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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • That’s not accurate. The article is about Australia. Netflix Australia had a net loss of 200K subscribers specifically due to the anti-consumer moves they’ve made which affects a lot more than just sharing a password with a family member. That’s a 3% decline in a major country. Meanwhile, Netflix rivals had subscriptions increase overall and several saw huge surges. Netflix remains #1 by total subscribers in Australia, but that shouldn’t shock anyone given the inherit momentum they possess.

    The article was never about Netflix globally. It was always about Australia. Companies operate business units in regions, and each region must perform.




  • and since the state was not democratic

    How do you define “democratic?” Because the “soviet” of “soviet union” is a type of council which was directly elected by citizens. The USSR was a democratic republic in that each soviet usually voted for a higher level soviet. Not that unusual, especially back then.

    Now, I’m not suggesting that the books were never cooked. We know that Stalin rigged at least some higher level elections at the very least.

    But “democratic” does not mean multi-party. It can also be “no party” or “three parties” or anything. In the USSR you could run for your local soviet or petition them to vote for you. Yes, you’d have to be a party member. But that doesn’t mean blind allegiance and no differing thought. I’ve brought it up before, but you had severe infighting in the party because of the diversity of opinions and thought, not lack of it. Sure, they were all communists or some flavor thereof at least superficially. But there’s a hell of a difference between Stalin and Kruschev and Gorbachev as examples.

    And, Stalin aside given his prominence in the early years of the nation, the other prominent leaders were very dependant on entities like the Supreme Soviet which was elected by your elected representatives.

    Different != undemocratic.


  • I still can’t get over the fact that lots of neo-communists use USSR as a role model. The only people in that country who benefited from that system were the people at the top and those with connections to them

    Demonstrably false. For example, are you suggesting that the 23 million serfs–dirt farmers–of the imperial Russian empire were better off not knowing how to read, having no education, no healthcare, no subsidized food supplies, no industry tools, and no ability to break free from being born into a rigid inherited socioeconomic class from which there was no escape?

    Capitalists need to remember that last point. They have a shared and reoccuring thread throughout their history of thinking they can treat people in a similar way and that a break will never come. Except they know it does, which is why they were literally murdering communists, socialists, and union folk in both the Americas and Europe (and likely elsewhere, but I’m not well versed enough to speak on other regions of the world).

    The USSR, as a model, worked. Capitalists don’t want to accept it publicly because it threatens their monopoly on state and enterprise power. A young government, forged through raw power, is going to be a bit different than what we expect. But the USSR was trending toward what we understand as liberalization which is why it dissolved the moment some ethno-nationalist capitalists were allowed to seize control of newly free media outlets and get people on their side with talking points. People like Yeltsin. I’d like to remind you that Gorbachev, leader of the USSR, didn’t react when people like (but not exclusively) Yeltsin used ethnonationalism to whip up mass riots and protests. He didn’t roll out the tanks,something tankies really hate. He didn’t refuse to recognize the results of elections and votes.

    We know the USSR worked because the entire region went from nothing to world superpower in a single generation. It spooked the Americans and a lot of Europeans such that they adopted a practice of containment after WW2 in order to prevent a rival system from spreading. They dirtied the word for a couple generations such that people wouldn’t and still won’t consider what the ideology means. And that, just maybe, a period of time under an autocrat doesn’t define the entire nation.


  • Btw, the dictatorship of the proletariat, aka communist dictatorships are just fascist states in disguise, concentration camps and totalitarian bullshit included.

    You clearly are not educated in communist ideology and philosophy. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” does not mean a literal dictatorship of a singular person or even a small group.

    The dictatorship of the proletariat means that the entire working class, as a people, collectively own and run the entire state. As opposed to what we have in the world today, which is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie–either outright dictators, monarchs, or increasingly the tiniest fraction of the ultra rich controlling everything.

    One person controlling a state with an iron fist, like Stalin, is not a dictatorship of the proletariat. The working class controlling the state is. It is called a “dictatorship” not because a singular person controls it, but a singular class. The largest class. The class of almost everybody but a fraction of a percent of outliers.

    No country on Earth today has a dictatorship of the proletariat, because only the monied elite get to control the government. Whether it be through bribery (lobbying), captured government, literal monarchies (even if “symbolic”, they still have massive sway given their expansive wealth), literal dictatorships, theonomic regimes, elite and rich leaders of military juntas, etc.

    There’s a reason that only the rich attend summits like Davos. There’s a reason nearly every country has golden passport/golden visa schemes which let the rich effectively buy citizenship.

    The ultra rich, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, have strong class solidarity. That is why the world is the way it is.


  • glockenspiel@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml2023-08-09.jpg
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    1 year ago

    America believes month/day/year for some stupid fucking reason.

    It’s because of Great Britain. We adopted it from them while a bunch of colonies and it regionally spread to others.

    America didn’t change, probably because we have been so geographically isolated (relatively speaking), whereas the modern day UK did change to be more like Europe.

    People get so goddamn hot and bothered by things that ultimately don’t matter almost like it is a culture war issue. Americans maintain the mm/dd/yyyy format because that’s how speak the dates.

    I wouldn’t say it is us Americans who “find it hard to read” if someone from elsewhere in the world sees an American date, knows we date things in the old way they used to date things, and then loses their minds over having to swap day for month. Everyone just wants to be contrarian and circle jerk about ISO and such.

