discardable_dan

Yes and no. I would agree, but housing is, for the most part, fungible (at least for people with tech salaries). If I sold my house, I could pay for rent in my high-cost area for the better part of a decade with just the income off the sale. I am starting to think I might be crazy not to sell and pocket the money: I could rent down the street and pay rent off my salary while that large pile of money collects rent. A house isn't a particularly liquid asset, and half a house worth of liquidity seems like a safer position in the current market.

I can't tell if this is satire. Draws by insufficient material almost never occur in Grandmaster chess. I have not seen a single grandmaster game end this way in a year of watching top-level chess games daily. If you inspect all of the dozens of draws in this world's Tata Steel, which included ~300 GM-level games, you won't find a single that ends this way.

> And hosting a font file entails dumping it next to your index.html file and adding some very basic CSS. Not exactly difficult.

If you are a 60-year-old woodworker living in Appalachia trying to set up an online store to sell hand-carved flutes, this task is essentially impossible.

How can a CDN fail to retain an IP address, at least for the purposes of knowing where to send the response? The ruling doesn't say that Google stored the IP, causing the issue, but merely that the user's IP showed up in a packet sent to Google.

It's loading fonts. So squarespace needs to host those fonts, fine. But more to the point, it could be argued even the Squarespace CDN is "different" from the actual website, so we need CDN shims that forward local domain requests to the CDNs and return the results. All to hide an IP number for downloading fonts." Moreover, "host it yourself" is easy if you're technically skilled, but very, very difficult if you aren't.

On its face, this appears to be death of the third-party CDN. The largest issue is this means companies will no longer be able to use third-party hosting services like Squarespace which rely on shared (technically third-party) CDNs.

A secondary, but similar, issue, is that now all embeds are opt-in: streams, videos, everything must first be clicked on to even load the thumbnail.

A third, and less-important, issue is that advertising providers are basically over: the website, on load, can't query the third-party ad service to figure out what ad to display. Which I'm fine with, abstractly, but it's also a very large revenue issue.

This is the essence of CDNs, though. Every offsite CDN is subject to this same ruling, meaning any developer trying to use a third-party CDN for something as simply as loading jQuery is subject to this. For example, on load, https://evanandkatelyn.com/ grabs stuff from: twitch.tv (embedded player), youtube.com (embedded player), facebook.com (likely just a like button), and what I assume are several wordpress CDNs (c0.wp.com, i0.wp.com, s.w.org, ssl.p.jwpcdn.com).

If this ruling is upheld, either (a) browsers need to immediately stop interpreting these commands, instead providing user prompts for _each offsite load event_, or (b) a very large swath of websites are all open to the same legal issue. As a small example, the Aesop wine company site (https://www.aesopwines.com/), made with Squarespace, uses typekit, squarespace, and google CDN loads. They're subject to the same ruling, right? And so on, and so on...

Thank you for confirming. I was a bit aghast at how few light houses the US eastern seaboard had, to the point I doubted the accuracy.

I tried for literal years to avoid dealing with Plaid to send money, but finally broke down this last summer when trying to pay rent electronically. There was literally no other service that would allow me to pay, and mailing a check was not an option. I was aware of the scummy tactics, but literally had no alternative. I'm relieved for this settlement, frankly.

I'm about in your boat, except with HBO Max instead of Apple TV+ (their shows aren't as appealing to me). And as those numbers climb and I look at one to cut, Netflix is the easiest. That's the whole point, though: Netflix is going to be the service on the chopping block before these others.

I'd have to look at my phone. I just know I installed some and got ads in the games, and it made me unsubscribe.

I'm this way _for Netflix_. HBO Max and Disney both have an awesome back-catalog of things to revisit, and I'm constantly finding myself watching an old 90s or 00s movie I had forgotten about on a whim, because it's there. The catalog is curated enough to focus on including good stuff, and HBO Max also has all of Batman: TAS.

A few things:

First, Netflix' games have the same issue as Apple Arcade: the majority are ad-riddled trash. And Apple Arcade has App Store tie-in.

Second, the global numbers are likely to keep Netflix afloat (the same way they seem to for Facebook), but stateside numbers are abysmal compared to emerging services [0]: Netflix boasts 74.02 million subscribers in U.S. and Canada, and HBO Max has 45.2 million domestic (give or take 5 million). Within a year of launch, HBO Max has captured 2/3 the subscription size of Netflix! (Globally, it is barely doing double the numbers of Disney+.) The other competition has proven itself viable in a fraction of the time, and are using their built-in infrastructure to continue to compete. Netflix no longer has any differentiating factor, except that their US adult-targeted content is usually lower quality.

0. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/10/disney-netflix-and-other-str...

I said this again recently, but it's worth repeating: Netflix is on the very fast downward slope. Their catalog is wilting, the space is heating up with well-established competitors moving in and serving the precise content that Netflix originally built their brand on, and their efforts to fund a new catalog with new IP (and taking ownership of old IP) is destroying the business model that made them so appealing in the first place. The writing is very nearly on the wall. At one point, long ago, the Netflix CEO (?) said they were trying to become HBO before HBO became them. And, frankly, they failed. They are still the industry leader, but only for a moment.

