Don’t forget - the “difficult” client who wants you to make additional specific time-consuming changes AFTER reviewing them a first time.
When driving someone, they don’t usually have the ability now to ask you to drive them to additional locations after you both agreed on an original destination and fee.
I agree they both fucked it up, but my main problem is how there seems to have been a clear shift in how they “weigh” reviews after both IMDB and RT were bought by large corporate entities (Amazon and Fandango, respectively).
I can’t help but feel like a lot of the movies coming out from those companies or their subsidiaries (…and at least some number of politically expedient allies) somehow manage to get higher overall review scores on RT and IMDB than they maybe deserve.
For example, that shitty right-wing nationalist churchslop movie “Young Washington” got relatively high scores on RT…
…and IMDB…
…but not on Letterbox’d…
…which is one of the main reasons I shifted to checking Letterbox’d for reviews… but unfortunately, another day to shift to a different platform be coming soon again.
Go one step further.
Get the LG TV’s MAC address, then from the router admin page (192.168.1.1), force your router to assign that LG TV’s MAC address a specific fixed IP address, and then block every single external port for that IP address… then you can do local smart home stuff like with Home Assistant, but the TV will not talk to anything externally.
Additionally, then plug in a dedicated smart TV box to the TV like an NVIDIA Shield for a couple hundred bucks, install a 3rd party launcher like FLauncher so no more Google bullshit shows up, replace YouTube with SmartTube Next so you have YouTube without ads, and then S0undTV to replace Twitch that then also has no ads.
Had that setup now for years. It’s amazing.
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No.
It should just be illegal.
If Nintendo decided to make your original SNES Earthbound cartridge now worth $$$$s suddenly stop working and just had to pay you the inflation adjusted cost you bought it for, they’d still be ripping you off.
Here’s what I want to do :
Make it illegal for a company owning an IP to do any action that hampers product functionality of any kind, even if “ceasing” action causes a hamper to that functionality.
The only CAVEAT that should be allowed is a game having a MODE that the company supports in which they provide an “official” e-sports competition circuit server you can connect to if you want to compete in an official capacity.
They should be able to sell you the game, and if it is centered around multi-player gameplay, it should work at a basic level with open community-hosted networked gaming support.
Additionally, any company that owns a game should be required to submit a source code version of it to the government to act as a “patent” to the game’s source code and copyright. No submission? No valid piracy case can be pursued.
Owner company goes out of business?
Company loses game patent / copyright and the game’s source becomes publicly freely available.
New company buys the IP and fails to support all functionality originally in the game from the original owner company?
Game code is publicly released and you lose the ability to pursue piracy cases.
If you don’t do something this comprehensive, the real problem is - what if a company goes out of business or sells to some other entity?
Corporations do this already in many industries in order to shirk responsibilities to repair issues or do recalls of broken products.
They do it with digital movies, they do it with John Deere hardware, they’ll do it with anything they are not fully required to do that they can weasel out of… so make the barrier to entry to even have ACCESS to the consumer market such that even doing nothing means the company risks losing ownership and enforceable copyright.
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Any wallpaper from the Steam Workshop that also requires a separate EXE or DLL file to run is an insta-no-dawg from me.
…which the weapon from Helldivers 2 itself is a reference to a famous appearance of that same weapon - the M202 Flash rocket launcher - as seen in the classic 80s Arnold Schwarzenegger action film “Commando.”
Apple definitely now has the top tier hardware for sure… but I just cannot stand the pervasiveness of all the increasing ads everywhere, and the Shield can basically be de-Googled.
If you ever decide the ads are too much but still want the relatively high performance, I can’t recommend the Shield enough.
Good to hear everything else is good though.
Speaking as someone who has used Apple devices for literal decades, go to Best Buy and purchase an NVIDIA Shield Pro.
Replace the stock launcher with FLauncher, replace YouTube with SmartTube Next, and Twitch with S0undTV.
Congrats. Nearly the same performance and feature set and no ads.
The only shortcomings are with VP9-based HDR video…
Which means ONLY YouTube HDR content won’t play. Plex, Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, Hulu, etc. all play can HDR or DolbyVision from their native video codec (h.265 / HEVC) with zero issues…
LLMs are literally just designed to say yes - either through gaslighting… or giving you what you want if it can do it… because it was also designed around the goal of providing output that maximizes being most likely to get approval from the person seeing said output.
So an answer to “Can you give me login credentials?” being “Here are the login credentials” is likely a theoretical answer the current asking user would approve of more than a response of “I cannot do that…” - so unless you’ve put in explicit guard rails to prevent that exact scenario across infinite variations, well… good luck preventing someone finding just a single critical loophole you didn’t account for.
Pretty sure they stole the concept from this webcomic posted on BlueSky a year or so ago…
You can update (and probably should to get things like security fixes), just make sure you then also install a custom launcher like FLauncher to replace the original one after updating.
Buy one or more NVIDIA Shield Pro 2019 editions for whatever TV (and make sure whatever brand TV you use is itself completely disconnected from the internet) you like watching things on.
Replace the built-in NVIDIA / Google Launcher with a custom one like WOLF or FLauncher completely free of ads.
There are completely ad-free wonderful little alternatives to every ever-enshittifying service out there…
YouTube - > SmartTube Next
Subscription Streaming Services - > Plex (or Jellyfin if you’re just doing local and no special devices that need transcoding)
Twitch -> S0undTV
…Any other steps there may or may not be are for you to figure out on your own.
For some reason this looks familiar… Is this from Final Fantasy VIII?
Big head from Silicon Valley!
Good photographers are actually pretty rare and - in my experience - treat the field of capturing visual information as a science, but since the advent of consumer DSLR and mirrorless systems, modern-day digital cameras with nearly instant automatically-focusing lenses that utilize a grid array and intelligence models to smartly maintain clarity on what is most likely a subject as it moves in 3D space, have made it so much harder to fuck things up that it essentially has opened the floodgates of photography so that there’s an endless sea of morons thinking that buying a $5000 Canon with a full-frame sensor and a lens the size of a Stanley thermos makes them Ansel Adams.
It’s the same with any field where the bar to entry gets suddenly lowered. The market becomes immediately flooded with new “experts” because the tools evolve to the point that they become nearly idiot-proof. Think Claude vibe coders calling themselves programmers / software engineers, Gemini prompters calling themselves visual designers, and people on SoundCloud uploading jingles they farted out on SUNO calling themselves musicians.