Libra00

Streaming was different for years and years. But then people got greedy.

They want the old cable TV days, but worse, and filling their pockets instead.

There’s a word for that: enshittification

Netflix will what now? Sorry, I was busy canceling my netflix account.

Kidding, I canceled it ages ago when the $10 version became SD-only with ads.}

Why do we keep paying people like this to enshittify everything?

What’s the alternative? I guess you can use chatgpt or whatever as a sort of search engine? shrug

Is that something built into the browser? i dropped Brave when I heard Google was forcing the adblock-gimping shit in Manifest V3 into Chomium. Also I was never entirely keen on their crypto-hawking bullshit.

Yeah I’m far too used to getting my search for free to pay for it. I’ll fuckin’ use chatgpt before I pay a subscription fee for that shit, even if it is a substantially better option.

Yeah, paying someone else to tell you what to do with your business when they will bear none of the consequences for the things they tell you to do are is just mad.

What’s odd is that it’s not in the Wired headline either, this is a direct copy of their headline.

Also because that lump sum is all there is. If you take the annuity they put the lump sum into an investment account and then pay you out of the proceeds (from which they take a cut, of course), and you can get the same returns they get, without losing their cut, doing it yourself.

So, your bog-standard ‘we’re improving the company by making everyone do the work of 2 people on the salary of 1’ routine. :P

it makes sense to guide the customer through the most common solutions first, as that will likely solve the problem.

And this why you have to suffer through those lengthy recordings that tell you about a bunch of shit that generally doesn’t apply to your situation before you can even use the menu, much less talk to a person. I am disabled, I have had to be on the phone with the Social Security Administration, Medicare, my insurance company, and various state benefits agencies probably 15-20 times a year for the past ~14 years, and I can count on one hand the number of times those ‘common solutions’ were even remotely applicable. I don’t even need fingers to count the number of times they have actually contained the solution to my issue, because it has literally never happened.

Once you get to a person who can make an assessment about what’s going on it makes sense for them to cover a few basics (I used to do tech support, I know how much time a simple, ‘Are you sure it’s plugged in?’ can save), but replacing customer service with AI means you’re pretty much stuck in those recordings for your entire call. Now to be fair this can be done better than most places do it. I shop on amazon a fair bit (can’t drive so I order most things online) and when I have issues I honestly prefer dealing with the livechat AI than calling because it’s a much faster and smoother experience and they can quickly bump you over to an actual agent when there’s a weird thing going on that’s outside of its scope. But most companies don’t have Amazon’s customer service budget to do shit like that well, so usually what I get is ‘If you’re calling about XYZ, hang up and dial this number. Did you know that if your birthday is on an odd-numbered day blahblah-ad-blahblah? If the crescent moon is waning and the distant hills are draining and the watchful eye is straining…’ etc.

They had to invest how much money into AI to realize this thing that literally anyone on the street would’ve happily told them for free? And they probably paid some consultant even more money to tell them it was a good idea. sigh.

Shiiit, I really don’t want to go back to Google and all their sponsored/AI/tracking bullshit. Any other privacy-focused search engines out there that don’t rely on this?

Something something money.

AI is just the latest hype train they’re hopping in the hopes of making more money.

I hope you’ll understand why I’m not going to take my opinion on douches from the guy trying to pick apart my helpful comment with a flood of pedantic bullshit.

You ever notice how it sometimes helps to read the whole sentence to understand what some part of it means in context?

A VPN is a VPN, having a different IP address is equally effective against those things no matter which IP it is.

There’s a comma after that second VPN so obviously it’s related to what follows, which is the part where I describe exactly how a VPN is a VPN: in terms of getting a different IP address. This is twice now you’ve gone way out on a limb here trying to back the play of some fucking troll who didn’t bother to explain themselves and I’m not sure if that’s where you want to be. Picking through my comment and taking bits out of context to feed back to me as ‘evidence’ to back up your pedantry and assumption that the rest of the text of that same comment shows you to be wrong about is not a good look. If you’re going to nitpick my shit to death then you should at least try to read the whole thing and understand how each of the parts relate to each other first, otherwise people might mistake you for some fucking troll too (albeit a clearly slightly more intelligent one since you can actually elucidate what your issue is with what I said, regardless of whether or not it’s remotely accurate.)

Then you are not a decent human being? :P

If that’s the case then both of you failed to read the part of my comment where I explicitly addressed that:

The issue is whether or not anyone can associate that IP with yours, and what that comes down to is how willing they are to give up their records when the government asks nicely (or, even more importantly: not so nicely.)

I admit I didn’t include the possibility of the VPN operator themselves being malicious, but it seems weird to call me out for not addressing the issue of record security re:governments/LE when pretty much the entire point of my comment was to address that specific issue because no one else was, no?

No one gets thanks for being a decent human being, it’s sort of the standard that everyone is expected to hold to.