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abraxas

@ abraxas @sh.itjust.works

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Comments
93
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription

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  • I've used playnite a few times. I always forget about it for some reason or another. Gog has a built-in tool like playnite and I fail to use that, too.

    Still do that. For over 25yrs I nourish my library. Just the MP3s made room for FLACs.

    I still have it somewhere I'm sure, but I really gave up on it, for the convenience of youtube music of all things. Literally every song I ever had including a couple super-obscure albums I'd lost. And it's SO convenient. It just works for me everywhere I want it.

    Yeah ok, I get that. I’ve got 2 servers running 24/7 with proxmox/hyper-v, so those tools all run in seperate VMs. But especially in this case, it’s practically no maintenance

    Every time I mean to start setting up servers, some reason (or my wife) talk me out of it. I'm jealous. It's on my bucket list. I'm the only guy I know who has run server clusters professionally who has never had his own.

    I must say that i’m in the warez-scene since the early 90s and I never had a virus-problem.

    I have had a couple over the years; usually use the "nuke and restart" solution. Only one was REALLY major and I was never sure whether it was software or a dumb family member. My password-protected screenshare app went live one day and started buying Chinese gift cards with a clearly automated script. Thank god someone was in the office when it happened and they only got through a couple hundred dollars before we pulled the plug and called our bank.

    You won’t see that elsewhere here. No way. First you gotta prove it wasn’t YOU that broke it at home. I could on for hours…

    I know resellers hate Amazon returns, but they agree to them. I will literally make buying decisions based on the presence or lack of the "Free Returns" flag. I would literally pay for "return insurance" if AllState started to do that, too. I hate return hassles.

  • It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription

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  • a game i actually played on epic.

    Here's a few of mine (not sure if any come from Amazon): Control (this was awesome!), shapez (almost bought it, then it was in my inbox), loop hero, Guardians of the Galaxy (Christmas free games), Outer Worlds (ditto), Evil WIthin 1 and 2, most of the fallout games, Death Stranding, Gloomhaven... I'm only on page 5 of 20 lol. Only 1 out of 5 of their free games are any good, but between big giveaways and the like, that's still ~15 good free games a year lol. So needless to say, Epic is always installed on my computer.

    It just never occurred as a prime (no pun intended) reason to pay… Errr… Prime

    Perhaps THE problem with Prime right now is that none of their services except maybe TV is worth $11/mo on its own. Their free games aren't Humble Monthly, but HM is just games. Their TV isn't Netflix, but it's $4/mo cheaper. You can get free shipping without Prime now (that wasn't true before), but next day is phenomenal. As for books, there's not really any replacement I know of. It's not perfect (has this annoying thing about having books 2 on in some series, without book 1), but if you read a book a month, it pays for itself.

    Warez were never convenient. Just “free”. Yet, with a tiny amount of “work”

    For sure. It's always been a baseline of convenience. I remember the old days of curating my mp3 collection every 6 months, removing dupes and fixing organizational shifting. But if I do that stuff for apps, I have to maintain freaking sandbox environments for each app, make sure my computer is backed up in case I have to wipe it, make sure nothing auto-logins so a remote attack doesn't happen, etc. About 1 in 2 cracked apps show up as a virus and you can never know whether it's a false positive, so you have to use a computer condom and then STILL get tested.

    Dishing out 100 bucks would need a lot of benefits to convince me. Though i get you. Trading money for tinkering-time. All depends on our preference and skill and nerdiness 😂

    I'm in an ok place right now. And Amazon is still the cheapest place to buy anything, for me. If I spend over $1000/yr there on everything, a lot more if you count the holidays, then Prime has already justified itself. And slower or not, Amazon with Prime is STILL the fastest Christmas shipper.

    Anecdote... We bought Ring cameras from the Ring site for a family member in November. By mid-December, they still hadn't shipped because Christmas orders were so backlogged. So we bought them again on Amazon and they were on our doorstep 2 days later, just a couple days before Christmas. Was it next day? No. Was it worth it? YEAH.

    Then we had to fight with Ring for 2 weeks because they wouldn't cancel the order. We got the Cameras the 2nd week of January and my wife was on the phone with them 6 or 7 times before they finally approved a return. Amazon has this thing called "Free Returns" on most items. You can literally write in "I was drunk shopping" for your return reason and nobody bats an eyelash.

  • It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription

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  • But i doubt it just downloads and that’s it. No tracking? No phoning home? No play-statistics? Hmm

    I can't be positive. I've never run any network traces on it. But it doesn't have any of the hallmarks of service DRMs. No "connecting" popup or login prompt. I've played Amazon-downloaded games offline. If there's a hidden DRM, it's more-or-less obscured.

    Let's be honest, though. Amazon gives the games away for free in an app that will never be used to sell products; and they do it as a bullet-point for Prime and to nudge people towards Luna. It's obviously the games they get for free that they give away. I see no reason for them to do more work than they have to, plugging in a DRM.

