OpenStars

Probably b/c if they can’t monetize your data, then they choose to profit from you in other ways. :-(

Who doesn’t enjoy our annual, third of a year long Christmas-gasm!?

No don’t answer that, I know what you mean:-P.

Northeastern USA is extremely cold compared to temperate Europe.

Though that is nothing compared to north midwestern states, brrr… did you know that at some point, the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales converge? :-P

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.

For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add “Reddit” to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.

As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.

And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they’ll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO’d AI answers.

DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won’t anymore.

Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that’s the official term afaik!!:-)

Similarly, Mac OSX is POSIX compliant and therefore more truly UNIX than Linux is, fight me. :-P

Silly you, thinking that women are “people”. :-P (/s) “Fearing for your life”, according to those who “tell it like it is”, is actually code for gentrified white men, though going to college may remove from you this privileged status.

They would if it makes their food tastier. Yum… infants.:-)

They would if it makes their food tastier. Yum… infants.:-)

Yup, sounds about wrong.

Nothing I have ever seen will ever top this image describing the year: https://daysuntilspring.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/81321947_3096760897007337_1939866200221679616_n.jpg

I think a lot of shows are AWESOME, but then late-stage capitalistic enshittification happens and they become… far less so, and often quite TERRIBLE even, though ostensibly still have the same title, even though nowhere near being an identical show.

One super-good example is Stranger Things, where the first season was really quite good! So many homages to nerd culture like E.T. and D&D - it was fantastic!:-) As I read though, the pair of creators had 2 rules: never use CGI, and absolutely do not “sell out”, i.e. a story should want to be told, not sold merely for the sake of cash. So after the first season where they made it b/c of their love for the craft, you can guess how the subsequent seasons played out (I believe one of the pair even quit over it).

Arguably a better example is The Walking Dead - it started off REALLY good, but then… well… it too “sold out”. Actually I keep trying to force myself to get through it, I even started watching it over again from the start (a couple times now) thinking that would help, but have yet to accomplish this feat.

Another is Designated Survivor. It had some big-name actors, most of whom quit (I think the show was sold to a different network… or something?), and the last season was just terrible, limping along before they finally put it out of its misery and ended it.

The really fantastic shows - like Star Trek - had to prove themselves, then the creators were given leeway to subsequently make great sequels and spin-offs and even entirely unrelated titles. Fun story: Gene Roddenberry even created shows after his death, as his wife took his unfinished notes and lead their creation under his vision, like Earth: Final Conflict.

TLDR: why offer you a good show when they can offer you a crappy show that they made for a tenth of the price, yet charge you the full amount?

(though stupidly enough, they also seem to be trying to offer us even more terrible shows that cost 50x the price to make, and yet somehow suck all the more for that!? anyway it all seems to be based on greed + arrogance - they want to make money, but they do not want to put in the effort to actually earn it, e.g. by paying the actors a decent wage)

First and most especially the single most important factor: b/c I thought it sounded cool. 😎

Second, I googled “what does Zaddy mean” - oh wait that was earlier in the day, cough, I mean I googled “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, found that it was first aired in 1939, and so put that.

Third, it is a popular meme format.

But mostly b/c it sounded cool (yet is accurate).

Teaching true facts about the world - that some people will never truly love you, only what you can do for them - since 1939.

But the anti-romance dialogues were pretty fun too… (choose one person, then the others get mad at u:-P)

Kotor also encouraged replays with all options so that you could try the variety of romance situations:-).

I thought some of the older ones, like 2000, were more secure, with ability to access on-chip security features. So ofc they threw all that out in favor of 10, the final OS that would come as a subscription service, meaning that you’d never need to buy one again. And then they threw that out too, in favor of the next one… and on and on it goes:-P.

I absolutely hate Windows:-(.

If you were close enough to take this picture, then you were close enough to influence the outcome… I’m just saying… :-)

Makes sense - why allow people to administer their own machines? :-P

Computers mostly don’t force software updates on you, unless you tell them to. (Caveat: IT routinely forces updates on people.) Find the setting where you specifically asked the machine to keep itself updated, and turn it off. If you can’t find it, throw the machine away and get a better one where you can be in control:-P. This concludes my sermon for today, I hope you all have some Happy Holidays!:-P

Not me, I’m th first one.:-)