>"Do a venn diagram and "TiVo owner" and "@aol.com email address" probably have a lot of overlap"

Have you actually ever used a TiVo for an extended period? Or are you just ignorantly casting aspersions?

Streaming still does not replace all that TiVo does very well, especially if you follow lots of series. I suspect most TiVo users today do stream as well and are very familiar with its up-sides and down-sides and yet still keep and use the TiVo for very valid reasons.

>When the FCC nixed the requirement for offering CableCards, Tivo with any cable subscriber basically became a useless brick."

That mandate drop was 4 years ago. Cox still supports TiVo, for now (and by "support" I mean, it works, with the cable card and tuning adapter, even though it is only 720P and all they ever want to do is try to get me to rent their brand of crappy DVR). Will this continue under Spectrum? Who knows. If not, it is at that point I will decide to try and deal with their crappy non-TiVo DVR, or just drop cable TV completely.

Reply to self. Oh, here is the actual Email:

Weâ(TM)re reaching out to let you know about an upcoming change to SkipModeâ, the functionality on your TiVo DVR that lets you automatically skip commercial breaks on select recorded TV shows.

Beginning November 2, 2026, the current version of SkipMode, using the Skip Button on your TiVo remote, will no longer be available. You will still be able to skip commercials manually using the 30-second skip (â'I) and Fast Forward (â-ïZâ-ïZ) buttons on your remote.

We are also excited to share that in November we will be testing a new Premium Auto Commercial Skip add-on service. Youâ(TM)ll have the opportunity to try the service for free for 30 days and decide if it is right for you. After the 30-day trial period, you will have the option to opt in and add it to your TiVo account for an additional monthly fee.

For now, no action is required. Before November 2, 2026, we will send additional details about the free trial, pricing, and how the new service works.

Thank you for being a TiVo customer.

Sincerely,

TiVo Customer Support
www.tivo.com/support

That function should still be available/effective. I don't use it much, though.

>"Wasn't this single feature half the reason you use TiVo in the first place?"

No. That was a feature added many years after the start of TiVo. It is not necessary, nor does it even work on half the recorded content. The skip feature is a single press to jump through the commercial section, you always have the option to just zoom through the commercials manually. I have not watched commercials for at least 35 years- first by recording painfully with VCR, then conveniently with several models of TiVo (my last/current being the Roamio).

>"The other half is just being able to record the show and watch it whenever you want."

That is one of many features (of course it is the base function of any DVR). The killer feature of TiVo is its ability to learn what you like from your recording and ratings and then

1) Accurately track and record every episode of everything you want with zero intervention. It will shift the schedule or even channel if necessary, across year after year. And do it intelligently so you don't end up with 10 of the same episode.

2) Predict other shows you might like and fill the rest of your storage with many hundreds of hours of things you might want to watch, so there is always something to watch and discover. Yet those recordings never rob space from anything you indicated are important.

And I have yet to see any cable company's DVRs do those. Probably due to patents. Doesn't matter anyway, time is ticking and the whole concept of cable TV is dissolving and I will be left with nothing but "streaming", which is still currently inferior in several ways, and not likely to improve. (And streaming on a TiVo is a mess of slow and annoying. For streaming, I use a Roku Ultra).

>2000 called It want's its Tivo back. Who still uses a Tivo? Who even still has a cable service to hook it to?"

I do. It is a much, much better experience than "streaming". And I do have to pay quite a bit for cable TV service, which sucks. I expect it won't be long now before I am forced off.

Yep, I got the Email yesterday. Unfortunately, I wasn't shocked. TiVo was sold to another company and they are going to start trying to squeeze customers for more revenue as they become less relevant. But I am not going to pay extra for the feature I have had for many years. Besides, the skip function only works on less than half the content, anyway. It isn't difficult to zoom through commercials manually.

I didn't want to move to the "new experience UI" either, because it is just like all the streaming devices with their HUGE graphics and crazy navigation. The old UI is much easier, faster, and logical. Thankfully, there was an option to keep using the old UI. But I don't think the newest models allow that.

I love my TiVo, but I expect it will be my last. I don't want to use the new UI, and the cable company has ALWAYS been extremely hostile to TiVo equipment/owners. Having to use a "tuning adapter" is stupid and has caused issues over the years. And several years ago, cable-card users got banished into 720P only mode for ALL channels now. Now add Cox being just bought by Spectrum and I am guessing it will only be more hostile and expensive in the future.

And yes, I completely understand the utility and limitations of streaming services. I have a Roku Ultra. Streaming has its own problems and frustrations as well. It is not a better experience than using TiVo nor is it a drop-in replacement. Especially when it comes to finding and tracking things I want to see.

>"There's also talk of a "Vice City Motor Fest", which might feature "classic cars, customized vehicles, lowriders, motorcycles, tropical graphics, and local entertainment within a controlled, family-appropriate setting."

Um, yeah. Nothing says "family-appropriate" more than Grand Theft Auto...

>"The sheriff of Miami-Dade county has publicly opposed plans"

There is hope for them, yet.

>"Remember when iPhones used to come with free headphones and a phone charger (including the wall plug)? It didn't feel so much like Apple giving you free goodies"

And the misuse of the word "free" continues. Those weren't "free", they were included at no extra/additional cost/price. I mean, you pay me $350,000, and I will sell you my house and give you the kitchen "for free"!! Free kitchens!!!! To be free, there would be no requirement to buy anything (free of cost and of obligation).