    But i never heard of anyone actually using the app instead of maybe even playing one of those freebies and then quitting the app again 😁

    It's hard to remember what games I got through Amazon vs Epic, but I clearly remember a few times I was excited about an Amazon Games offering added an Epic game.

    In Amazon Games natively, my happy games are Autonauts, Terraformers, Close to the Sun (recently), and a few of those short adventure games I completed that nobody wants to spend $20 on but everyone loves to play.

    I tried watching like 3 things. And one i could rent, the others pay extra and i was like “wtf? This is prime? Fuckit”

    Their rent thing sucks, but I *never *see rentals in front of me when I use Prime Video on my TV. I named 3 of their big exclusives, but there's plenty more either exclusive or just licensed. It's never the most awesome shows of any service, but I could still find a few hours per day of video if I tried.

    It just sucks that you’d need like 5 services and still can’t watch EVERYTHING

    Yeah, I'm with you 5000% on that. That's where Gabe Newall is right. I'd probably be willing to drop drop $100/mo or more on a service if it had EVERYTHING on-demand, convenient, with no DRM of any kind. And I'd never once think to download-and-unsub or distribute or anything.

    ...as for your experience, I say wave that damn Jolly Roger. Gimme convenience or give me death. I pay because things are convenient for me. If it wasn't, I probably wouldn't be paying either.

  • It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription

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  • The games are on their app (nope, thanks) or epic (no thanks).

    Their app is surpisingly fair. No inherent DRM, just click "download" and it downloads. Epic... well, I have 100+ games I got for free, so I have it anyway. I probably have a $1000 collection of "free" games on Epic at this point.

    The tv stuff is the worst I’ve seen back when i actually paid for my series/movies

    With all the subscription services, I think that's the rule. If you like what they have, you love it. If not, you go elsewhere. At least Prime is cheaper than some of them, but at the end of the day it's about the stuff you enjoy.

    For me, it's WoT, Reacher, Good Omens on top, along with a few of their FreeVee partnership shows. But I have to respect they also have The Boys, which I've been meaning to get into.

    I mean, to me they beat Apple+ and Hulu, lose to Disney+ and Netflix. At $11/mo, I get all those things along with the expedited shipping and the books. Convenient, but also not overpriced.

  • It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription

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  • And when the other website costs more, has worse return policies, slower shipping, and possibly is even a scam site? The problem with Amazon is how good it is even when it's being evil.

    As I said elswhere, I look EVERYWHERE before Amazon first. That involves me checking out BBB on mom&pop storefronts and trying to filter out the scam stores or the ones with significant issues. It involves me price-checking, coupon-checking, seeing if services like Rakuten can get the price to match Amazon's. I don't expect most people to do all those things and neither should you.

    And even then, I end up buying from Amazon about 2/3 the time. Because I won't pay 20% more in some meaningless protest that isn't going anywhere.

  • It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription

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  • It's an extreme-case prisoner's dilemma. For shoppers to prevent a Walmart/Amazon monopoly, people would have to both give up convenience AND affordability in hope that everyone else had the same radical values. There were PLENTY of boycotters for both, but they just weren't anywhere near enough.

    At some point, when you're starving and Sam Walton comes by and offers you food your family can afford, you pull the trigger. And I don't fault someone who does that.

  • It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription

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  • It's the Walmart problem. People buy from Amazon because they can't afford some necessities at MSRP when going to a local store.

    Some of the stuff I can get in bulk on Amazon are as much as 50% cheaper than getting those same things in bulk from a restaurant supply (which is cheaper than buying them at a grocery store). And that's before Subscribe&Save's 15% off. Coffee (for example) costs would drive me into the poor house if I didn't get my beans from Amazon... and I end up getting higher quality beans than my grocery store at that lower price.

    Do I NEED coffee to live? No. But it's not exactly a luxury in the modern world, and beans are much cheaper than going to Dunkin. There are things I buy that I need; there are things that I buy that I want. And as much as I hate it, most of them are not available locally or are FAR more expensive locally. I never go to Amazon first, but I very often find myself landing at Amazon last.

    And yes, that doesn't justify Prime on its own. But because I have Prime, I get those things that I couldn't find cheaper elsewhere the very next day. Prime will never be necessary when there's free shipping options, but boy have they packed it out with more features than (for example) Walmart's subscription model.

    Here's what I get with Prime that I appreciate:

    1. Free games every month, some of which are pretty awesome
    2. that fast shipping
    3. A fairly average TV service with a few of the best exclusives out there (imo THE best but I'm a WoT-head).
    4. Tons of included books and I live in a family of readers

    I mean, a lot of it I could get on the High Seas as it were, but it's the law of convenience. They make it easy and there's a value prop there for me.

