Not recently but when I was a teenager (2001-ish) my supermarket was using a DOS computer to handle stock, print new labels when prices updated each day, etc.
It's funny because everyone predicted this would happen back when Netflix had everything and was $5. "Eventually other companies are going to make their own apps, put in ads, increase prices and we'll be back to $80 a month"
It's fine to extract from the subsidies as long as you have an exit ramp. Always have an exit ramp planned for when the gravy train ends (because that's always the goal, achieve market share or dominance and then crank on profitability as hard as possible). The defense against enshittification is a stack you can own and operate end to end.
(Jellyfin + Soundcloud + Bandcamp + sonarr/radarr/lidarr in this context; if you have Plex, that is also an option; you can also stick web content into this system with yt-dlp)
On the bright side, it’s just TV. I watch it like everyone else, but with the awareness that literally any hobby that replaced it would be a better use of my time.
For now we’re still better than cable because you don’t need to stay subscribed to everything just because you want to watch something. Especially in this modern age of “dump a whole season at once and then spend 2 years making the next season”. You can subscribe to something for a month to watch the latest season and then drop the subscription.
It's usually the same team. In addition to the sophomore slump, the team will also be squeezed for time as they have a tight deadline to deliver a finished product after they learn whether they have been renewed or not.
Coupled with the required ambiguity. Every first season has to both stand on its own, in case Netflix doesn't renew, while also leading smoothly into plot lines for the next season if they do get picked up
Landing that ambiguity, and having the second season be as good as the first, doesn't look like an easy job
A lot of (good) series are also just fresh and different when they land. They're not as fresh in Year 2 much less any subsequent years. Yes, sometimes they can build on a serial story but, personally, I lose interest in most TV series after a bit. I realize others have a different mindset where they hate not being able to live with their favorite characters for more or less forever.
That is worse than cable if you had something like TiVo. Back with a cable subscription you were "locked in" but it was cheaper than buying all the subscriptions. We have taken a massive step backwards in UI/UX when it comes to TV, piracy is the only thing that beats TiVO but TiVo (old TiVo, before Cable Card was killed) beats pretty much everything else today.
Yeah its also interesting seeing the niche apps that pop up that basically pick what to watch for you and where everyone watches the same thing at the same time. Seems like converging on old school television.
Netflix is definitely the service that's closest to my bubble. Sometimes I then see something I'm interested in but I don't watch a huge amount of video and Netflix has gotten really pricey.
Ever since I did the "The Science of Well-Being" coursera course way back when, and got into mindfulness, I always try to saviour my daily sandwich! And also mix it up a bit (cutting it differently, using new ingredients). Both of these are tiny things in isolation but if you do stuff like this throughout the day it makes a measurable difference to happiness.
Good memories of visiting used bookshops near Kyoto University with stacks upon stacks of obscure literary works and research material. Lots of interesting books about the Japanese language that were never digitized and I always left with 2-3 new books. So I'm not super happy about AI companies hoovering this all up and not making the scans available.
That's not a new thing. I bought my first apple product (an iPad) last year and the free trials and nagging to set up iCloud cause the Settings app to have a red dot all of the time.
Mostly an advert for JIVX language learning tools. The entire site seems to be AI generated and there is no real trace of a human involved in the writing or curation.
It is a nightmare scenario: you have a long tail of thousands of websites that are broken, a large complex codebase and you need hours of time per bug for a human to investigate and fix it. Some trickier bugs could take days to diagnose. It's not sustainable for a small team. Luckily, I think this is one of the cases where AI can be leveraged appropriately, and give them a fighting chance of catching up.
1. PCB review subreddit gets posts from people who use Claude to design the whole thing with 3D renders. Looks amazing. But uses auto router and 20 connections are left open. Claude said they needed to be fixed manually but the user didn't even read, just posted the whole GitHub and expected volunteers to fix it
2. Another project used Claude to design the PCB. After assembly the usb c port melted. I can see (via GitHub) photos being posted to Claude, Claude commenting that they're not sure if it's a current issue or a soldering problem (short), so " just leave the usb c port out for now". Zero evidence of the user using their brain or pulling out a multimeter.
PCB design is not that hard. People trying to offload this to AI are also unwilling or unable to put in the work to actually diagnose issues and finish the project. Unlike code, you cannot chuck hundreds of dollars at Claude until it "solves" PCB because it has no way to test its changes.
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