Its like its the middle of winter and the forecast says its going to be sunny an relatively warm on the weekend. Then you wake up Saturday and it’s freezing rain and thunder.

I did finally clean the SIMMs out of my big box of leftover gear. If I haven’t used them this millennium, I probably won’t need them.

The board had this ability and they didn’t use until now!?

I just opened Lemmy after hitting the bottom of my unread posts in Miniflux.

Brain: Are you pondering what I’m pondering?
Pinky: Whoof, oh, I’d have to say the odds of that are terribly slim, Brain.
Brain: True.
Pinky: I mean, really, when have I ever been pondering what you’ve been pondering?
Brain: To my knowledge, never.
Pinky: Exactly. So, what are the chances that this time, I’m pondering what you’re pondering?
Brain: Next to nil.
Pinky: Well, that’s exactly what I’m thinking, too.
Brain: Therefore, you are pondering what I’m pondering.
Pinky: Poit, I guess I am!

He’s smart when it comes to snuggle acquisition. And I don’t think she’s plotting a coup (yet), just keeping her options open.

Didn’t this happen like 2 years ago?

A third party I contract with is consuming large quantities of copyrighted material to provide training material for my personal Ain’t-artificial Intelligence Model. There’s just no way to build it otherwise, and we can’t possible afford for the Chinese to beat us to this goal. No rare books have been harmed in this effort.

I got into the digital stuff around 2002ish with eDonkey. There was a big MST3k trading community at the time, and I had access to an OC-48 line back then. All the 90 minute episodes were sized to CD, so I had a whole spindle of episodes.

Maybe it’s my frame of mind (I’m not “discovering” new music, I stopped paying for streaming when I realized 99% of what I was listening to was recorded in the last millennium) but I can’t fathom how this would “turn free users to paid.”

2026?

Some folks have a bit more practice and never let their skills go cold

I’m enjoying the “look how many federal felonies we can publicly confess to,” part of the AIpocolypse.

Step 1: Degoogle

The only theater pirate I ever knew worked as a projectionist and took full advantage of that.

It’s the day after important provisions were struck out of the Declaration of Independence by committee.

My experience with Netflix shows tends to go like this: I hear about a new show from people at work (or maybe here). I watch and enjoy season 1. I never hear about the show again until someone mentions that there sad it was cancelled after additional seasons I never heard about.

Personally, I find it hard to watch things when I don’t know they exist.

Your pizza party has 6.2 minutes remaining, continue merriment for the prescribed time.

Gratis S’more Bod was my stage name as a stripper.

Proprietary tech with no existing laws telling the companies they have to keep supporting it, all so I can make a rich person richer? Where do I sign up?

A FOSS alternative would likely be missing or have meh performance from many of the streamers. All the big ones use proprietary codecs that are expensive annual licenses. And even then the streamer controls what various access methods are allowed to see and at what quality. I think netflix still limits web browsers to 720p, for example. And straight web access isn’t great, you want an interface that can ideally be controlled with about 6 - 8 buttons (4 directions, OK, and Back are the minimum) which might require API access to these services, which introduces more access control. Netflix (and maybe others) even have hardware installed at the ISP level that give them a lot of control over individual access as well.

Basically for a full featured FOSS service you’d need to start with getting grants to buy to codec licenses, and then you’d need to hire people just to maintain your relationship with the streaming services to stay in their good graces while they know you’re working against their bottom line.