    If I JUST wanted free shipping, Prime would be a complete waste of money to me. But I'd still end up giving Amazon my damn paycheck because the alternatives are just not there where I live.

  • Bug Fixing

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  • Isn't that the definition of a race condition, though? In this case, the builds are racing and your success is tied to the builds happening to happen at the right times.

    Or do you mean "builds 1 and 2 kick off at the same time, but build 1 fails unless build 2 is done. If you run it twice, build 2 does "no change" and you're fine"?

    Then that's legit.

  • Bug Fixing

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  • AKA - the test suites at half the companies I've worked. Except they use a loop with retries as well

  • Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off

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  • That happened to Comcast for a while. They milked it for a while, but it it led to them having a 10-year stock low. They're paying a price for being the most-hated company in America. Not the price they deserve, but it's not all sunshine and roses.

    Ubisoft will have its day the same way, eventually. It won't be the day they deserve, but it'll still make them cry. And it'll be their own doing.

  • I'm really getting over the enshitification of the internet.

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  • What I don't get is how most places, people get mad at us for not being able to read an article due to the paywall. I mean, I'm not going to subscribe to 50 shitty news sites just so I can read someone's damn random shit.

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    Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It

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  • I reported you. I'm blocking you. Please go back to reddit.

  • Locked

    Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It

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  • Coffee and chocolate are not substitutes for animal meat though. If you look at the chart and compare animal proteins to substitutes like tofu, beans, peas, and nuts the plant based options win every time.

    You came so close to the answer, and then fell away. Factory farming as a process is what jacks up those numbers dramatically, not the thing that's being farmed. A few large corporations have seized the cattle and chicken industries, so their numbers would be far lower if regulations reversed that horrific trend (with a few caveats regarding methane in cattle, but I'm trying to stick to the topic). Remember how I mentioned "leaves out a lot of important variables"? That's another of them. Nobody cares that Tyson collects a feed subsidy that's paid for by small-scale farmers, or that small-scale farmers' animal products are 100% environmentally sustainable in most countries. There's nothing inherent about animal agriculture that means it NEEDS to be factory-farmed, or that we need to penalize small farmers so we can kick money over to Purdue.

    But even in the current graph, poultry, pork, and seafood are in the same realm as most crops and are dramatically more usable calories. Several things that are not on the chart (wild-caught seafood, animals raised with certain processes, the influence of the symbiotic relationship between animals and crops) put most animals comfortably in with plants.

    As for beef, that would deserve it's own entire conversation because those numbers misrepresent a lot of the reality. But that's another topic and I'm starting to tire of having 10+ people reply to me every hour on this topic, most of whom are angry at or belittling me (not you, just in general)

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    Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It

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  • So your take was to dodge the entire question. Ironically, I had a discussion about how I expected you to answer this question in another thread, and you did not disappoint.

  • Locked

    Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It

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  • Devastates local ecosystems

    Nope

    It’s not untrue food is literally grown to feed animals

    Actual nope.

    Yes but I’m talking about the food grown to feed animals

    So, you're talking about fiction

    Biofuel and compost

    Whatever that means.

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    Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It

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  • "lol".

    Nobody is growing crops "for livestock". 86% of what they eat are inedible waste, and the other 14% are things they are being grown anyway. The most common two feed crops, corn and soy, are being grown for a different part of the crop to be used for industrial purposes. Yes, they feed a little edible corn to cows shortly before slaughter to maximize the return and quality of meat. Nobody is waiting in line for that corn because it's terrible and non-nutiritious calories for humans. If you suddenly passed a law that forced us to euthenize all the cows and threatened us with prison time if we ate meat, those same crops would be grown only to be destroyed in ways that are just as bad (or worse) for the environment as feeding to animals

    Thank you for invalidating the first two arguments by tying them to a propagandist's fantasy. Nobody will ever change a zealous vegan's view, but anyone else that reads this will realize all the coercion to quit meat has nothing to do with valid environmental concerns.

    Thank you for winning my argument for me.

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    Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It

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  • Not nearly as many people as in the US. But between ranching and leaving them in the wild, about 1/3 of all cows in the world are in India. As you might have caught, most of the cows in India are actually used for milk... which is a real problem because the lower tech means they get dramatically less milk per cow than we get in the US. As in, 1/4 as much.

    The environmental impact of the Indian cow population is non-trivial, both because of how many cows are not used for food and how inefficient their food processes are with cows. In comparison, the environmental impact of the US cow population is arguably quite trivial. Ditto with the other large beef/milk consumers of the western world like Spain.

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    Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It

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  • Cool thing is, a meat tax wouldn't even increase the price of meat if we take away the feed subsidy (which is financed for by what is effectively a VAT on first sale and then remitted to a few large companies).

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    Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It

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  • And there's answers to all the "it's about..."'s. Of the ones you listed, only the first two would even need answering since the last two are largely fabricated issues.