Yeah I think that’s a decent comparison. There are of course still hobbyists and enthusiasts today who know a lot about cars despite not being professionals working in a related field, but it does feel like the general understanding among the public has fallen because the cultural phenomenon of a father teaching his son about cars has dissipated. Piracy has always been a niche activity but the core skills and knowledges it requires were taught more to millennials than they were to zoomers. If people have grown up with less education about motor engines or desktop computers then it’s not surprising they struggle to expand on that later in life.

Acknowledging differences is not “war”.

This was a pretty underwhelming article. Most of it is a pretty uninteresting story about how the site was founded, which isn’t really relevant to the headline.

Resolution doesn’t mean much, those sites you are referring to use extremely low bitrate encodes that look terrible. Yes, streaming services (in my experience Netflix is the main offender) can sometimes deliver dogshit quality streams too due to their adaptive bit rates, but the ceiling is way higher than those sites that pull from DDL file hosters. If you are consistently suffering from very low quality paid streams then you likely have some kind of network issue affecting the adaptive bitrate.

Most streaming services have introduced cheaper “ad-supported” tiers within the last few years while jacking up the prices of the existing tiers. There is usually a price gap designed to either make you sit through ads or overpay to remove them. Many (most?) people don’t even use ad-blockers in their web browsers and are psychologically trained to sit through ad breaks, either because of TV (older generation) or YouTube (younger generation) which is why these streaming companies can get away with such a betrayal of their original premise.

From what I have seen, most Threads users are safe-spacers who wanted a platform with heavy moderation. So I guess these are just the growing pains they’ll have to get used to in the pursuit of their circlejerk paradise, particularly since this is Meta we’re talking about who have never been reliable or effective when it comes to moderating content.

This is a pretty clickbaity counter-article that doesn’t review the original in good faith. The New Yorker article is not titled ‘Social Media Is Killing Kids’ but rather ‘Has Social Media Fuelled A Teen-Suicide Crisis?’ with a lead of:

Mental-health struggles have risen sharply among young Americans, and parents and lawmakers alike are scrutinizing life online for answers.

So the implication that the premise of the article is to demonise social media is completely wrong, since it’s actually an investigation into the issue. That’s also the reason it’s long (another strange complaint from a guy whose 3000+ word response is only ever his opinions).

The “moral panic tropes” are testimony from real parents whose real children killed themselves. And these real parents think social media was responsible. It strikes me as pretty low to hand wave away the grief of these real people because it inconveniently feeds into a narrative you have some instinctual problem with.

The author tries to frame the balance of the New Yorker article as some kind of gotcha. Like it’s somehow a bad thing that this other writer took the time to consult with and quote experts who provide a different opinion. Personally I would much rather read that then something like this which was basically the equivalent of a reddit eXpOsEd thread.

Exactly. “Sparking backlash” just means these people whined for 2 minutes like they always do, before reaching into their wallet once again.

Corbyn was also good friends with Ken Livingstone, who said some very strange things about Hitler and the Jews.

It’s not that strange, I have a friend who literally said the same thing today in reference to one of his favourite channels shutting down. He preferred to call the stuff on this channel art, rather than content. I agree with the person above too, the term has always bugged me. It makes it sound so mass produced, like your job is to just produce meaningless “content” for people to mindlessly consume. And to be honest, that’s exactly what the mainstream YouTube culture is about.

Confucius is that you?

I guess relatively few people still turn to piracy, it seems like all these streaming platforms are massively increasing their prices knowing that their customers will try to rationalise the extra spending somehow.

More than 70% of central banks are currently researching and/or designing their own CBDCs.

“Crypto is the future” doesn’t really mean anything. Anyone can say that and never be wrong, because humans will always be looking towards the future. What I’m interested in is when this future is supposedly arriving. People have been making big claims about this stuff for nearly two decades and it’s still pretty irrelevant. Meanwhile CBDCs are actually being developed and rolled out globally. Where is crypto?

If you search on solidtorrents.to there is a version with ~17 seeders.

It’s a valid question, but the people asking it never seem to understand why social media is damaging for young people. They never seem to understand that designers are literally taking cues from the gambling industry to create addictive apps and algorithms, or that the brains of teenagers are still developing and are therefore much more vulnerable than an adult’s. It’s not just a moral panic about porn or cyber-bullying or kids doing something new their parents don’t understand and it’s not hypocritical for parents to want their children off social media while continuing to use it themselves. I think once you understand the technological aspect then it becomes clear that there is a problem here that needs addressing.

Marshall…?

WHY DIDN’T YOU CALL IT MALL-E?!

WHY?!

If you have slower internet or don’t seed 24/7, I would recommend just focusing on seediing torrents with a low number of seeders. It doesn’t really matter if you leech the latest episode of a popular new TV series, as there will be so many other seeders, (many with a better capacity to seed). However, for something older or more niche your decision to seed or leech could determine whether someone else gets to enjoy that content.

Xiaomi isn’t actually that big in China AFAIK. There is a lot of competition, not just from Apple but all the other Chinese vendors, most of whom are larger. Huawei, Honor, VIVO and Oppo all have at least an equivalent, if not larger, segment of the Chinese market.

I called them soldiers because that is the terminology the person I was replying to used.