PrimalAnimist

Well I think I pay something like $95 for YouTube TV +Max. Netflix is like 12? I’m on a sweet Spotify+Hulu for 9.99 promo for years, but I think it’s going up to $10.99. Disney is like $9. It may seem like a lot, but that’s all I spend on entertainment. I don’t eat outside the home regularly. I don’t go see movies at theaters. I don’t buy things like DVDs and stuff.

And to be fair, it’s for the household. We’re poly so there’s a variety of interests. And if you divide that by 5 adults, it’s cheap.

I cancelled cable a few years ago and now use YouTube TV. I love it because I can record everything, never run out of DVR space. I can run 5 tvs with different shows on each. I can watch TV anywhere on my phone and laptop. I can stop on one device and pick back up on another. Well over 100 channels now (but I only really watch a handful). Every channel also has an on-demand section. Like TCM has what’s live but also a huge library to stream from.

I have Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Peacock, Max…but if I had to just use one service, it would be YouTube TV. It follows me, and is not tied to my house. If I go visit another state, it will even switch to the local news wherever I am. It has, by far, the most content in one spot for one price.

Not everyone watches US politics, or Fox News. I live in the US and don’t know her. I am sure there are famous faces you don’t know because it’s not your field of interest. Can you identify famous contemporary painters by face? Physicists? Composers? Game designers? Belittling someone’s education because they don’t know something you do is pathetic and says a lot more about you than it does the person you were mocking.

It may just be the weed, but for a moment I thought I was reading something off a Night City public BBS.

You can’t tell anyone this, but I have a friend who is deep inside the insurance industry. Some of the big guys have invested heavy into LEDs. So to maximize the LED investments, they give manufacturers safety discounts for every LED they can attach to their shit. Big guys make some extra zeros for their accounts, and sharpie and 3M get some splash, too.

For me, sugars and processed foods (grains especially) were an addiction. I see a lot of advice about allowing yourself a “cheat” day now and then but I would advise against it. It’s like telling a drug addict it’s ok to shoot up now and then, or it’s ok for the alcoholic to have a drink on special occasions. Processed foods are harmful to us over time. So while it won’t kill you when you are 20 or even 30, it will catch up with you.

Push through those cravings. They will go away.

I agree with that logic. But for me personally, I don’t feel “locked” into google. There are no contracts, no penalties for moving to some other service if I need. I never use customer support from any of these services because I find it’s easier to just look for the answers myself. I have no loyalty to any company, I simply use what best serves me at the time. All corps are interested in profit over people, so there’s really no company I have found to be fully ethical and transparent while offering a competing service that is as reliable.

I have the free 15 GB of cloud storage with them, but I don’t use it. I keep my data on my own cloud storage box. Yes, I have a gmail account, but I also have a proton.me account that I use more than gmail. Also, pretty much every big service out there is powered by Google and/or Amazon (see Twitter lol), so looking at the big picture, right now, we are dependent on Google in ways we are not even aware.

This is also why I am excited to see the shift to open source and self-hosting. I think a time is coming, too, where big companies are going to have to pay us for access to our data. I’ve made almost $200 just casually answering questions for the Google Rewards app. Sometimes it’s a dime, sometimes fifty cents, occasionally a question nets more. Those credits can be used to pay for any google services or purchases. I usually buy movies I can’t find on streaming services with my Google Rewards credits (my pirate days are long gone, it’s just not as convenient for me anymore and if I can’t watch it through a service or buy it, I just don’t need to watch it lol).

I really want to self-host a lemmy server sometime in the next year, I have a Core i5 desktop that’s not dead, just sits in a closet. My wish is to have all my personal social media self-hosted and I can choose who I want to federate with and who I don’t. But I’m not a pioneer. I’m waiting til this all settles a little to see if it’s worth the work.

Check out Google Fi. It uses the T-Mobile network here (US), and I get unlimited data, no rate limits. I have three phone numbers on my account and it costs me $85 a month total. Also the phones from the Fi store are super cheap if you stay on Google Fi. My pixel 7 got $300 off at purchase and $100 for my old phone. They are unlocked, too. Something I hate when buying from other providers. One of my phones had a Verizon sim and a Google Fi e-sim, so I can switch services with easy. Here in the mountains, service can be spotty in places with TMobile. Wifi calling is also available though, so that helps, too. I abandoned US Cellular entirely.

I still use Google news to follow some topics and it gathers articles from my local news sites, too. But any time if shows an article that prompts me to register to see it, I just go back to the Google news page and tell it to block that source.

You annoy me once and you disappear lol.

But Meta doesn’t own social media. They have some social media platforms that are finding direct, open-source alternatives to their service…for FREE. The days of uncontested, corporate-controlled, AI-manipulated social media have come to an end.

I find this more mildlyhumorous than infuriating. I’m looking forward to a new era where every news article no longer includes a string of embedded tweets. :) As a non-twitter user, this certainly doesn’t encourage me to bother making an account.

That’s really difficult to do with a karma-like system. People posting in echo-chambers can post misinformation but receive many up votes.

Credibility is subjective. For example, people on one side of a political ideology will not think people on the opposite side are credible. So who can really determine an “attribute of credibility”?

We would have to agree on a standard first and that’s just not going to happen.

Former redditor. What do I call myself now? Lemming? lol But I also noticed that I don’t see some Karma score equivalent, which is a great thing to leave behind. Those imaginary points were just useless at best, and used against people who were new at the worst.

Let’s be honest, this price change was all about being able to charge the big corps mega money for access to their data in order to train new generations of AI. The price is absurd, yes, but the owners of reddit know that Google and Microsoft have deep pockets (among other global corps wanting the massive amount of data reddit has saved).

They never expected the third party apps to be able to pay this much and frankly, they don’t care. It’s HUGE profit from AI corps, and the losses, at least short term, will be overshadowed by the gains. Long term? I don’t know, this isn’t my area of expertise, but, like I did with Twitter, I have moved on so at this point, it’s no longer relevant to me.