Gets carried away in overly rambly rants about unimportant bullshit, uses fancy words without understanding their meaning, has a complete lack of self awareness.
Likes budgies.
The tradeoff kinda made sense at the dawn of streaming, when the transaction was basically trading quality for better pricing and convenience.
Nowadays? Yeaaaaah I don’t know about that chief
Crazy to think that we lost all the advantages that streaming offered, kept all the disadvantages, piled on a few more disadvantages on top of that, and people went “sure that makes sense 24 bucks a month worth it bro”
It sure is fascinating how surges in the usage of pirate platforms tend to coincide with eras of worsening value proposition in entertainment. We should really get some top notch analysts on this to get an explanation.
That’s true, I have to imagine a significant amount of the people driving the push for the IPO are only doing so to drive value up, cash out and vanish
I think there are a lot of extreme measures that would theoretically increase its profitability that they have not yet taken, most of which I have to assume are in the cards in the foreseeable future.
Most of them are, of course, measures that would severely impact user experience in a very negative way, but it’s clear at this point that they are drunk on hubris and believe users will stay no matter what.
I had some difficulties like these in the past, and what helped me was looking into amateur theater. There are part time (2 to 4 hours a week usually) amateur theater/drama schools that form closed groups and that group stays together over the years as they progress (with some inevitable degree of turnover obviously). I still talk to and meet with some of the people I met through that even though I left a bit after covid hit.
These kinds of spaces are good for people in our situation for multiple reasons:
You will however have to look into the details of what kind of options are in your area for that and how they work and when the groups are formed and what levels there are and all of that jazz because I can’t assume that it will work the same as it works here. If any of them are like my school was, then they offer smaller experiences (like a weekend or a month in the summer) so that you can dip your toes and get a feeling of how things work.
With all of that said, you should still look into regular therapy sessions while you are going through this. For people like us, our own brain is our worst enemy in this situation, and we need an external, specialized perspective that recontextualizes things for us. It will help more than you can imagine if you stick with it somewhat regularly.
They pay me by the word, don’t tell anybody
This, for me, is a good example of why the assessments that I’ve seen lately about how much Lemmy/Kbin may or may not have caught on, and the assessments about how Reddit may or may not have been impacted by the migration, are way, way too early and kind of nonsensical to make right now.
It is important to understand that Reddit is set on becoming a public company, and for a public company, not taking any avenue that could provide additional revenue is essentially only one step below setting that money on fire. If there’s a chance that something will make the company more efficient, you are kinda obligated to do it. This will constantly (and increasingly) lead to policies like this, which sacrifice user convenience or add additional friction to the experience, because an experience that is open, accessible, non-intrusive and non-restrictive inherently implies lost opportunities of revenue at each one of those unrestricted points (which is a weird paradox of digital capitalism, in which to make your product more profitable it has to become worse, which flies in the face of the traditional capitalist theory that you make the most money by making the best product, but that’s another story and I don’t wanna get sidetracked).
Anyway what I wanna get at, is that each person has their own points of friction (mobile becoming app-only, old reddit dissappearing, who knows) past which they would find the idea of transferring platform less intrusive than the experience they would get by staying on Reddit. And the fact that cutting Google off is even in the realms of discussion shows that Reddit is very willing to reach those points and beyond. If these changes pile up and the friction created in the experience by them becomes significantly greater than the idea of transferring platforms, then it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Reddit will bleed out slowly by taking actions like this. Time will tell.
That MSoft will go back to earning exactly what they deserve for Windows installations
I’m reminded of the story of William Davis getting hooked on cigarettes because he insisted on smoking real cigarettes instead of props in the first episodes of X Files
The only correct dimensions for pants are the dimensions that allow you to steal a second pair of pants underneath them
mid 90s to mid 2000s style was the peak I won’t hear otherwise
exactly! you command the 5 ton murdermachine Mr Carman, fucking act like it jeez
I’m so utterly socially incompetent that I pretend I wasn’t intending to cross and just keep going down my side of the street just to avoid this kind of interaction
For me, the main concern is that Epic doesn’t have a system of purchasable keys, even after all these years. Most stores in PC have had a system with keys that has allowed users to purchase games from 3d party sites such as GreenManGaming and the like. That system has been one of the key reasons why prices have stayed in check in the platform, and why cool stuff like HumbleBundles exists.
Without this kind of system, every time a game is exclusive to the Epic platform, it, in effect, has a single price point with no possible competition or alternative, which is no different than a console ecosystem… And a lot of the pricing on those is not great, to say the least.
Until they have that, supporting the growth and consolidation of that store would be potentially shooting myself in the foot as a consumer.
EDIT - Turns out, I had my info somewhat outdated, this was introduced at some point recently, at least with some retailers.
However, on second check it doesn’t apply to games with Epic Store exclusivity, apparently (or at least the ones I’ve checked). It seems to only apply to games that are not exclusive. So concern still valid, unfortunately.
If someone has more info about it I’d love to hear it because it looks unclear at the moment.
Three additional things that you have to keep in mind are that:
1 - Enterprise storage is much, much denser (as in, capacity per physical space occupied) than you would expect.
2 - These systems have capacity recovery features (primarily compression and deduplication) that save a lot more storage than you would expect.
3 - The elements in the infrastructure are periodically refreshed by migrating them to newer infrastructure (think of how you could migrate two old 500GB disks to a single modern 1TB disk to save the physical space of a disk).
As an example about point 1, this is what IBM advertises in their public whitepaper for their Storage Scale systems (https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/R0Q1DV1X):
“IBM Storage Scale System is based on proven IBM Storage 2U24 hardware that can be expanded with additional storage enclosures up to 15.4PB of total capacity in a single node and 633YB in a single cluster. You can start with 48TB using half-populated flash nodes or create a fully-populated NVMe flash solution with 24, 2.5” drives in capacities of 3.84TB, 7.68TB, 15.36TB or 30TB. Using the largest capacity 30TB NVMe drives, up to 720TB total flash capacity, in a 2U form factor, along with associated low weight and low power consumption. Adding storage enclosures is easy as up to 8 enclosures (each 4u with 102 drives) can accommodate up to 816 drives of 10TB, 14TB or 18TB or 14.6PB of total raw HDD capacity.”
In short, you end up packing a stupid amount of storage in relatively moderate spaces. Combined with the other two points, it helps keep things somewhat under control. Kinda.
I don’t remember names, but many users around here called this to the letter