This, truly, is the thing to worry about: if it happened here, it likely happened at other companies. Turning a blind eye is a blank check to do it again.

I believe nobody talking about Netflix is worse than people talking negatively about Facebook. Facebook has far-reaching influence over non-US societies, and are generally capable of living off of just those societies. Netflix, on the other hand, is very quickly losing the content war to the likes of Disney and HBO, plus further losing its bread-and-butter catalog backfill to Hulu. Facebook is going to keep being the popular boogeyman, possibly declining over the next decade. Netflix may truly be gone in 10 years, though.

The issue is their content is actually a very poor point in differentiation. I watch a larger amount of TV than I'd care to admit, and honestly Netflix is awful for content.

- Disney has Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, and a long tail of childhood classic films. - HBO has Warner Brothers, DC, Cartoon Network (including a nostalgia back catalog), the best TV shows made in the 00s, and a long tail of adult films. - Netflix's largest successes in the last two years are Tiger King, Squid Game, The Witcher, and a long tail of shows cancelled after Season 1 and short-run miniseries.

At this point, Netflix is a last-resort source of entertainment for me, even after (ad-riddled) YouTube. I mostly only use it to watch their weird reality shows (Blown Away, Sugar Rush) and check out shows friends recommend. I suspect even Paramount+ has a larger selection of TV shows I'd like to watch compared to Netflix.

This is why I cook. At the end of a day where I make no discernable progress, spending time on a tangible product that is done in a finite amount of time helps unwind a great deal.

While I appreciate your stance, I am constantly amazed at how many people are happy to use NFC. It's demonstrably insecure [0], and using it for payment at the moment is only secure through obscurity. If it becomes more-prevalent, we will see more cases of pay-info theft attacks [1].

0. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/drive-nfc-hack-work/ 1. https://ajinabraham.com/blog/stealing-card-details-from-cont...

Those "idiots" are people who don't like sitting in a car with sub-40F air in it while the heater works.

Plex supports a lot of this as paid features.

Kinda: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit

It is, frankly, _weaponized_ facebook. It literally shows you content that is the most-engaging and most-interacted, across the entire site (not just your friend group). Which is ironic, given how often users there was philosophical about the evils of facebook.

If you don't believe me, go browse /r/popular or some such and see how long it takes to see right-wing posts. The right-wing posts are usually heavily downvoted, so you'll see one with 100 upvotes between two posts with 20k upvotes; that's by design.

This is the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

You know what makes for a good user experience? Not using a website that hosts white supremacists, but staying in your little corner that doesn't deal with them (you hope).

I remember when Imgur was launched as a free image hoster for Reddit users. It was jarring to me, years later, to see it had attempted to become some weird Reddit/9gag mash-up. Not because it was a bad move, business-wise, but because it became clear how unmonetizable the plan was to start with.

That said, I agree with you: it feels like Imgur makes the Reddit move about twelve months before it, every time. From gif hosting to discovery to live feeds to requiring logins for NSFW content, Imgur basically leads Reddit. It honestly makes me wonder why I bother with Reddit at all...

I have a 10-year-old reddit account. When it was static pages served out of lisp, it was rock-solid. Their rewrite got to the instability you're describing, and it never really recovered.

Just to pick this one out:

> - remove the "influencer" aspects of the site. People don't need a profile with a custom picture, don't need to post to their /u/ board when they should be posting on a reddit reddit.

I think this was added for the OnlyFans pipeline. There is a massive porn community on Reddit, and the entirety of it thrives on this feature. Whether either of us want that, Reddit's decided it is a good and reliable monetary way forward.

Reddit said, not six months ago, that they weren't going to ban anti-vaccine rhetoric. The lead admin stated: "We appreciate that not everyone agrees with the current approach to getting us all through the pandemic, and some are still wary of vaccinations. Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy." [0]

When you combine this with the fact that moderation on the site is unpaid, it's literally a land mine: anything done on it is open to litigation, and all of the counter-measures are "we rely on unpaid volunteers." It's a nightmare for a public offering, really. It'd be like investing in Facebook, except if Facebook's stances were "well, vaccination is a choice" and "we can't pay people to remove inappropriate content; we just rely on unpaid volunteers for that."

Reddit has effectively monetized outrage in a way Facebook could only ever hope to: instead of primarily presenting your friend circles, and the outrage there, Reddit presents the outrage of the social media cloud itself, weaponized in the form of upvotes. The worst part of browsing Reddit is the level of smugness you see around its users: they act like Instagram/Facebook is the worst parts of humanity, while actively engaging with a different corporation selling the same thing but more effectively.

0. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debat...

Yes, they really don't care unless it results in a site going down. An industrial giant is happy to throw infinite machines at a problem until it is resolved. The issue isn't in their behavior, it's in Linux's implementation being so poor that they have to. But what are the alternatives? Should Google/Facebook/Amazon throw infinite developer time resolving kernel issues? Should they walk away from Linux?