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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • So let’s say you want to buy a painting for your house. You’ve got a few options. You can go online, look at various items and choose to buy it. You could go to a gallery, look around and decide to buy whichever one suits you.

    But crucially, you get to what you’re buying before you commit to the ownership. You may not own the rights to the paintings (its probably a print), but you know what you’re getting. Why would I pay for a movie if I don’t know whether or not it’s worth it.

    Netflix, Hulu, amazon, etc. Are like galleries. They have an entrance fee and that’s ok. But what most of them don’t have anyway for me to actually buy a copy. Netflix movies require you to pay month over month to maintain access. So you are forever required to go to their gallery.

    Like your friend, I’ll pirate to watch a movie and if I like it, then I’ll buy it. I try to buy physical discs, but they are becoming more and more rare. I pirate because I want ownership. Subscription models work because they are more convenient than physical purchases. But that convience is getting smaller every day.

    There is a few reasons why I want physical copies. License deals expire and thus the content may disappear from the service it’s on. My internet may be out. Yes, I can download, but that requires inconvenient forethought and you’re always limited in the number of downloads and quality of those downloads. Having a large collection of movies in my home means I’m never without option.

    Basically, I pirate because I’m not going to buy something that I don’t know if I want it, and because I’m a doomsday prepper who has no other option 90% of the time.




  • Pre-installed is the biggest factor. Go to Walmart or best buy. You’ll find windows and Mac and chromebooks.

    I don’t think it’s “laziness” per se, but rather people aren’t that technically inclined. It’s too much of a challenge for the average person especially when they don’t understand the benefits.


  • The only one that really pissed me off was a distro called biglinux. It’s arch based and very popular in Brazil. It’s actually very stable. Everything works great. It’s got some nice features.

    Butttt, it uses latte dock or panel (kde). They have built in presets for how to arrange the panels and what not. It’s nice, however, I was trying to move some panels around from the base options and broke kde. I wasn’t doing anything more than changing GUI settings and the whole desktop broke. I seriously don’t understand.








  • I used the iPhone 12 mini for about a year before I gave up and went back to android. Some of my thoughts:

    I don’t actually understand your comment about apps being easier to find. There is no way to organize them alphabetically. You can’t choose which folders they go in. It’s only “easier” because people default to searching for apps. Which is very annoying to me personally. My GF does it that way. But I really don’t like it.

    I am a little jealous of IOS widgets and the ecosystem. While I haven’t tried a pixel watch yet, the apple watch is absolutely amazing and it’s the only real reason for me considering to go back.

    My two biggest gripes is that there is a serious inconsistency in their apps. I never hear people talk about it. But some apps, have their settings inside the actual apps. Other apps are you tied into the apple settings app. Most apps use gesture navigation. Some, especially older ones, don’t react to it and still rely on a back button in the top left. Which was a good option when the phone were sub 5", but not anymore.

    Other stuff, while the ecosystem is great, being locked into it is extremely annoying. Not being able to put a torrent app on the phone is annoying. There’s still a lot of things you cant do.

    Maybe I’ll buy the iPhone 16, I seem to try it out every 4 or 5 years. But I doubt they’ll fix anything other than the back button, because no one really complains about it.



  • Look at Fiio. They’re a Chinese company that makes pretty good quality mp3 players. They have some expensive models but also a few for less than a hundred bucks. I’ve owned two of them now and love them.

    You can just drag and drop files onto a microSD card and then the player will recognize that new files have been added. It’s super simple to manage and no iTunes or other software required.

    Edit: The M5 and M3 pro both use a proprietary OS. The M6 is android based so you can also load Spotify/YT music/tidal/etc. These models are all touchscreen. If you want one more old school without the touch screen, they’re m3k model is still on aliexpress. And they used to have models with scroll wheels (I dont remember the model number) that I’m sure you could find used on ebay or something.