cobysev

I didn’t even know Netflix had a games department, and I have a Netflix account. I’m assuming this is just another effort on their part for further enshittification of that service. Perhaps it’s finally time I unsubscribed from Netflix.

This doesn’t seem like it would work. Debris falling off the trains, dusty buildup, vibrations, rocks bouncing around the tracks; heck, even just wildlife crossing the tracks. So many things are gonna damage those panels if they’re just lying on the ground between tracks, and solar panels are extremely fragile.

I hope they have some sort of bullet proof glass or something over those panels. Probably going to need a special train to spray water over them to clean regularly, too.

I dunno about Swiss trains, but the tracks behind my house in America leave a thick black film on everything, and it’s very hard to clean by hand. I think they transport coal.

I thought it was referring to “standup meetings,” which is what we called weekly meetings with the commander in the military.

Everyone stands for the commander when he enters a room, then each person presenting needs to be standing while briefing the commander.

It’s military protocol for a high-ranking officer, although the cool officers would tell everyone to buck protocol, remain seated, and just give them the bullet points so we can get back to work.

I think it’s great for a ground-floor investment in a YouTube competitor. It draws more people to the platform, gets a chunk of money flowing up front to help boost the service, and they can always sunset the lifetime option if the site gets popular and revenue starts to get tight. As long as they continue to honor it for everyone who paid initially.

Like I said in my original comment, a Nebula subscription is only $6/mo. A lifetime access payment is over 4 years of subscriptions up front. That’s a nice chunk of change to help get them established.

I saw someone’s video about how Nebula works (I think Legal Eagle? He was advertising it hardcore on YouTube for a while) and the subscription service is how they pay content creators. He said it’s a more stable income than YouTube, where your videos earn advertising money based on trends and visibility. If you’re not YouTube famous (and the algorithm doesn’t make you visible), you’re not going to make any money on the platform. But Nebula gives you a more solid income, plus the freedom to make the content you want. No AI moderators flagging videos because it thought it detected the word “suicide” or something. No forcing you to include key words or pushing regular videos on a tight schedule to ensure the algorithm keeps recommending your channel.

Yeah, like I said, it needs more content creators to dump their libraries there. It could be a fantastic competitor to YouTube if only more people knew about it and used it.

Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn’t require self hosting and I’ll happily move my content there.

Nebula is the next best thing to YouTube, but not enough content creators have moved their stuff there, so it’s easy to run out of interesting videos to watch after a while. Some of the bigger folks I follow share their content on both platforms, and the incentive to watch on Nebula instead of YouTube is that content creators have more freedom with their videos on Nebula. They can post bonus/extra footage that would be automatically flagged and blocked by YouTube normally. Don’t need to dance around the censors on Nebula.

Nebula is subscription-based, so they don’t show ads anywhere on their site. But if you don’t want to pay for another subscription service, you can also do a one-time payment to have lifetime access to their site. It’s $300, which is the cost of just over 4 years of their subscription service ($6/mo). Considering I’ve had an account for over 3 years now, it’s almost paid for itself.

I’m terrified of Gabe retiring or passing away. He’s been amazing for the company and I don’t trust anyone else to not want to use Valve for their own greedy purposes. The next president of Valve will likely ruin all the good things about it, thanks to late-stage capitalism.

I firmly believe in voting with your wallet; I normally don’t invest much long-term interest into businesses because you never know how they’ll change over time, but I’ve been so happy with Valve that I’ve gladly given them thousands of dollars over the decades for Steam games. My library is sitting at just over 3,500 games right now. I don’t know what I’m gonna do when Valve crumbles one day. I really hope they give me an option to download and play offline all the games I’ve bought, because that’s a massive library to lose.

I’ve never given a penny to Epic Games, and unless they get on-par with Steam’s functionality, I won’t ever buy or play any of their games. The one thing that might make Epic Games competitive (and could convince me to use their platform) is letting Steam users copy their libraries over, so we’re not just starting over from scratch with a new service.

That’s what got me on Steam in the first place. Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library. That’s how I got my collection of early Call of Duty titles on Steam, as well as Half-Life and some others. I moved my physical game library over to Steam and I’ve been a Steam loyalist ever since.

AskJeeves and Hotbot! Man, that takes me back. I also enjoyed Excite and Infoseek back in the pre-Google days.

Proton’s top tier service for individuals (Proton Unlimited) is only $7.99/month if you pay for 2 years of service. Gives you full access to all their services.

Proton just announced last month that they’re turning the company into a nonprofit organization, because security is more important to them than making money. That’s why their services are dirt-cheap; they want to ensure it’s affordable for everyone, and the only reason they collect money at all is to keep the servers online.

