The piracy thing is a bit backwards I think. Piracy is a consequence of subscription price so higher prices induce more piracy. The only way piracy doesn’t exist is if all content is free to begin with
There's subscription cost, then there's other factors, like DRM, usability, single source, etc. If you want to find the latest media, you can either hunt for it on one among several subscription services or you can find it on any of the big torrent sites. Once you torrent it, you can watch it on any or every device, without internet, forever.
If first party media companies sold one-off DRM free downloads of movies and TV shows for a reasonable price (not even that cheap, just not requiring bundling with other content you don't want to see), I bet that'd have more of an impact on piracy rates than lowering subscription prices by 10% or whatever.
Music is basically sold like that (Itunes does it for example), and very very few people use it. There are probably some, but I don't personally know any — and I know plenty of music lovers with huge collections.
Normies want to have access to everything at the click of a button, and they don't want to be worrying about disk space, cross device synchronization or organizing files in directories. Streaming is perfect for them, especially in the mobile age (I bet many people had access to more disk space in 2013 than they had in 2021 or have in 2026).
People who would want to be normies but can't afford it (often in E.G. 3rd world countries) use Youtube with ads, Spotify with ads or pirated "free unlocked Spotify" apps on their Android phones. Music geeks want more music than they could possibly afford, so they use ${whatever this week's Deezer grabber is} or just get an account on Redacted. The anti-corporate left / retro people just buy vinyl, CDs or maybe tapes, depending on preference.
Paying to see a movie (versus paying to own a movie) has been a longstanding tradition in the movie industry (cinemas, rentals). If anything, being able to outright own movies was a short blip, and a weird consequence of how media worked at the time, which was annoying to most of the population more than anything else.
With power comes responsibility, and I think responsibility has fallen out of fashion. I think this comes down to the definition of "want", and I talk to my kids about this because I wish we had a different word. Yes, I want to have the piece of cake tonight, but I would also want to not have diabetes in 20 years. People want instant access to the entirety of music produced by humanity for a flat fee, but they also want to be able to access their music even if the industry that provides that service goes away. Curating a collection requires some responsibility and discipline, which is more work than just paying 15 bucks for the service and pressing play. But it also gives you access to that material in 20 years, which the service does not.
What the industry has successfully done is have people learn that for 15 or 20 years they can cave in to their want of convenience. People don't seem to care today that they'll have to pay the price in 15 years, but they will care in 15 years.
Nothing made this more evident than people buying digital movies from Sony, only to find that the rights to access the movie they purchased have been revoked. People are so sick of it in fact that they're now inventing new words like in enshitification to capture the idea that they have been brought in to an ecosystem that they're trapped in and now feel like they can't escape even though it's getting worse. People's love of convenience is the mechanism of their capture by the business.
In fairness once you've seen a movie its value drops with most never getting a second viewing. Them having the ability to take back that awful movie doesn't hurt as much as a song.
Consumers are worth less than creators in the cosmic scheme of things. I believe we should be much friendlier to consumers than our laws currently allow, but there should be a balance, and that balance should not privilege consumers above all.
I have the largest physical media collection of anyone I know. I will buy things I can actually own, but with digital media the studios and labels have ensured purchasing no longer means ownership, and thus digital piracy is not stealing.
> … for technical users it's a pretty noticeable step down in terms of how you may use and configure your own system
It’s such a frustrating experience on both ends—I use macOS for most of my work because I like the hardware it ships on, but it is so annoying to not be able to, like, use a different window manager (hacky accessibility API systems notwithstanding).
On the other hand I’ve probably burnt weeks troubleshooting and configuring different compositors/window managers on Arch (and STILL don’t have the setup of my dreams), so it’s frustrating on that end too.
I imagine you're trying to use it in ways that it's just not designed for. Cmd-`, Cmd-Tab, and Mission Control (Ctrl/Cmd-F3 or three-finger swipe up/down) are powerful enough to do most tasks, especially combined with automatic window tiling.
