Because the “you wouldn’t steal a car” nonsense scares a lot of people off

Because some people want to support the creators of content but digital downloads from iTunes or whatever are more expensive than getting a month of a streaming service

Because there is a level of convenience of having thousands of hours of content at your fingertips without having to store content locally or finding it on a “dodgy” website. Setting up torrents / usenet is more work than giving someone your credit card number

Because a lot of people don’t know where to find content and if they did they don’t know the difference between a 480p avi vs a 2160p HDR DV MKV and get confused with torrents and file formats and how to get them on their TV.

Because - at the moment - the ads aren’t that bad, I got one ad at the start and one episode in the middle of an episode of Gen V - obviously they’ll add more until it’s as bad as cable but they’re not there yet.

Wtf did I just read…

Tab groups are coming but in the mean time containers work well enough for me with the added benefit that they’ll also block tracking from the sites that are within them.

Yeap, but Digg was still pretty early in it’s life and was very much catering for tech nerds.

Reddit is basically the home of all communities these days, its swallowed what used to be individual forums from around the web and put them into a single place.

Building those new communities across multiple lemmy instances also adds to the complexity.

Reddit also didn’t have Reddit to compete with, which certainly makes things harder.

https://www.popsci.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/GluePizzaAI.png?strip=all&quality=95

I feels like they either badly copy (see Gemini) or don’t think about what they’re offering (see Stadia’s busted business model) they’re content to milk the existing services they’ve already got and make them worse by cramming in more ads (see YouTube, Google’s search result pages) and they cut out or dictate the web through their monopolies (see AMP and Chrome) rather than working with other parties to make good products.

They feel like Hooli in Silicon Valley, basically the definition of a fat tech giant who doesn’t do any innovation of their own.

I feel the original Chromecast was probably the last truly great original Google product, it was simple, it was inexpensive and it worked - you just plugged it in, joined your network and you were off, there really wasn’t anything like it at the time.

I really hate what they’ve become.

Take out is probably OK but as OP has experienced, you won’t always get the freshest food.

Dining in and you’re basically just annoying people.

Cool, now do Chrome!

Too late then, I’m afraid you got the crew who were more concerned about getting home at a slightly more healthy hour than giving you fresh food.

Never go in to any restaurant past 9pm unless it’s in a busy metro area and there are other people about or you are getting food that caters to drunk and high people that can be taken away.

Honestly, it’s 9pm so unless the store is 24 hours (and even if it is) then they’ll be trying to close down a clean up and get things ready for the morning shift which starts early.

When I worked at McDs years ago a few big orders deciding to sit in the restaurant around 9pm could mean the difference between getting to go home at 12:30 and getting an OK nights sleep vs getting to go home at 2:30 and getting a terrible nights sleep before they might have to come in at 10am the next day.

You could argue that if they didn’t want customers at that time then they shouldn’t be open - which I would agree with - but obviously the low level grunts making your food don’t get to make those decisions.

I’m currently using the iOS 18 beta and - during an earlier beta (3 I think) - Screen Time was broken in that it didn’t let you change the settings or extend a session, it would just crash.

This actually made the feature useful! You could no longer just click a button to skip the warnings, you had to actually stop when the time was up. Sure it was a bit annoying but that’s the whole point.

So yea, I’ve been thinking of getting my partner to change the PIN for it so I can’t skip the warnings in the future.

It’s not a bad feature, it’s just often poorly configured and badly implemented.

Given that the entire countries school system starts and breaks up at the same time you get an absurd system that holiday companies are able to rinse parents wanting to get away with their kids.

And since it isn’t tied to income it essentially ends up as a tax on poor people who aren’t able to afford the fines or the additional cost of taking them out during holiday times.

It’s a crap system that wouldn’t actually be that difficult to fix if they put some thought into it

If you really think about those books as a grown up some of the plot holes are big enough to drive a goddam truck through.

As a kid having their first experience of a magical universe though they were goddam incredible

I really hate the corporate IT.

I was at a job that was slowly transitioning from a medium sized company to a larger one, initially we were allowed just install and use whatever on our machines, but gradually IT started implementing policies where if we wanted to add something it had to go through a request system and usually it would be denied.

As a software developer this was just infuriating, it would hold up work, force us to use shitty software (like Chrome and Edge) and there would often be fuck ups where installing a new version of software would require removal of the old one and installation of a new one - which would trigger the approval process again.

Like - I get it - some people can’t be trusted, but we were some of the key devs for the companies product, we know what we’re doing.

I was rather happy to leave that part of the company behind when I left.

Destiny was supposed to be their “forever” game, the problem is that after 2 dozen expansions:

1. New players are extremely intimidated about joining
2. Old players dislike losing the content they’ve paid for when it’s vaulted
3. Long term players will eventually get bored of playing the same thing they’ve been playing for years

Live service games just won’t last forever like they want them to.

Apple Maps and Fastmail.

Fastmail is paid but the 1Password and disposable email address system makes it worth it for me.

I went through a period of de-googling a couple of years ago. Swapping browser, mobile os, search engine, storage, maps, music, video purchases, voice assistant and even email service was relatively simple, there are alternatives out there which do the job just as well if not better than what Google offer.

The only exception is YouTube, yea there are individual sites that occasionally offer some of the videos I want (often with a subscription attached), there are some federated systems like NewPipe which have some videos but there is no one offering remotely the quantity or quality of what you can get on YouTube for free.

As the article states, it’s basically a monopoly at this point without a viable alternative.

Arc is weird but pretty good once you get used to it.

DuckDuckGo is good if you want a minimal browser and don’t really care about extensions

Brave is OK if you want a slightly more private version of Chrome

Honestly though, just use Firefox.