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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • There are a bunch of free channels on the internet that some TVs can just stream without a dedicated app. These channels are supported by ads like cable/whatever channels, but not locked behind a subscription. VLC is supporting whatever formats they use to allow (or make it easier; IDK) people to watch them if they want.

    The other part is that they’re working on web assembly to allow sites to use VLC as their embedded video player.





  • The other benefit with Costco is that they have an extremely generous return policy.

    Some obvious stuff has different rules (electronics is 90 days, stuff like tires that have clear expected lifespans have their own rules), but it is extremely liberal. And my experience is that I pretty rarely have to use it, because while not everything is a premium product for a bargain price, they tend to ensure that the suppliers for products they sell have reasonable build quality and make stuff that isn’t trash designed to fail.




  • There isn’t guesswork involved. They know for certain that people will. They have network effect on their side. Their entire audience is captive. Anyone willing to leave already has after the hundreds of different “revelations” of how fucking disgusting everything they have ever touched is.

    They aren’t selling anything but your privacy. It’s Apple’s limitations on being overt malware that they’d be bypassing, and it is absolutely guaranteed that they would do so the literal minute they can.






  • Facebook/ten cent/etc have literally zero reason to stay off the play store. Google encourages them to be malware, and doesnt curtail their bad behavior is any way.

    Apple doesn’t. They might not leave while they think they can also destroy the security of iOS in the US, but it is a complete and utter certainty that the literal day any similar law takes effect in the US that Facebook and all their apps leave the App Store completely. They absolutely can trivially walk people through the steps from their website and the apps that are already installed, and they already have the monopoly to force their users to deal with it.

    Apple isn’t Reddit, building a market by claiming to be open then locking it down. They built their market because the walled garden is a massively better product.


  • I literally buy iPhone mostly because of the walled garden. It’s by far the biggest value add they have, and they grew to the scale they are in large part because of the value that adds.

    If you want to sell an app on iPhone, you have to follow their human interface guidelines. You have to respect users’ privacy (not enough, but as much as they can enforce). You used to be required to take payment through Apple’s payment methods that make it incredibly easy to track and cancel subscriptions. Courts taking the payment rules away makes my experience worse. A shitty law forcing Apple to allow apps to pull out of the App Store and do whatever they want would make my experience much worse. (Thank God I’m not in the EU or subject to that.) If I was in the EU, the government be stealing a large portion of the value of the phone I paid for from me, to be replaced by stuff I can already do if I really want to.

    These laws aren’t giving power to the people. They’re taking away Apple’s power to protect people and giving the power to fucking China through epic.







  • I mostly don’t play multiplayer, but some games just aren’t the same single player.

    Madden, for example, the AI just is too complex for them to handle it at a high enough level for the balanced but competitive strategy game football can be. All Madden is hard, but it’s hard by cheating. Playing against humans is how you get the chess match. I’m sure there are various other genres focused on strategy that are similar. AI can beat advanced humans in clean games like chess or go, but probably not on a PS5 and not with messier strategy games.