I’m currently de-Googling my life. Moving all my services over to Proton, testing other search engines, etc. Trying to slowly cut out/replace all services that Google provides me.

Oh, and I’m sticking with Firefox with Ublock Origin, to ensure Google can’t ever advertise to me, even incidentally.

I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he’d be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.

Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.

He was ultra-conservative and didn’t believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.

The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know… he didn’t learn his lesson.

I actually prefer Lemmy because it’s less active. I browse Lemmy’s version of r/All and I have more than enough content to keep me entertained for hours. Plus, when I find a popular thread, I can actually contribute to it and my comments aren’t buried under 10K other comments within a few hours. I feel like I can actually communicate with the community here, instead of shouting into the void like on Reddit.

Oh damn, I’m starting on the Boomer habit of complaining about Zoomer culture when it’s actually Alpha culture.

It feels like yesterday, Boomers were complaining about how annoying millennial kids were, when we were actually adults in our 20s/30s at the time. I’m just realizing that was over a decade ago, and now I’m doing the same thing to Zoomers. Someone please stop time before I get any older; I want to get off.

Had to guess on the boomerang. I’ve seen boomerangs but didn’t know that’s what they’re called nor have I ever posted one.

I’ve never heard of a “boomerang” that wasn’t referring to the Australian tool/toy. I totally guessed on that one too. I don’t post videos to any social media platform, so I was totally out of the loop on that one.

Skibidi toilet? As a 39-yr old millennial, I’m aware that was a thing like a year ago, but I assumed it was a Zoomer meme or something. I can’t get past that captcha.

EDIT: Upon looking at it again, I see it just wants me to type in “what is skibidi toilet” into Google, not answer what it is. Ugh, I’m turning into my Silent Generation/Boomer parents.

I was referring to PlexAmp. It’s decent, works well, but I just liked the interface for Symfonium better. It seemed more functional than PlexAmp when I switched over to it.

I actually haven’t used PlexAmp in a few years, so maybe it’s gotten better lately. I guess I’ll have to compare apps.

I’ve been maintaining a self-hosted music library for so long (30+ years now), there used to not be any tools for editing metadata. I used to have to go into file properties and manually edit the data for each individual MP3 file. Nowadays, I use Mp3tag to manually edit entire albums at a time. I have ADHD though (the hyperfixation kind), so I’ve literally dedicated thousands of hours to manually fixing metadata.

I guess I never bothered to look for more advanced tools to auto-update metadata. I had to go in and manually fix stuff that updated automatically from the Internet in the past, so I guess I stopped trusting online databases. But they’ve really advanced since the last time I went searching for tools, and their databases are a lot more complete in this day and age. I’m gonna play around with some of these programs and see how well they work.

I host my music library through Plex, then use Symfonium on my phone if I want to stream my Plex music remotely, just because I like their interface a little better than Plex’s.

That’s what the founders of Reddit believed when they started. We all jumped ship from Digg because Digg became too corporate and greedy, and Reddit was our safe haven.

Now here we are, over a decade later, and we’re jumping ship again because Reddit has become too corporate and greedy.

Lemmy has the advantage of being decentralized, with no single person or corporation running it, and you’re proposing a Reddit clone, run by an individual? Honestly, I love the ideas you have for Matrix, I love what you’ve accomplished with it, and I love your optimism for the site. But I’ve been burned too many times in the past by hopeful honest innovators who let money and power slowly corrupt them over time. Unless you can add your site to the federation, I’m gonna have to pass, even as enticing as your site looks now. I’m too jaded to trust a single entity/corporation to host social media content.

I use Win+Pause as a shortcut to bring up the system menu in Windows. I’ve used it so much over the years, it takes me a minute to figure out how to find that menu when I’m using a keyboard that doesn’t have a Windows key.

I also use Home and End about equally. Quick way to scroll back and forth across text or files/folders.

come on we all go to reddit when we need to find some information because its almost always guaranteed to be there

Most of us dumped Reddit when third party apps went away. I personally haven’t been back to Reddit since creating a Lemmy account. Screw that place; they don’t deserve my patronage anymore. Or anyone’s, for that matter. Continuing to use their content is justifying their shitty business practices. It’ll never get better if people keep enabling it.

Also, what specific info are you searching for that Reddit can provide? Their search function has always been garbage. Or are you referring to general content and/or subs that don’t have an active userbase here yet?

I’ve been using Nebula. It’s a subscription-based alternative with no advertising, but I get it for free because I’m subscribed to Curiosity Stream (which is basically Netflix, but for documentaries).

The only downside to Nebula is that there aren’t a lot of content creators on it, so you don’t have the variety of videos that YouTube offers.