Rejecting Netflix fixes things for you and me, but the article says Netflix has 93 million ad-supported subscribers. I’m really worried about the amount of influence advertisers have on our society, and it’s only getting worse. Even if you and I can be above the direct influence of these ads, many people are not, and those people are influencing you and me. This produces a dangerous secondary influence that can reach most of society, and just fills everyone’s mind with lies, for hardly any cost.

Bezos does not make a billion dollars in a week, unless you count certain short term gains based on random variation of the stock market, in which case he also loses a billion dollars in some weeks.

I knew. I had been meaning to buy an aftermarket car stereo with USB and MP3 support for a long time. I was on my last blank CD, and had to decide then whether I would buy more CDs, or whether I would buy a new stereo that didn’t need CDs.

Kanopy looks like they use Widevine DRM. I will continue using other DRM-free sources.

At this rate, they’ll deport the players. Is it too late to move the 2026 world cup?

The GPL explicitly allows redistributing without charge, even if you paid for it. If they didn’t want their program redistributed, they shouldn’t have licensed it under the GPL.

Their entire security model depends on knowing file extensions, but they still hide them. Even if you enable it, there are some extensions that still won’t show, like .lnk (shortcut file). You can absolutely have executable code, and therefore malware in a .lnk file.

And it was GPL, so it wasn’t even copyright infringement.

It would be profitable if they taxed pollution according to the damage it causes.

It used to ask. I haven’t tried in years. Maybe it only asks if you also create a gmail email address with your account.

First, I don’t like Google’s terms.

Second, if I try to create an account using a different email address, it usually complains that I don’t have a real phone number, or every phone number I have or can borrow has been used too many times to create a Google account (I’ve never made one, but I’ve lent my number to a graphic designer who needed multiple accounts), or it blocks me at the Recaptcha (“Your computer is sending automated queries”).

For my current main email address, there is already an account created for it, which I did not make. This account was “suspended” as of the moment I first knew about it, with no reason given. Google said it would be automatically deleted if not signed into for several months. For a while, it seemed deleted. A year later, another implicit Google account was created in my name, and suspended immediately.

Each time, I learn about the mystery account because when I try to send email to any Gmail user I get a bounce message from [email protected] stating “The account [email protected] is disabled”. Using Google’s forgot-password system, I get confirmation that the account exists, and is suspended.

It’s kind of a big problem, because tons of people use googlemail.com servers to handle their email, even if the nominal domain isn’t gmail.com. When I opted out of Discord’s change in terms, that bounced with the same error message from [email protected]. Contacting Sparkfun’s tech support to tell them I can’t order from them because of Recaptcha, I also got the same bounce message.

I have to disagree about the idiot proof. KDE Plasma and Mate Desktop are more idiot proof and easy for newbies than Windows 10-11, yet have more features in their simple control panels.

I’ve had no bootloader problems in the last 10 years of Debian, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu (15-20 installs, plus another 20-30 if you count VMs.) However, my work computer’s bootloader was semi-bricked twice in 2019 (Windows 7).

What they want is: to reduce the trade deficit. But they don’t know how to do that. The most straightforward way is to produce more American products that people in other countries want. But how can Japan do that for them?

Is there any way to view this link without having a Youtube account? I can’t make one.

Transformers can increase voltage while decreasing current, or increase current while decreasing voltage, but can’t increase a signal’s power.

1905 is a milestone of modern physics, because it’s when Special Relativity came out.

That’s older than the transistor, which was commercialized in 1951. But it’s also older than the vacuum tube triode, which was invented in 1906 or 1908.

In 1905, there were no amplifiers of any kind (though there were relay switches). There was almost no radio. The triode was a necessary invention for almost all of analog electronics.

I assume bash scripts using jpegtopnm | pnmtopng are also in the neutral good category (from Netpbm).

I last played it in 2021. Steam says I have the achievement “Complete every task in the main campaign”, but I seem to recall not finding this game as fun as the other Zachtronics games.

1. Yes, many Steam games use a few API calls to integrate with Steam, such as seeing your friend list, usually to invited them to a multiplayer game. Hit shift-tab to see the Steam overlay in any game to get an idea for what this API can do.

2. They are a measure of the cost of your solution. They account for things like how many total squares you touched, how many total instructions were executed, and how much parallelization you had.

I like git add because then you can do git diff --staged

Because assault rifles (or any fully automatic rifles) are highly illegal in the US, and very rare in practice. If it was an assault rifle, its existence would have been as notable of a crime as his brandishing and threatening. The police would have been unlikely to let him go, would likely have confiscated the gun, and would have reported all that to the media.