Or I can pay nothing and get a plain video file that I can do anything I want with, and play on any device without needing a player. And as long as I keep that file backed up somewhere, I’ll always have a copy of it.

The TV business is struggling to learn the lesson the music industry learned a long time ago.

Accumulated knowledge in our society really is frail. Take a computer mouse, tons of people are involved in making them, they’re considered extremely simple tools. Yet not one person on the planet could go out into nature, get the natural resources required, and without help turn those resources into a working computer mouse.

I consider it occasionally, then remember I’m paying a ton more to save like, 15 minutes. Then I just go get it.

AskReddit, being the best comparison I can make, had a lot of questions with an established theme. Usually along the lines of asking Redditors what they thought or experienced around some topic.

AskLemmy on the other hand never really established a particular culture, and not everyone here necessarily came from Reddit. So instead, it’s become more of a community for general, genuine questions, rather than one seeking subjective experience or thoughts.

Yes, I’m not sure if it’ll be ready by this year’s tax season or not, but it was happening. Last I heard they were doing some limited runs on it.

For those in the US: Learn how to file your own taxes. It’s really simple for the large majority of people, and usually just consists of copying numbers into boxes off a sheet your employer made for you. After you’ve done it once, subsequent times you’ll probably have it done yourself in less than half an hour.

You can do it for free on a ton of sites unless you make significant income, freetaxusa is typically the most highly recommended one.

That’s not what they said, you’re presenting a false dichotomy. The truth is, in determining what another person feels, if you refuse to trust their words, then you can trust nothing. Yes, there are signals that hint at things that might lay below, but you cannot tell someone what their inner thoughts are better than they themselves.

In that vein, something often said of those who have killed themselves is “but I saw them yesterday and they looked so happy!” By your logic, if they looked happy they must have been happy, and just felt like ending it one day for no real reason.

My coworkers look at me like I’m a monster for just grabbing a fork and eating the chef boyardee spaghetti and meatballs straight out of the can.

There are far too many ways for an immortality wish to make your life hell in ways that a money wish uh, wishes it could.

I assume you’re talking about tracking score on profiles ala Reddit? There’s nothing stopping anyone from making their own client or modifying lemmy-ui to do that if someone really cares.

But honestly, Lemmy has enough bots posting stuff that I wouldn’t want to bring more incentive for karma farming in.

I think my credit report still says I work at “DOMINOES” after like 5 years of not being there. It doesn’t effect anything, but I get mild amusement out of it being misspelled on top of that.

Shout-out to the GM of the Aaron’s calling me an idiot that doesn’t know how to operate a dryer when they sold me one out the door so clogged I’m amazed my house didn’t light on fire. Swore up and down they quality checked everything, the 2 hours I spent with that machine open scraping the lint out suggests otherwise.

Yes, I’m still salty about it over a year later.

I didn’t go full keto, but I did tighten up my sugar consumption once and tried to keep it as close to zero as possible for a couple of weeks.

I can’t say I had hallucinations, but the cravings are seriously real. I didn’t even stop because of the cravings though, I stopped because sugar is so ubiquitous in everything that trying to find a drink to buy while working that didn’t contain sugar and I actually liked was difficult. I tried drinking tea with stevia as a main drink, but the taste of it never really acquired for me.

The relative lack of content on Lemmy, for me, has been a boon. I go through New, then Top 6 Hours, then Top 12 Hours, then I need to find something else to do. When I was on Reddit, I found myself bouncing between Reddit and YouTube for entertainment. With Lemmy not having boundless amounts of crap to scroll through and no algorithm, my tech usage is far more varied.

unbearable due to the sheer amount of advertisement.

I spent 3 days in a hotel room this week, and while I did bring my Steam Deck and dock with me for entertainment, I got there to find that the TV had no HDMI ports. I was stuck with basic cable and the only saving grace being Showtime, which wasn’t at extra cost and doesn’t have ads.

But when both Showtime channels had stuff I was less than indifferent to watching, the advertisements on any of the other channels were horrible. The shows felt like they were 1:1 in terms of content to ads.

Don’t get me started on the radio, either. I used to love listening to the radio, but now all they play is the same set of a couple dozen songs, with 5 minutes of ads that play every 3 or so songs. Also, no rock station in my area plays anything newer than ~15 years old, tops. They’re all still playing the same music that I listened to on those stations when I was a teen, and I’m a little over 30.

I remember hearing about the potential of Web 2.0 in the 00s and thought it sounded like it was going to be really cool.

Now I just want the old web back. Isolated forums had a sense of community that, even on Lemmy, isn’t present in the same way.

If they’re going by user agent, then a VPN won’t help. But user agents can be spoofed trivially, especially on a PC. If it’s geographical, you could try parking in a place with low average income and look up prices with the browser set to incognito/private.

If I had to guess, they’re probably not doing it just because they want to. It’s entirely possible they got a threat letter from one or more publications about the topic and are doing it to avoid litigation. Or they’re afraid that they could face litigation if they don’t take action.

We shouldn’t assume ill intent unless there’s something to substantiate it.

The RIAA’s lawyers will be there to take that bird for everything it has.

I could see why someone would think it, though. My girlfriend got her license very late, we went to the same DMV 3 times to take the test. First time, bapped the pole during the parallel park, instant fail, do not pass go, do not collect a driver’s license. Second time, didn’t pass the parallel park but didn’t bap the pole, so continued. Got marked “Fail” on things. More practice, third time, again, tons of fails over minor errors. Note that there is a middle point between good and fail, but they literally never used it.

Fourth time, I said screw that DMV, we’re going to a different one. We went to a town with a tiny DMV with one little older lady running it, she literally had to lock up the office portion for every road test because she was alone. Girlfriend miraculously did the parallel park perfect, not a single fail on anything, and 2/3 of the middle scores. Passed easily.

First DMV had a lot of young workers, so my thinking is they like to mark everything they can to show their bosses how good they are at nitpicking other people’s driving.