Nah, the super long delays and animations are by design and make a lot of features like mission control & workspaces unusable. But, if you can tell me a way to switch between only the two most recent windows (note: I said "windows", not "applications") with a single keyboard shortcut and no animation delays, I'll love you forever.
I don't think that's possible but there is a by default unset shortcut to switch between windows of the same application. I set it to command tilde. And there are configs to make animations instant.
I have an Asahi Linux M2 macbook that I use for work, tried MacOS for a day and just couldn't stand it compared to the flexibility of Arch + KDE plasma.
I'm reminded of the joke about the two friends who come across a bear in the woods. When one puts on running shoes, his friend chides him that he can't outrun the bear. He responds, "I don't need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you."
AI doesn't have to implement Hilbert's vision and be able to prove everything. I just has to out-prove human mathematicians.
I’ve written a lot of Lean for economic modeling (so take this with the caveat that it’s not frontier-level mathematics research) but I think this problem is overstated. If you follow good engineering standards—keep primitives composable and design abstraction well—it’s not so hard to understand enough Lean to ensure the formalized statement is correct.
In part this is possible because mathlib is very well-designed and has a very good API (in no small part because they’re willing to make breaking changes all the time), so building on top of it makes life much easier.
As someone who doesn’t write Zig, I wish the code examples gave type annotations for the writers so I could see the difference between the old generic API and the new `std.Io` interface.
I’d be happy to get the advertised charge speeds on my Equinox. The number of times I use a charging station that delivers ~120kW at most is maddening.
And it’s this kind of thing that stops mass adoption. When you fuel an ICE car, the pump just delivers fuel and that’s that. The price of fuel is prominently advertised and the experience is the same no matter the station.
Charging on the other hand is an exercise in frustration. Charging stations have different advertised power delivery rates; often they can’t meet those rates (is it the charging station? Is it your car? No way to know!); pricing is opaque; charging can stop seemingly at random .. and then you get levied the penalty congestion rate for using a charging station.
My parents asked me if they should get an EV. I advised a conventional hybrid. They are too old to have the patience to deal with all this.
It heavily depends on what kind of driving you do. I would say 97% of my driving is local and home charging works perfectly while being 10x cheaper than an equivalent gas vehicle. For the 3% of the time that I do long trips I might have charging issues but frankly it hasn’t been a nightmare, just waiting a little longer at some charging stations.
Once or twice over the last four years, I’ve driven to an Electric America charging station to find that it is being renovated and I only have 30 miles of range left and next closest charging station is 50 miles away. That has mostly been resolved since Tesla chargers became available to Ford vehicles.
Yes, totally agree—I love the car and for nearly all of my driving it’s great. It’s just that the residual of long drives is more of an issue than some say because of how inconsistent the experience is. For someone my parents age, for whom things not working as expected is more befuddling and aggravating than for me, I just don’t think it’s tolerable (and they do many more road trips in retirement anyway).
To me, explicitly representing the two pairs of ages (now: M, A; previously: M', A') is simpler because it let's you directly represent the problem statement without any mental gymnastics whatsoever.
M = 2A' "Mary is [now] twice as old as Ann was ..."
M'= A "when Mary was as old as Ann is now"
It’s ironic that the README has all the tells of being LLM-written:
> 53 numbered rules, 9 sections, written in 1983 by people whose readers die when a sentence is ambiguous. The ones doing the heavy lifting: …
Not really a promising tell for a writing skill, IMO.
I've been using a plain ASD-STE100 prompt for a little bit now, and while I somewhat prefer the text that agents produce while being told to use simplified English, it does not necessarily change the overall structure of what they write. It just now tends to have shorter sentences, and fewer drumroll, pitch-deck / vacuous section titles like "the finding that pivots the preposition", etc. Overall a significant quality increase in my opinion, but nothing earth shattering, and doesn't fully solve the problem.
The problem with at least ChatGPT is no matter what personality you set it still reads like a smug asshole trying to sound smart. You can just pick different flavors of smug asshole.
And the goddamn emojis. I get it, people use them when texting to make the writing a bit more chummy, but I can really live without them everywhere else.
