Reddit used to be amazing. "Just pick a username and password. Give us your email if you want to be able to do a password reset." Now an email (with verification) is required and you'll still get insta-shadow-banned.
Actually, no, an email is not required. It's a dark pattern. You just need to click "Continue" without entering any email address.
Hmm, it gave me an error message and wouldn't let me continue until I had put in my email address a few weeks ago when I was making a throwaway. Not doing it now though. I suppose either they're experimenting or maybe they just don't like my ISP.
Honestly... it depends if you have an ad-blocker. I would prefer TV to Youtube any day, if I had a TV ad-blocker, simply because the content is far more likely to be reasonable quality rather than a 20 minute clickbait video with 30 seconds of actual content.
Are you sure? When I used to watch Battlebots on Discovery channel it was basically 6 minutes of action wrapped in 10 minutes of fluff and 15 minutes of ads. Discovery Magazine had 3 sections per half-hour; comparatively speaking any science channel in YT will have way more content, and a lot of it really good for specialized audiences. Travel YT are way more up-to-date and useful than TV travel documentaries used to…
I never said all content on TV was good. Similarly, not all content on Youtube is bad. But the most hyped/advertised content on TV tends to be pretty entertaining (and usually fairly accurately advertised), while the most hyped/advertised content on Youtube (i.e. frontpage) is 90% clickbait and 10% people I'm subscribed to.
I grew up in the 90's, when I turned on the TV the audio was being output immediately and the actual display took a second to warm up. a second. Now my TV takes about 30s to start up, it's actually constantly on standby mode. It takes a good 5-10 minutes to actually boot from cold. using the UI feels sluggish, there's proprietary "applications" which clog up the main screen and I'm told it spies on me. Not to mention…
I haven't had this experience at all with my new TV I bought this year. It boots up in quite literally 3 seconds and I can navigate to netflix or the criterion channel right away and begin playing stuff there I can even mirror my phone screen directly to my TV with with my phone's built-in functionality, which has actually been useful more times than I would have expected!
Try unplugging it and plugging it back in.
I’m glad your TV works for you, I haven’t found one that boots in 3s and is usable- even from standby.
Do you recognize that this is subjective? YouTube is way better than TV, imo.
Maybe being better than TV was a bit of a low bar to shoot for. Youtube has super good stuff but it's like with email: there are very good emails and then there is the spam. But there is no youtube 'spamfilter'. Hm... idea?
Subscriptions are basically that. A curated feed of only creators you're interested in.
I can’t count the number of times my wife has shouted at the iPad because some web dev wants a SPA form validation that didn’t work correctly, and all while trying to do something reasonably important like making sure our child gets fed food at school without the ingredients she’s allergic to.
Advertising is cancer and should die, but billboards and real-world display advertising is probably the least bad version of it. I'd prefer if online advertising (and the associated data collection and privacy violations) were nuked first.
Counterpoint: You can escape online advertising by walking away from the computer. There's nowhere you can walk to escape physical advertising. Maybe the desert.
Online advertising stalks you even if you're not looking at the ads. Opting out of online advertising basically means you need to go live in the woods and never interact with modern society again. Every interaction you'd have with technology will have something to do with ads one way or another, even if just buying paid products in a physical store thanks to Bluetooth/Wi-Fi MAC address tracking, face recognition, not to mention loyalty cards (but at least you can opt-out of that one).
I share your frustrations with Chatbots on the phone so much. Weeks ago I was dealing with chest pain/heart pain. I ended up trying to call a bunch of clinics/doctors to try to get a recommendation of where to go. Everywhere I called, they would have a spiel about covid that would last 1/2 minutes. It would make me livid and my pain worse. I understand that thats partly my fault for being impatient. But it felt so ha…
I see you made the mistake of thinking that the healthcare system has anything to do with your wellness. Common mistake, but still a mistake. The healthcare system is just another machine to shovel money into a select group of peoples pocket, any doctoring they choose to provide is just a consequence of the marketing budget (gotta keep those word-of-mouth numbers up!).
Yeah, Im really surprised by how inefficient everything here is. Also how shady the practices are, no one warns you as an immigrant that you should avoid hospitals at all cost unless you’re almost sure you’re gonna die.
I come from a 3rd world middle eastern county. We somehow have a life expectancy higher than the US. And over there you pretty much just deal with the doctors straightforward. I think part of the problem is there isn’t enough doctors in the US to begin with
Cars. I appreciate all of the advances in emissions reduction, safety, etc., but when I was a kid I learned the basics of working on nearly any car on the market, and now even with an OBD scanner most of them are still near unfixable without visiting a dealership. Cars are literally immobilized by things like faulty sensors when if ignored, the car would legitimately still work just fine. That's just the purely funct…
> Cars are literally immobilized by things like faulty sensors when if ignored, the car would legitimately still work just fine. Any concrete examples of this? FWIW, cars are orders of magnitude more reliable than they were 40, 50+ years ago even though those were easier to work on.
Faulty Mass Airflow Sensor on my 09 Touareg told the car that not enough air was getting into the engine and it just refused to start. This is on the main intake, which unless completely covered is impossible to block. Plenty of air was getting into the system, so it was possible to disable it and the car worked fine.
I work in digital advertising. I manage several billion impressions a year in ads spend and over $15M a year. I think it's easy for engineers to undervalue the importance of advertising. Without marketing, many many well-engineered products would never be discovered. This is why marketing is considered a core function of business. It speeds up the integration of new products and technologies into the general society.…
99.9% of products aren't needed in any way by anybody. 90% of products are created to fill an artificial demand manufactured by advertising in the first place. these products and their manufacturing comes at a massive carbon cost for meaningless gain. i also worked in digital advertising. for some of the biggest brands out there. i quit.
In a free market, we don't dictate what someone needs or doesn't need. We believe the individual has a right to choose amongst options that are presented with truthful claims. If someone pays for it willingly, they needed it. If we start attempting to break down all the extrinsic motivations for purchase decisions, we'd see almost ALL of them are dictated by social acceptance, comfort, and convenience. This is a feature of a wealthy nation, not a bug, that we can seek out goods and services beyond basic food/water/shelter/safety needs.