glockenspiel

joined 1 year ago
[–] glockenspiel@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree, and those routers can be extremely cheap. I recommend people plug them directly into ethernet whenever possible otherwise speeds basically get cut in half when operating as extenders (just like at home, excepting backhaul).

And in hotels without an obvious ethernet port: check behind the TV. There is usually a less metered port on the wall back there for use by the TV. Sometimes it is restricted, but I've been pleased to find that enough hotels don't have the foresight to do more than simply obscure things a bit.

[–] glockenspiel@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

That's not accurate. The article is about Australia. Netflix Australia had a net loss of 200K subscribers specifically due to the anti-consumer moves they've made which affects a lot more than just sharing a password with a family member. That's a 3% decline in a major country. Meanwhile, Netflix rivals had subscriptions increase overall and several saw huge surges. Netflix remains #1 by total subscribers in Australia, but that shouldn't shock anyone given the inherit momentum they possess.

The article was never about Netflix globally. It was always about Australia. Companies operate business units in regions, and each region must perform.

[–] glockenspiel@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The comments are just so much worse than the top posts. It is akin to Twitter after Musk pushed the main active user base away in exchange for a Faustian deal with right wingnuts. That or Reddit was truly duplicitous in their messaging and are perfectly fine taking money from propaganda organizations running in other countries which can pay the API fees to push narratives still. Not that they'd want that before an IPO or anything....

[–] glockenspiel@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree that this is needlessly nuanced, but it is possible. If you have a Mac you can transfer files between Mac and an iPad wirelessly or with a cable. iPads can also connect to external storage devices or Windows PCs if they are sharing the files. But it isn't like Android where you can basically just plug it into a Windows or Linux machine and have direct instant access to its entire directory.

[–] glockenspiel@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

A bit pedantic, but it is also industry leading in revenue/profit. Even in Europe and parts of Asia. A first glance it is a pretty "duh" statement. But companies, like Samsung, see Apple's price action and then move in unison toward it. Sure, you can get plenty of phones for relatively cheap these days. Often times with huge drawbacks or a lot of additional spying built in (or "features" like advertisements in notifications). Or you pay for it in other ways, such as not receiving more than a year's worth of updates.

[–] glockenspiel@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I feel this as well. I'm in a mixed device household, and sharing images and videos between each other is a real pain. Nobody wants to mess around with going to an iCloud or Google Photos link and grabbing images or video. In the USA, few people want to use third party messaging apps. My family certainly doesn't. My kid's friends certainly don't, and so everyone sticks to iMessage.

Because iMessage really is the best in this region given what is actually used by non-outliers. I use both Android and iOS, Windows and Mac. There's no comparison. iMessage has more features than Google's solution. Google's "RCS" is better than SMS/MMS but isn't equivalent to iMessage. And cross-device support for it is a joke. Samsung has their own little bridge if you buy entirely into their ecosystem--apps included (sorry, Google Messenger). But there isn't the same identical experience that happens like with Apple: iMessage on iPhone is the same as on iPad is the same as on Mac. No web QR codes to scan, no weird per-device limitations, it really just works. Handoff works like magic. I know, cliche, but Google doesn't have anything that competes with the feature set. iMessage is so much more than group chats and text messages and pictures like Android users tend to characterize.

Google has no room to call out Apple for its b.s. with iMessage, either; Google has its own proprietary messaging apps. They've tried several times to replicate iMessage and lock people in. Their latest is RCS, which is really a misnomer because Google took the actual RCS standard and made it proprietary. That's why there aren't third party apps outside of a tiny number of outliers with special business arrangements with Google (such as Samsung). That's why Google's entire campaign to "shame" Apple (really, remind iPhone users of the pain of interacting with Android users) doesn't go anywhere. Google is just as proprietary as iMessage. Google requires all traffic route through Google's proprietary Jibe middleware and cloud infrastructure.