>"Hyundai is charging customers extra for a driver's display"

End of the world! They are making a feature an extra cost which the consumer has the freedom to buy or not. OMG! At least THEY CONTINUE TO OFFER THE OPTION....

>"still kind of a slap in the face for a feature traditionally viewed as standard fare."

Tell that to Tesla and certain other vehicles that don't even offer it at all.

I do agree it sucks when you have to play the "trim" game- where there is a feature you want and you have to drag in thousands of dollars of other features you don't need/want to get what you do want. But that has been the vehicles norm for my whole life. They aren't going to offer every customer a completely custom vehicle. It would be a logistics and sales nightmare.

>"in the EV's case, the base trim gives customers the full Tesla-screen experience"

Yeah, the crappy no dashboard experience. The "hey, why not try to unsafely look at the center of the car while driving" experience. The "we don't like physical controls" experience. So don't buy that experience, regardless of the brand or model. I didn't. When I went EV shopping last year, I immediately threw out ANY vehicle that had no front display/dashboard, that had no way to display analog indicators, or had no physical controls for anything important. (Ended up with an Ariya- great controls/displays/layout).

My Sonicares last for several years each (been using them for decades). But I am also careful not to wet anything but the brush head. It is a common failure point to have water enter through the shaft.

>"Dyson is entering oral care with the $499 CameraJet, a smart toothbrush that uses a tiny camera and on-device AI to detect gaps between teeth and automatically blast them with mouthwash"

$500 for a finicky device that does a poor job trying to replace what it takes pennies of money and under a minute to do with floss. No thanks.

>"The brush head oscillates nearly 1,000 times each second while the angle of oscillation is constantly changing to improve the effectiveness of your brushing"

Yeah, I have a $50 Sonicare that does that job just fine after I floss, thanks. And I can get low-priced replacement heads at Costco in multipacks that regularly go on sale...

I also had the same thing on my Linux user's group Wiki. Since the wiki is very old, it has hundreds of changes on each of thousands of "pages". That is on top of all the other wiki stuff and search stuff. So it is millions of permutations. Our little computer was essentially DDOS attacked which never ended. Our own users of the site would get loading errors or no response because it was so constantly overwhelmed.

Robots.txt completely ignored, of course. Then I tried banning IP addresses. That worked for a while, then the addresses started coming from everywhere, in the many hundreds of thousands. I didn't want to, but ultimately I had to put up a static information page and the rest of the entire site behind a login, because there was absolutely no way to control/stop it. Fortunately, it really is a mostly-private site so that was the easy way out.

>"Today, git.kernel.org receives about 6M daily requests demanding to see random commits. Of these, 66% are still immediately batted away with the Anubis challenge, but 33% are now solving the math and getting through to the main site â" because apparently what we have to offer is worth spending a ton of cycles to calculate the Anubis challenge... With a bunch of generous assumptions, legitimate requests are only about 2% of git.kernel.org traffic â" everything else are scrapers..."

I would love to calculate just how much electricity and other resources are being wasted on AI crawlers solving useless challenges and scraping useless duplicate data. And in the process, raising electric rates and making RAM and storage unaffordable for millions of users and businesses.

Oh, and also in the process of this "war", legit human users are now being "automatically" misidentified as bots and locked completely out of web sites with zero recourse. And you thought that CAPTCHAs were bad...

"Edgesuite" by Akamai is an apparently one of these poor netizens performing a "protection service" that is flagging Firefox and/or other browsers under Linux on some of their "protected" sites as bots and banning access. Go there and all you will get after certain pages or searches is a cryptic error message like:

  Access Denied
  Reference #18.8b551702.1787659556.715cd97
  https://errors.edgesuite.net/1... ... 56.715cd97

Of course, the link has zero info as well. And there is no way to get whitelisted or request help from Akamai. If you can find any info on their site, it is just to claim they can't do anything and direct you to contact the admin of the site affected. The web sites that enroll in this crap have little to no control, have no idea they are blocking legit people, and will not help users either (they are not set up to do so).

At work, we are now unable to use homedepot.com and lowes.com (with any browser under Linux, which all of ours are, of course) for this exact reason. And no, our IP address is not listed in any of their blacklists as poor reputation. Interestingly, I have no issue with those websites when at home, under Linux/Firefox. So it could be IP address, or version of Firefox or whatever browser, or what screen size you might have, or how many requests come from one IP address (not like we visit either of those sites often), or any other number of super-secret criteria. Utterly infuriating.

>"vegans are pretty harmless and their obnoxious virtue-signalling should be regarded with amused tolerance."

[joke time]

How do you know if someone is a vegan?
Don't worry, they will tell you over and over...

>"We can easily see that the obesity trend in the US accelerated after the introduction of aspartame."

Correlation is not causation. I seriously doubt that aspartame caused obesity. Far more rational and reasons are:

1) Consumption of way, way too many calories
2) Consumption of way more carbohydrates
3) Lack of exercise

And that #1, above, is pretty apparent when you look at how much people are actually consuming. I have been on a diet for 3 months now. All I did is reduce my caloric intake to significantly below needed and, voila, I lost 21 pounds (so now 144lbs). It really is that simple... I didn't significantly change what I eat, just how much I eat at each meal. I didn't start exercising (although I should). I didn't change when I eat. And I didn't use any medication or special supplements.

The real issue is that I will gradually start over-eating again and gain it back over the next year or so. It is hard to make a permanent change.