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Growth of a few million subscribers is nothing for a company the size of Netflix and there could be all sorts of creative accounting going on.

Executives patting themselves in the back to justify bonuses is self serving bullshit. Quality and value build long term brand profitability but that is too hard for MBAs. Cost cutting and screwing customers is all they know. In a few years people will be asking what the fuck happened to Netflix.

I was a relatively early adopter of Netflix before it was available in my country and used it via VPN back when Netflix had more to gain by allowing that. They made some interesting shows that justified the very affordable price. Now there is more content and most is crap. I rotated subscriptions for the last year but I am hard out now. And ad supported tiers don’t fix it for me because I would rather eat shit than watch them.

Framework ship laptops to Australia and has a headphone socket. Great company. Great products. Great experience, highly recommend. I can’t recommend products that don’t sell and support in my market. I don’t have any loyalty to Fairphones or Steamdecks or any other product from low effort companies that don’t ship beyond NA or Europe.

I like repairable hardware and own a Framework laptop. It has a headphone socket that I use every day. If Framework made a phone I might be interested. If most fairphones end up paired to disposable wireless earbuds with limited battery life that end in landfill I don’t get how that is more sustainable than adding a socket for the declining but still sizeable number of people who cling to wired stuff that just works.

My rugged mid-range Nokia refuses to take damage. The thing is cursed. I have dropped it so many times it is ridiculous. It might be years before I replace it. Has a jack as well. Made me totally re-evaluate what I value in a phone. I realized I am not a feature/performance fetishist. I want solidly made gear that has regular updates.

Every day. Aux in on my car, wired headphones, aux in on old stereo. I could replace it all with bluetooth but it isn’t broken and I can still use bluetooth on other devices. I like choice and I hate waste and conspicuous consumption. Rechargeable wireless devices with limited battery life that can’t be serviced or repaired is peak consumption/pollution bullshit. The headphone jack may wear out before my phone’s usb, battery or something else but that hasn’t been my experience historically.

Long time family premium user (household of parents and kids). Anything Youtube do to preserve their revenue within reason doesn’t bother me too much as long as they don’t reduce the split with quality creators. If they were successful with all this bullshit perhaps they wouldn’t have needed to notify me that subs are almost doubling next year. My guess is all they are doing is fucking things up for everyone. It is only going to get worse if their premium subscription base reduces. They should be pricing premium as an alternative to ad-blockers but instead they are pushing people including premium subscribers towards ad-blockers.

I already have ad-blockers and apps for circumventing youtube ads. Not using them in favour of a fairly priced (to me) subscription was a choice but sadly one Google seems to be discouraging.

Not just the degoogled open source Android disros either. Amazon has a commercial fork of Android with its own app store. There was Oppo’s AOSP derived ColorOS which was not based on Google’s stock Android. I don’t think Google should control the core apps as tightly as they do on stock Android but on the other hand those apps sort of define stock android and the default user experience in the marketplace. Epic could roll their own fork if they wanted and substitute apps.

On the subject of Oppo, I think Tencent went after them and other Chinese manufacturers as well to get into their platforms. Tencent are the guys who push their own app store and one app to rule them that Musk has wet dreams about. I sometimes wonder if they are using Epic to wedge open US based app stores for a future WeChat/MyApp like approach. Not that the US government would allow that.

Valve created their own console and helped fund Wine development, presumably as a strategic move to counter Microsoft’s platform control. I might be missing something but I don’t see similar effort or innovation from Epic.

I believe Microsoft and Nvidia did deals with hardware manufacturers for years that helped exclude competition and those sorts of deals probably pose more difficulty in court. Google might have fallen into a trap and done something similar. Being vertically integrated Apple doesn’t have to do deals with other manufacturers but presumably they have some deals with developers. Obviously Sony, Nintendo have exclusives, agreements with developers and tight control of their platforms as well that go far beyond anything I can see with Google so I do find it a bit confusing.

Probably comes down to the unwillingness of US legislators to create clear laws. Too many compromises to satisfy lobbyists and avoid any negative campaign they might sponsor. Judges likely do the best they can trying to interpret the mess of case law they depend on in the absence of modern legislation. I have no idea why the US supreme court gets to decide on matters like abortion based on hand wavy interpretations of historical documents when in any normal democracy the politicians do the will of the people and enact legislation that reflects modern society.

My interpretation of the article is that it wasn’t Google’s app store but the deals Google did with other manufacturers and big studios that caused them problems. Unlike iOS Android has both open source and commercial forks. Amazon have their own app store for their own range of devices and you can load that app store on regular Android I believe if you want to access a shittier range of apps. There are degoogled versions of Android and many people including myself run f-droid or side load apks. It is much more open than Apple’s system which won.

All reddit did was unmask themselves a little but only for those with their eyes open. Social media is close enough to a cult operation utilizing addictive behaviors and conditioning to control people. People are scared to leave their church and be shunned. Reddit is just another exploitative techbro run business. It isn’t a social enterprise or open source community and it is weird that volunteers invested so much of their time and effort propping up shareholder value instead of contributing to real communities.

Plenty of independent thinkers left and found federated alternatives or walked away. The predatory and manipulative nature of social media was bad enough when it was all about controlling and manipulating the masses but now it is also a huge machine learning harvesting operation. The only people who really benefit are the ultra rich.

ML based handwriting recognition has been powering postal routing for a couple of decades. ML completely dominates some areas and will only increase in impact as it becomes more widely applicable. Getting any technology from a lab demo to a safe and reliable real world product is difficult and only more so when there are regulatory obstacles and people being dragged around by vehicles.

For the purposes of raising money from investors it is convenient to understate problems and generate a cult of magical thinking about technology. The hype cycle and the manipulation of the narrative has been fairly obvious with this one.

Many areas of machine learning, particularly LLMs are making impressive progress but the usual ycombinator techbro types are over hyping things again. Same as every other bubble including the original Internet one and the crypto scams and half the bullshit companies they run that add fuck all value to the world.

The cult of bullshit around AI is a means to fleece investors. Seen the same bullshit too many times. Machine learning is going to have a huge impact on the world, same as the Internet did, but it isn’t going to happen overnight. The only certain thing that will happen in the short term is that wealth will be transferred from our pockets to theirs. Fuck them all.

I skip most AI/ChatGPT spam in social media with the same ruthlessness I skipped NFTs. It isn’t that ML doesn’t have huge potential but most publicity about it is clearly aimed at pumping up the market rather than being truly informative about the technology.

Technology circumvention and copyright infringement are just about the only power consumers have against the near monopolies and cartel like behavior from the tech/media industry since our government regulators have been neutered.

I am grandfathered into a family Premium plan from the old Youtube Red days. The price is close to doubling come April. In the absence of competition or government intervention to punish anti-compeitive, anti-consumer behaviour I will be relying on ad-blocking and other circumvention measures next year. I am willing to pay a fair price but costs of living have gone up a lot while incomes for regular people are stagnant. The executives running these companies are completely disconnected from reality.