At this point I doubt Google would actually share their proprietary RCS with Apple given that they don't share it with anyone else except Samsung, and only then because Samsung was moving to fork Android (or abandon it entirely) after Google got into the hardware business. We know Google has a private API for their RCS implementation and that they actively choose not to share it, because they've accidentally leaked it before and XDA devs picked up on it. There are a million SMS/MMS apps available, not so much for "RCS."

[–] glockenspiel@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People deserve to be paid for their labor. This is Lemmy; that's the default position given our history. There are plenty of free as in beer and speech apps out there if someone doesn't or can't pay the price. But software development is hard work, especially if it isn't a hobby. And a lot of Lemmy apps are hobbyists. That's the communtiy phase we are in right now. And we are a smaller community, which means fewer paying customers, which means a higher overall cost. LJ can't throw out an app for $5 and expect a hundred thousand to convert into paying customers off the backs of over a million downloads.

I'll never understand this criticism of Sync. I hate subscriptions as much as most people, but with software it sort of makes sense because the work never ends. It isn't like buying a bookcase or any other static item. And Sync, in this case, isn't like what companies such as LG are doing where they are intoducing forced subscriptions into static firmware to extract maximum wealth from customers.

[–] glockenspiel@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I don't think it does. I doubt it is purely a cost issue. Microsoft is going to throw billions at OpenAI, no problem.

What has happened, based on the info we get from the company, is that they keep tweaking their algorithms in response to how people use them. ChatGPT was amazing at first. But it would also easily tell you how to murder someone and get away with it, create a plausible sounding weapon of mass destruction, coerce you into weird relationships, and basically anything else it wasn't supposed to do.

I've noticed it has become worse at rubber ducking non-trivial coding prompts. I've noticed that my juniors have a hell of a time functioning without access to it, and they'd rather ask questions of seniors rather than try to find information our solutions themselves, replacing chatbots with Sr devs essentially.

A good tool for getting people on ramped if they've never coded before, and maybe for rubber ducking in my experience. But far too volatile for consistent work. Especially with a Blackbox of a company constantly hampering its outputs.

[–] glockenspiel@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Capitalism is a problem but it doesn't mean everything has to be socialism. There can be an in-between.

It's not even that to be honest. Socialism is characterized by worker ownership and operation of companies primarily. LJ is a sole proprietor exploiting nobody, not earning a wage via labor and not having to work because he under pays others to work for him. He's just a worker like the rest of us.

I definitely agree that donations is not a viable long term path. Maybe in a different economic model. People need to be realistic. The general arguments they are making against Sync in favor of FOSS apps can also be made against them using FOSS apps by the FLOSS folks. People should pay if they can. And use a free third party app if they can't, or don't like how sync works.

I really don't get the hate people are putting out there over this. This is why third party apps build strong ecosystems. You can find what you want.

[–] glockenspiel@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm not paying any subscription for a free service

You aren't. That would be your Lemmy instances patreon (or similar). I hope you support your instance because otherwise this entire service could fail.

You're paying for the slick presentation and app features with Sync. I'm a software engineer. It is difficult work. Time consuming. Risky as well given this (sync) is literally the dev's full time job.

That's the beauty of third party apps; you can find a best match for you. But there will almost always be a quality and feature gap between people doing it for a hobby and people doing it for a career. That is why Apollo beat basically every iOS client. That is also why Sync beat the other Android reddit clients for me. And it has already beaten the free ones for Lemmy in my opinion.

[–] glockenspiel@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I definitely feel the same way. I had been on Reddit since before the Digg collapse. Back when it was mostly nerds and other IT professionals like myself. Lemmy gives a strong wave of nostalgia. Sync for Lemmy makes it a pleasure to use on a tablet. The webpage is alright, definitely serviceable. But Lemmy has strength in the third party apps scene. Sync is the returning champion for my Android tablet. Happy to support his work again.

[–] glockenspiel@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

There is, sort of. It is a subscription similar to Apollo this time around. Maybe it was that way last time and I just forgot considering how long ago I had purchased the reddit app.

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