abraxas
@abraxas@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription 9 months ago:
. I use MediaMonkey since v0.1
I think that’s one of the ones I tried. It’s just more convenient to have unlimited access to music, whether I own it or not.
as she runs into walls now when the system is down because there is no light.
What do you do for lights? Like motion/position detection into each room? Or voice control?
I’ve wanted to get into automation several times, and I’m never settled enough in a house to spend the money. There’s always some reason we want to move and I don’t want to do all that permanent work to move. I even worked at an IoT company for a few years on backend and embedded code, so I have literally no excuse…
At least we have that mandatory 14-days-return-policy.
Not sure where that is. That would be nice (except that they could reduce the cashback anyway). Consumer Protections these days have been eroding in the US. Even our so-called consumer protection laws have landmines to protect the businesses.
- Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription 9 months ago:
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.
- Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription 9 months ago:
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.
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.
- Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription 9 months ago:
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. 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.
- Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription 9 months ago:
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.
- Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription 9 months ago:
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.
- Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription 9 months ago:
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.
- Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription 9 months ago:
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. 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:
- Free games every month, some of which are pretty awesome
- that fast shipping
- A fairly average TV service with a few of the best exclusives out there (imo THE best but I’m a WoT-head).
- 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.
- Comment on Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off 10 months ago:
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.
- Comment on Control - the first game to get me to turn on cheats in decades 10 months ago:
I’m with you on RDR2. I can’t stand it. I don’t know why. Even BotW I get bored a lot. I really enjoyed Bioshock and Borderlands, though I’ve never finished either. ADHD is a hell of a thing, and only the games that should be the hardest to stick to (like JRPGS or Bethesda games) stick for me.
- Comment on Control - the first game to get me to turn on cheats in decades 10 months ago:
I got it for free on Epic a year or two ago. I love everything about Control - and I can’t stand the game.
Never quite figured out why. I think part of it was the controls feeling a little too “arcadey” for me? I just don’t know. Great story that I couldn’t stay into. Great level design which I kept losing track of. Fun puzzles that got on my nerves.
I played most of the game in Assist mode because I don’t like hard action. I quickly got sick of dying. But that didn’t affect my love/hate of the game. Perhaps if it had the “magic action balance” where your’e constantly challenged but never seem to die… but perhaps not, too.
I think in part it got sorta tedius.
- Comment on The four houses dads belong to. 10 months ago:
My tool experience is limited, but with Makita you seem to be describing the same anachronism principle you find in espresso machines.
Arguably the best espresso machines in a class are reminescent of the same model you found 40+ years ago. If you’re looking for the B+ range, everything worth buying has a big metal E61 grouphead with manual levers. In the S-class range, you tend to have more manual levers as often as bells or whistles. My new machine that cost more than I deserve (wife bought it) is basically an oldschool machine with nothing modern in it but a PID controller. Legend has it, it will be passed down in my family for generations to come (exaggeration, but not much).
- Comment on Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight 11 months ago:
If I had to guess, probably for the same reason you can’t sue for not being able to pick what apps you install on your toaster.
Google probably opened themselves up to this monopoly shit by trying not to be as much of a monopoly as Apple is trying to be.
I’ve heard a lot of lawyers say that the law punishes virtually every good behavior because that behavior can be construed in a way that you can be sued for, and that it favors being a dick more than anything. In this case, that might be what happened?
I mean, not that Google is a saint at all.
- Comment on Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles 11 months ago:
… genuinely I’ve never been offered (even had to google EMLA)
But now that you mention it, I’ve never had this particular issue from novicaine at the dentist. And they always use a topical.
Next time I need a shot/blood, I’ll see if they’re willing to try that! Since it really does seem to be about the poke itself, something that changes the feeling might be exactly what works.
- Comment on Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles 11 months ago:
I hope being able to plan ahead for the occasional jab makes it not much of a real issue in your life.
Basically that. I schedule a day off if I need a jab for any reason, and work from home anyway when I’m miserable the next several days.
Does it happen for accidental/“natural” pokes? You mentioned the splinter thing, but if you had a thorn, cactus needle, or even a piece of glass stuck in your skin and pulled it out, would you do alright?
All of those are fine. And unlike a lot of people with my issue, blood doesn’t bother me in the least. Once in a great while I’ve gotten a mild version of that from an insect bite, but the feeling is just completely different.
Oddly, I think if a needle hurt more and did some tearing, it wouldn’t bother me so much.
But you’re asking some really thought-provoking questions. I have a lot of food-related texture issues and while this is COMPLETELY different, I’m suddenly wondering if it’s a little more similar than I thought.
- Comment on Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles 11 months ago:
Honestly, I wouldn’t trade it for the medical conditions of some of my family and friends. It sucks, and makes me hate doctors, but it won’t kill me.
I mean, I’d take this over diabetes and/or asthma shrug
- Comment on Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles 11 months ago:
Yeah, exactly. And I agree that there’s separate categories for skill, dedication, and niceness. Some folks are damn good but lazy and don’t care, others make up for being “only ok” by trying really hard and caring a lot, and some are just friendly when they screw up. It’s nice to have more than 1 of those 3 at a time. Someone in my family went to a weight loss doctor and asked me to come along. She was the friendliest doctor I’d ever seen… and the appointment finished with “I’m really lost. I don’t think there’s anything else we can try right now. You’re doing everything right”. Don’t know WHAT that was in the spectrum of skill and dedication. Maybe it’s true, maybe she was just giving up. But from what I’ve seen/heard, it’s definitely better than “well try harder, eat less, and workout more” that heavier patients hear from doctors who don’t even ask what they’re eating or what their workout regimen looks like.
