Civil matter, not criminal

Flac 44.1 16bit level 3. Host with something that meets your needs. I have my files in jellyfin and navidrome and can then access the library remotely either through jellyfin web client, navidrome web client, substreamer, Finamp, kodi, etc. but this way if another amazing format comes up down the line I will always have my library in a good state to transcode from. Tag and sort everything with beets.io (or musicbrainz picard is great, I just like that beets is cli). This results in a library I can access on my phone, laptop, tv, carplay, etc

Technically you could go for 24bit but imo the extra file size isn’t justified. though one could make that argument for flac vs 320cbr mp3, transcoding 320 mp3 is more likely to create artifacts, thus the reason for keeping around flac

Alac may be easier for you if you use mac

The characters being ancillary and easily edited out/cut is by design so they can still use the movies in foreign markets that are hostile to lgbt rights

If the gay character is only identified as gay in one scene where they say “I’m gay” or kiss for 10 seconds you can just cut that part out and still screen it in Saudi Arabia. Disney doesn’t actually give a shit about lgbt issues, they give a shit about what will sell

Thus a prominent main character who is gay or a movie about a character coming to terms with queer identity is far less likely because that basically means they instantly lose out on much of the lucrative international market

Reading the article it appears they support it because language was added to allow them to continue to act as they have been

They do not have to stop enacting security features or making it clear that 3rd party parts were used. So they can likely continue to disable key features of devices and add nag notifications when parts are replaced by anyone but them

The repair self service they have is good for individuals but pointless for repair shops and that makes it kind of pointless overall. The pricing for parts is actually not bad, it’s higher than 3rd party obviously but not that much more. But when you factor in the tool rental simple repairs like battery and lcd swaps quickly become about as much or slightly more than just paying apple to do them.

So don’t buy the tools and just buy the parts? That makes more sense if you’re doing a ton of phones. Like a repair shop. You can do a iPhone 12-14 per an ifixit guide at home for sure and it’ll work fine but if you really want it to be sealed up well and waterproof you should at least have a press, which is pricey and bulky enough to not make sense to buy for a single battery or lcd swap. And then a repair shop would buy a lot of the other tools apple provides that make the overall process smoother and far less likely to leave your phone with scratches and gouges.

So why don’t repair shops just buy the apple parts? Because apple won’t sell them to you without the device serial number. So unless you want to drop off your phone, wait for the shop to order parts, a couple days for them to show up, etc. that’s not really ideal. And the shop can’t buy in bulk and save that way. Whereas when the iPhone 15 comes out I’ll probably buy like 50 iPhone 14 batteries because they’ll start coming in more often and buying 50-100 at a time might get me 1-5$ off per battery or more, which will save me a lot if I actually sell them all (I only do cell phone repairs as a side thing so 50-100 might actually take me awhile to get to).

But there is also a mixed point here. Apple does this because it (hopefully) lowers the value of stolen iPhones. The iCloud lock makes most modern stolen iPhones pretty worthless from a functional standpoint. But they’re still potentially worth a lot for parts. A stolen locked iPhone 14 is easily worth 300 in parts, probably a bit more if it’s clean and not a base model. That’s why apple would probably rather have it that salvaged parts simply wouldn’t work at all but I’m sure there’s some legal thing that makes them think that won’t fly. So instead you get the current thing where a battery powers the phone but you don’t get the metrics and you get a nag screen, the lcd works but you don’t get auto brightness or trutone, the front camera works but faceid doesn’t, etc. they want to make it essentially pointless to steal an iPhone (or turn every iPhone theft into a more confrontational and potentially violent crime I suppose. Pickpocketing turns into “tell me your iCloud password” at gunpoint).

The obvious counter to this is that it creates massive e waste. The iPhone (and most cellphones at this point) refresh cycle is already ridiculous; very few new features are added, spec bump, camera upgrade. because what groundbreaking thing can really happen in a year to a 14 year old platform when it’s forced to release year after year. At any point you can go on ebay and find thousands of locked iPhones for sale; I’m sure a ton of the parts end up trashed. Perfectly good parts of the latest tech that have tons of service life left being tossed for essentially nothing

Sure but I mean to accentuate the idea that older printers don’t have these stupid drms. Frankly I would prefer something newer that isn’t the size of a mini fridge and sounds like an industrial copier but I’ll take that over a printer that requires persistent WiFi and my debit card to print.

Pretty sad that in 20 years we went from a printer that had a chip that tracked toner use so that you could see how much was left but still easily gave you the option to say “ignore that and keep printing” to printers that arbitrarily create e waste by bricking cartridges because they’re past the assigned page count or expiry date despite having ink/toner left.

Third party toner is usually fine, refilling is where I’ve had issues. Although years ago I did get a super cheap third party toner at micro center that leaked like crazy. I had to return it and clean the whole printer, was a nightmare. But aside from that one incident never had an issue

I still use the same printer I got in 2004. Hp color laser jet 2600n. Highly recommend. It’s large and loud and toner is pricey. But toner is widely available, you can easily get 2,000+ pages out of a toner cart, I’ve generally found it to have native driver support in macOS and Linux at this point, it has an Ethernet jack so you can print over network, etc. the toner is also much more reasonable if you only print black and white, the $$$ is if you change all the toner carts at once.

