinion

It will result in suppression of all anti- power/wealth opinion, i.e. all criticism of government or big-pocketed business.

This change is sponsored by litigious motherfuckers. Trump is only the instance-du-jour, a few percent of the overall threat, though very much a shining example of it.