I don’t have to deal with a lot of that stuff you do, but I can imagine it since what little I deal with has shown me multiple sides of people (doctors too, I suppose).
- Comment on Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles 11 months ago:
Yeah. I half-mentioned it elsewhere. I was in an ER and needed to have blood drawn. I was just barely staying conscious by leaning back with an ice pack, but they needed the room so a nurse came in and said “yeah you’re fine” and lugged me from the blood-draw chair into a wheelchair. My wife wanted to hit her (lol) but it took the 2 of them to keep me from hitting the floor instead of the wheelchair because I started to black out from suddenly standing.
Some nurses are idiots.
- Comment on Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles 11 months ago:
It fucking sucks, more because a lot of providers don’t (or didn’t. They’ve been getting better) take seriously. They’d treat you like a baby or a hypochondriac, right up until you scare them half to death by WHAT YOU SAID WOULD HAPPEN happening.
The stopping-breathing thing is super-rare, so even people expecting that “complely calm-seeming patient” pass-out are shocked when that same unconscious patient starts holding their breath and shaking.
- Comment on Not mocking cobol devs but yall are severely underpaid for keeping fintech alive 11 months ago:
I think it’s a matter of expertise. I am stuck dealing with people who write Javascript/Typescript like it’s C#. It’s not world-ending until issues of speed, scale, or other “why we use best practices” raise their ugly heads. Then it is world-ending.
In FinTech, I can imagine it becomes a bigger deal faster.
- Comment on Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles 11 months ago:
Yeah, I really can’t imagine. My wife (who works in the medical field) tried to help me “get used to” needles and I didn’t make a single lick of progress. With my kind of issue, it’s common that the issue gets worse and not better if you get shots more often. Something about my subconscious forming a feedback loop with my reactions to create worse reactions over time. I didn’t stop breathing from shots when the symptoms started when I was 8 or 9, just got dizzy/lightheaded and passed out.
- Comment on Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles 11 months ago:
There’s more to full sedation than just “scared of dentists”, but it’s a start. Anyone who needs substantial work can get it done in 1 day on full sedation instead of a dozen shorter sessions. yes, “needs substantial work” often relates to “scares of dentists” (or relates to “was too damn poor for dentists”)
And I’m with you on hyper-hypodermic-phobia thing. People don’t realize that “fear of needles” does not manifest as a phobia, but as an acute body response. Getting a shot ruins me for a week, and often involves a doctor’s time because my vasovagal symptoms tend to need a little more expert observation. About 1/3 of the time I stop breathing for a short time. I’ve never needed life-saving measures, but they need to make sure that’s the case (lol).
So for doctor’s offices, it could easily become savings for them because of people who have responses to needles.
- Comment on Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles 11 months ago:
Happens for blood draws as well, even small quantities. Happens if someone pokes me with a lidocaine. It’s a vasovagal reaction where my body “overreacts to certain triggers”. My blood pressure and heartrate plummet (to scary low levels. I’ve freaked out nurses on a couple of occasions). It causes me to feint in a comically dramatic way because the bloodflow to my brain gets too low. To be even more fun, I sometimes exhibit false “seizure” symptoms when I’m down, tightening up all my muscles at once and stopping breathing.
In theory, this could kill me, and there are confirmed ultra-rare cases of people dying from vasovagal syncope. In practice, I’m far more likely to die of a car accident on the way home (with my wife driving me because I’m in no state to drive after that).
Honestly, it makes me feel like I’m some kind of drama queen. But it’s entirely made up of unconscious responses in my body.
- Comment on Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles 11 months ago:
Lol, it’s true. But if we were meant to be stabbed we wouldn’t have a completely unique dangerous (occasionally it kills people) reaction to it that doesn’t resemble most phobias.
- Comment on Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles 11 months ago:
I think it depends. I went to an ER once that threw me into a chair when the world was spinning and dropped me off in the hall saying “You’ll be fine!”. That hospital will never get an Ultrasound injector.
When I got my COVID vax, however, I took up 20 minutes of the time of 2 on-call doctors and a nurse because my passing out often resembles a seizure. They’d have killed to have said ultrasound injector for people like me.
- Comment on Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles 11 months ago:
A blood draw ruins my week (not exaggerated). If I were diagnosed with diabetes I would end up dead. For me, anything that avoids a needle is worth it.
- Comment on Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles 11 months ago:
For people like me who go down for a half hour and feel like a train wreck for 8 hours when they get stabbed a little, I’ll take a 1.5min one.
If you told me I needed to run on a treadmill for an hour while the ultrasound worked, I’d STILL take it over getting stabbed a little.
- Comment on Keep in mind that social security is set to run out in 10 years time. 11 months ago:
and a stock market crash every 10 years
Need to have money in retirement to care about the stock market. If you had to liquidate retirement during COVID, yer just fucked. And got fucked for 3 years of “deferred taxes” on the emergency withdrawal as well.
It’s funny what a 40 year older will do to NOT have to live on the street when push comes to shove.
- Comment on Blueberry milkshakes 1 year ago:
(reading post history)
Ah. I understand now. Enjoy the block.
- Comment on Blueberry milkshakes 1 year ago:
Not quite sure how this answer is relevant. Childfree, or just too young to have kids yourself? The question stands for your mother, a sibling, a niece/nephew, a girlfriend, or whatever makes no stop and consider for a second that you just said you’re okay with random, innocent people suffering and dying.