It does have a toner tracking chip but you can override that in the firmware. they used to actually allow you to do such a thing!! It’s not even like a secret developer menu thing, it’s just an option you can pick although iirc it warns you print quality may suffer. or you can just buy blank chips for a few bucks, it’s just a little plastic tab that you break off and then you slide the old one out and the new one in. But that’s more for if you plan to refill the toner carts which I do not recommend; it’s a messy process where you have to burn/cut a hole in the cart, refill with powder, then seal it with tape. I tried it a few times and it was a huge mess and lead to leaky carts; not worth saving the $50 bucks or whatever

I’m pretty sure in like 2040 my house will be an anachronism of old tech like this. It’s already mostly there with some notable exceptions. If I have to subscribe I won’t buy it; if I buy it and find out I need to subscribe I’ll return it or sell it. I will pay month by month for items that justify a need for ongoing payment (like I pay once a year for Usenet access). But I don’t think I am in the target demo for basically any company lol

As well as utility cost to run the stove, lighting, pos systems, etc. plus rent/mortgage/taxes on the building, upkeep of fixtures like tables, menus, and cutlery, insurance costs, inspection costs, non sales staff (think like general managers, janitorial staff, plus HR and IT if they have it), any planned building upgrades down the line (whether to the actual building eg renovating dining areas or upgrading kitchen appliances), theft/shrinkage, damage from customers and staff being assholes, from equipment breaking down, from natural disasters, etc

Probably a lot more too. There’s a whole bunch to factor in

Or it could’ve led to a butterfly effect where measurements were much easier to understand and as a result scientific and engineering progress moved along a bit faster

Maybe both; maybe that resulted in like a huge bomb that destroyed the world. Or maybe it resulted in utopia where we figure out eternal life and cured all disease

That son of a bitch pirate has no idea how much of a pain in the ass he ended up being

Learn to trade options on the stock market. That’s basically gambling and you can potentially lose way more than 100% of your money

Absolutely this. Can you imagine him looking at the main page of most instances over the last few weeks? If he has the typical tech ceo arrogant narcissism he was probably so pleased even though the discussion was universally negative

Same deal with Elon. He doesn’t really give a shit when people roast and mock him. It’s just about achieving notoriety

But it’s in the same vein of the old “don’t feed the trolls” adage. Some people really just can’t avoid giving attention to the toxic environments and people even when they know it’s a bad idea. But it’s very similar to a child who is throwing shit at you instead of asking you for attention appropriately. You have to teach the child the appropriate way to ask and ignore the problem behavior. But our mass media is set up to constantly provide these dicks the attention they crave and platform awful disgusting behavior so culture in decline I guess

You don’t understand it’s “lifestyle creep”. First you buy a ps5 then you end up with a 3 yachts and a controlling interest in a media empire. It sneaks up on you.

The doctor has no idea what anything costs

Edit: unless it’s a one of the admin slash doctors or a private practice

Bots count as active users on the metrics, I’m sure Reddit admins see this as a huge win

Sure. And it works both ways, also gets the other side who feel the need to comment to correct it. Divisive comment is similar, for many it drives feelings of superiority but for others it’s rage bait.

But there’s a lot of sub categories to toolset here. One of the interesting parts of Reddit was that it showed that users would categorize their ragebait; r/stupidfood, r/diwhy often featured obvious troll farm content that was designed to get people to just comment “this is so fucking stupid”. But when it got reposted to Reddit it got its own category and people subbed to it; they wanted to see more of it. They want to see videos of people wasting food to farm comments. once again the simpsons predict the future

Because it works

It doesn’t work for you but it works for the casual user

Promoting shitty short rage bait content, charged headlines where no one reads the articles, etc drives traffic up with casual users who are far less likely to use ad blockers, far more likely to use native apps, far more likely to enable tracking features blindly, etc.

Power users don’t like it but power users don’t view ads, are more likely to be privacy focused, etc. they also are a very small demographic so they are simply ignored once they are annoying. Before they are annoying they are marketed to bc they can be milked with things like premium subscriptions for no ads or whatever.

Subscriptions don’t sell for social media, advertising doesn’t pay until you’re scaled wayyyyy up, and generally once advertising and outside funding gets seriously involved they start pushing you to get as many impressions as possible. So basically advertising is a cancer that ruins everything along with the capitalistic need for constant growth and endless profits

If meta pushes this it will be to brand themselves with decentralized social media. The average person will associate the concept with meta and assume it was a meta invention. This may be a long play by meta to get in front of things like mastodon/lemmy/kbin/etc and become an established player in the space to the laymen before the actual established players can do so

It’s a gross misuse of their obscene power bordering on monopoly and hardly a good thing. Even if the above isn’t true they will 100% use it to harvest as much data as humanly possible without consent and tons more if you’re stupid enough to give them consent. They will tune algorithms to feed people rage bait and stupid bullshit to drive engagement at all costs. And they’ll load it with intrusive targeted advertising

Fuck meta

It’s okay, my other old person trait is teasing people on the internet don’t take it too personally

My old person trait is that I think we need less acronyms

That said I do agree with you