• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 6th, 2023

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  • Everyone has their own opinions here. Here’s my opinion on what’s worth it and not:

    Streaming services: Only if you’re not getting ads bundled with your subscription and you’re getting a lot of use each month from it, more than just renting each movie.

    Amazon Prime: Again, only if you really need the frequent free shipping. I don’t, so I’ll eat $30 in shipping costs per year when I need something more urgently instead of paying $140 to avoid that.

    Discord Nitro: Obviously not worth it but it’s funny because I had it for a few months before their privacy policy shocker in 2023. I genuinely wanted to support them before then because it was feature rich but not as bloated and ad-free with a reasonable privacy policy before 2023.

    News: High quality journalism deserve the support.

    SiriusXM: Unless you’re road tripping into the middle of nowhere, internet radio is free and has many more options.

    Xbox game pass: I never saw the appeal because I’m a patient gamer.

    Gym membership: I tried to get one a Planet Fitness a few weeks ago just for a month because the closer gym was revamping itself and was shocked to find that it wanted a downpayment. It tripled the price of a month of membership so I noped out, I’m not paying $50 for 8 trips to the gym that doesn’t even have bench presses.












  • I also use ZArchiver and unzipping is zippy (sorry) in my experience. Not quite as fast as Linux but that’s to be expected considering the hardware difference.

    However Windows is quite slow in this regard in my experience. It can easily take 30 seconds to extract a zip file that Linux can do in under a second, often with a sub 1MBps throughput. This is on an NVMe SSD.




  • I have a few examples:

    • Flight Sim 2020
    • Windows Defender is the best antivirus, better than all those paid crapware antiviruses
    • An attempt at an independent browser engine that wasn’t the dated IE
    • This is a hot take but seamless integration of local file storage with OneDrive. Yes, they are way too heavy-handed about forcing this on you and it’s really stupid how it moves your files without telling you, but I’ve never seen a file manager that handles both local and cloud files faster than W10’s file manager (a big part of the reason why I was mad about W11, because that advantage disappeared)

    The only useful thing I can think of after the pandemic is the CPU scheduling updates for Alder Lake, but that was pretty much a necessity. Everything else is AI overhype, rewriting programs to make them slower, and/or yet another way to invade people’s privacy