TOTALLY get it. I’ve gone as far as blocking ads at the router-level so I don’t see ads browsing the internet or using apps on my phone inside my network. Plus I have ublock origin to help catch any extra ads that sneak through the router block.

To say I see no ads is an understatement. The only reason why I know about the “he gets us” ads is because I hear people complain about them. Not once have I seen one hahaha.

After fifteen years, I cancelled my Netflix last year. Don’t miss it at all.

I think all these streaming platforms forget that not all of us need to watch their content 24/7. I spend less than an hour watching television a day while eating food and that’s it.

Did you know that you can still enjoy Youtube ad-free (or the occasional 10-second skippable ad). How do you do it? By not watching youtube at all aside from the random how-to video. Since I watch less than an hour of youtube a month on average, I see essentially zero ads.

And the same thing is happening with AI. Friend of mine who is a programmer has a few side projects for customers. One of them got impatient trying to get him to fix a bug in their software. So instead they tried to use ChatGPT to fix the bug, and it went as well as can be expected.

Having worked with ChatGPT to program code, I’ve seen it literally invent fake modules, declare variables, call up this fake module and then never bother to declare the code for that special module (which supposedly does 99% of what you want it to do). And if you ask it to program the missing module, it simply declares that module and calls up a new magical module that still does 99% of the desired work. It’s and endless loop that goes nowhere lol

And there will be loads of companies who insist on using AI in the future… but not all will - because they’ll learn that like everything, there are limits to it’s capabilities.

Remember when big corporations thought they could outsource 100% of customer service to india many years ago? Remember how well that went?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasdichter/2019/03/30/call-centers-return-to-the-u-s-more-companies-get-the-link-between-customer-service-and-profit/

LOVE My Bose Quietcomfort2 earbuds. The active noise cancelling is one of the best in the industry. You can customize up to three modes with your own desired level of noise cancelling from totally silent, to completely transparent (to hear what others are saying). The app lets you chose between something like 10 different levels of noise cancelling.

In louder environments, you could turn down the transparency mode so you still hear “some” sounds, but not everything.

Then I simply turn on some quiet music to hear my own favorite tunes, and then shop around. This not only helps me block out other noises/sounds, but gives people the impression I can’t hear anything, so they don’t bother talking to me (thankfully) hahaha.

For me I use them while bicycling - full silent to jam out to my tunes in quiet neighborhoods, and then switch to transparent “aware” mode when crossing busy intersections.

Only complaint is the call quality - kinda sucks because the software is trying to noise-cancel my voice when talking to people, and they all say it sounds like I’m in a hallway or fishbowl. I wish there was a way to disable that feature or tweak it somehow. But that’s fine, I don’t use these for phone calls anyway, I use them for blocking out the world.

That partially already happened at the start of the war. There was a massive “brain drain” among the higher educated part of society, which did include a bunch of hackers. Why live inside russia these days when you can move elsewhere and get paid better?

I was a Netflix DVD subscriber before they released a Wii streaming disc then started streaming Netflix back when it was glorious with all your favorite shows. Eventually I downgraded to the cheap $8 plan for a single user at 1080p resolution which was fine - my old television is still 1080p native resolution.

Then they quietly raised the price… and dropped the resolution to 720p without telling me. Finally I had enough - after more than a decade I finally cancelled my Netflix account last year and haven’t looked back.

I don’t miss their “netflix originals” which only last for one or two seasons before getting canned because netflix needs more viewership to justify the investments.

Truth be told, I don’t watch must television (or even youtube) in general - I have better things to do with my time than vegetating on a couch watching a tv screen.

True, but at least you can pause a download. That wasn’t possible twenty years ago with any software that I can think of… aside from maybe usenet newsgroups where a single file is split into millions of text documents and then uploaded to services ultra compressed and then recompiled into the file after downloading. That tech has been floating around since the 90’s but it’s still very niche and very few people even knew what a newsgroup was back then.

Lol yeah I was lucky enough to get a dedicated phone line for dialup.

Although even at max download speeds, I think the fastest I ever saw on dialup was around 4.5kbps because our phone signal was so low quality haha.

Damn I’m getting nostalgic for the old internet, pre 2008 when the average person wasn’t online. The internet had it’s trolls, but it was a far more civil place compared to the modern era of vitriol and hate prevalent in many online communities.

Remember the IRC and downloading files using automated chat rooms with simple queues to request files from hosts. It’s crazy to know they’re still in existence and still pretty active.

Remember when downloads could not be paused/resumed. Back in the day if your download was interrupted, you’d have to restart the download. Then apps like Downloadzilla and other programs let you download large files and resume as needed which was critical for large downloads that took hours/days to complete.

It’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but Philips Hue smart lights can sync with Spotify. You program where each color light is located in the room (location and elevation) and then it will dance the lights to the music, with light color scheme determined by album art colors (which is really handy for things like Christmas music where most of it is red/white/green anyway lol).

I use my spare hue lights in my garage gym so they dance to the music in my earbuds. I honestly love it - it gets me more “in the zone” when working out.

Otherwise to answer your question I use ProjectM on my android phone

Wow, thanks for that writeup!

I’m glad I stayed off r/headphones because that would have been dangerous for my wallet lol. I already hate that I spent $500 on my B&W headphones, but damn do I love them.

That was a long in-depth bringing me up to speed, and I loved it hahaha - thanks for taking the time to write all that up

Many people seem to forget credit scores didn’t exist before 1989. Decades ago a wife would have to get permission from the husband to open a line of credit with a department store.

Credit scores were built to help the banks, not the average person.

Pretty sure this has quietly gone on for a long time among circles - questioning if one is truly “jewish” enough (sighs)

The difference is they’ve been emboldened to these claims loudly, when previously it was considered poor taste to air that dirty laundry in public. It really speaks to the class of the person making the claims if nothing else.

But you are here, so that’s a great first step. Twitter is an necessary evil for many people these days. Just like reddit, it’ll be hard for people to make the transition. Signing up here is the first step - the more content we create, the more people will stick around

Yeah that doesn’t apply to every brewery. My wife works for a micro brewery (3 barrel system). They have 22 taps and constantly rotating out new beers and flavor combos. I’m often there helping to brew (and scoop out the spent grain which we feed to our spoiled chickens). MOST of the time they’re using high grade amoretti brand flavoring (although they do add other stuff like fresh fruits or spices and cakes where appropriate).

But since they’re not producing high volume, they are constantly rotating out flavors and styles of beers. Almost every other week there’s something new on tap.