Idk about the franchise but it’s an excellent movie.

It’s difficult to even evaluate this level of complaint against Discovery when there are so many more fundamental issues with the writing . Like yeah okay this is fair criticism but I would care a lot more if it was well written to begin with.

On the other hand even Australians can’t bring themselves to classify Australia as “safe”.

The reward for that is that they have to fend is invasion from Venezuela.

VR has been around in modern form for more than a decade and the only truly novel and useful application is some types of gameplay.

There are a few other legitimate applications. Architects can offer people a 1st person view of a designed building. There are already companies that let people do VR walkthrough of homes they’re considering buying rather than in person open houses (I think this started in the pandemic).

These things have value but they’re niche applications that can be done with any VR headset.

Has anyone identified the “killer app” yet?

I still don’t see it. I watched a lot of review vids just because it was interesting but I don’t see a single thing that the Vision Pro can do that can’t be done better with other devices.

The tech and computation required for those avatar things is amazing . It might get much better soon. But even if it does, will it be better than simple FaceTime type video conferences?

It’s not clear to me how apple even imagines people using the thing.

This is just a less gross version of “DAE store their piss in jars so they can commemorate their unitary secretions”?

Season 2 was arguably worse.

There is never any reason to pre-order a game. Like, ever. It’s always stupid and reinforces terrible incentives that drive the enshittification of gaming. Even when the devs aren’t straight up scammers, preorders mean they can be profitable before they’ve even released anything so they’re incentivized to put out whatever half-baked garbage they can.

Netflix’s model makes the individual business case for a specific show really complicated to make. What’s the marginal return on investment for a moderately successful show? If it’s not quite popular enough to get people to subscribe just for that show, then it’s basically a total loss (existing customers only are watching it, who were paying anyways). Looking at the financials of that one show in isolation, all they’ve got are costs with no revenue gain.

There is the broader argument to be made about how a show contributes to the overall catalog quality and how that ultimately drives subscriber growth, but this is a far more roundabout way of talking about value.

There’s no point asking questions like this. Star Trek has routinely featured technology that is so powerful that it’s world-breaking, and then promptly ignored it. The greatest modern example is the spore drive from discovery, but TNG has several as well.

With a recurring fee model, it’s in the business’s interest to make you use their service less while still paying, because if you use it too much they lose money, and if they price it according to how the power users use it then it won’t be a competitive deal.

You know I never thought of streaming services this way, but you’re absolutely right. Any service running on a regular subscription model falls into the “gym business model” where the ideal customer is one who is paying but never showing up. That way, their operational costs stay constant while revenue goes up.

All I got from this is that the Galaxy is thiccc af with more C’s than i can use within the bounds of civilized discourse.

I sort of agree. When everyone is trying to seed to up their ratio, getting stuff is easy and fast. But maintaining your ratio is a nightmare. The place is essentially starved of downloaders because even people who want stuff can’t get it for fear of ruining their ratio. The only reason I had a positive ratio on what.cd was that they occasionally had freeleech days where you could download freely and only uploads counted. On those days I would just get the most popular torrents on the site and upload the shit out of them.

While these problems exist in any private tracker, I do still miss what.cd.

I pirated a cracked version of Adobe Acrobat Pro recently. First thing I had to crack in years. It had a sketchy crack installer , with music and everything. Like it was back in the 90s. Of course it worked perfectly lol.

There’s a big part of this that’s just his ego though. The self-imposed release schedule is bad, but ultimately his inability to truly admit he was wrong is what will ultimately undo the company.

I was enthusiastic about LTT Labs - there are many areas that reviewers can’t explore because of the complicated and expensive testing setups required, such as objective measurements on whether a phone has a good antenna or not. But at this point I’m not sure how we would ever be able to trust what they produce.