    Us devs, on the other hand, absolutely should use the same format of yyyy-mm-dd plus time and time zone offset, as needed. There’s no reason, in this age, for dates to be culturally distinct in the tech space. Follow a machine-first standard and then convert just like we do with all other localizatons.

    But hey, if people want to be pedantic, let’s talk about archaic gendered languages which are completely useless and has almost zero consistency.


  • It all depends on your tolerance.

    FireSticks are inherently easier to tinker with. But Amazon bends you over with shoving ads and spyware up your ass at every opportunity. It is baked into the UI design itself. It is very advertising-forward, with everything else designed around ads. And even the 4K max lags at times.

    AppleTV really requires an iPhone to set up optimally. And it is locked down with no clear jail break at this time for most people unless you’re willing to solder (or if I’ve missed a new flaw in an update which opened the door programmatically). But Apple TV is fast and smooth, with no inherent ads of its own. It is honestly over powered for its purpose, probably because it can also play a fair number of iOS games.

    Chrome Cast with Google TV is a fucking mess. It is severely under powered to the point of lagging. It has half baked ideas like profiles which don’t change anything. And it has ads as the focus of the design just like FireStick.

    But you’re going to pay a subscription if you go with Apple TV and want something like Infuse. Jellyfin and Plex, of course, don’t require it.

    And despite what people say, Stremio is absolute dogshit on a FireStick because of its mobile-centric UI.

    If you plan to use a server like Plex and Jellyfin, all of them work—but Apple TV works best. If you need anything else out of it, probably the fire stick if you use a pihole to stop it from phoning home for more ads constantly.


  • glockenspiel@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI like a good UX
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    1 year ago

    Wait until the non-technical reddit exiles learn about defederation and start whipping themselves up into frenzies trying to purge things they mildly disagree with or flat out don’t like. Just like the good old days on reddit with banning people for participating in verboten subreddits.

    Keep the worst of reddit and Twitter off lemmy, folks. Plenty of platforms for those types.



  • If it is impossible to make a living and work on these apps with either reasonable app pricing or no ads, then why is Sync the only app for Lemmy with these strings attached?

    Sync is a “professional” app. The others are mostly hobbyists. That’s the ultimate difference. Same as with Apollo. You had a bunch of open source reddit clients, but a hobby piece of software will seldom outshine a professional product. Sometimes it happens, but that’s the exception not the norm. Sync has been incredibly stable for me over the last day. Memmy on my phone and Connect haven’t been. No shade to the devs, but devs approach a solution differently when that is how they support themselves. Passion can only carry a project so far, speaking as a dev myself.


  • I’ve noticed that the people losing their minds over Sync and solo software devs trying to make a living while keeping apps accessible, aren’t the ones beating down the doors to contribute their time and skill and labor for open source. Most of them don’t strike me as devs at all. I’m used to it. It’s the lemmy equivalent of your one family member asking you to make them an app for free at a family Christmas.

    People that are passionate about FOSS/FLOSS should definitely use those things. And support them financially. And contribute. But somehow the meta has become to dogpile on the first major third party app for our community that had a lot of users on reddit and which makes onboarding easy.


  • The key detail you are missing is that most people that left reddit did so on the backs of closed source third party apps. That’s what kicked off the entire firestorm of events. The reality was that, of those who used third party apps, most used closed sourced solutions.

    FOSS is great. FLOSS is even better. People should support projects they identify with, just like people should support their home Lemmy instance via community funding. But far too many of the argument I’m seeing against Sync and others basically boils down to “we shouldn’t pay for software,” like our [software engineer] labor is just something to be had for free.

    Closed source third party apps are no threat to Lemmy. The failings of reddit cannot happen to Lemmy so long as one instance does not come to define Lemmy in such a way that they can self-isolate and essentially turn into a proprietary model itself. Let’s all recall that Reddit was, once upon a time, open source.

    Third party apps are about choice. I hardly consider someone using a closed source third party app–in a sea of many, many FOSS versions–a loss of freedom or an abusive relationship. Come on, that’s very hyperbolic. And I’d wager 99% of people can’t verify that trust even if they wanted to since most people don’t understand code, let alone software development practices. They just take the word of random strangers whom they have no right trusting saying “yeah it looks good.”




  • I have the South Park bundle from Steam. The Ubisoft launcher wasn’t an issue, more of a minor annoyance because you need to log into it every so often.

    A bigger issue is that both Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole suffer from random freezes that require killing the game from the Steam Deck menu. It doesn’t appear to be universal, but other folks have said the same thing on ProtonDB. Tinkering with proton versions hasn’t fixed it for me yet.



  • It was. The Apollo dev, Christian, informed everyone on Mastodon that Reddit was a bitter child (my words) til the end and revoked the keys for Apollo and most other big third party apps (aka the competition) many hours before the developers were going to revoke them themselves.

    Reddit thoroughly burned the bridge and pissed on the ashes as far as I’m concerned. Decades of use—gone. Now I wouldn’t be caught dead on Reddit for any reason, just like Facebook, purely out of spite.


  • Well, fair enough point. But Google is preparing to actually become actionable and start issuing sweeping user bans.

    I’m a dev. I know people who’ve run afoul of Google and had their accounts banned. They lose access to everything with zero recourse.

    And it means they have to find new jobs because enterprise Google accounts are also affected. Especially if they are Android developers.

    Google also has methods to trace people down if they make new accounts. That presumably extends to people accessing information without accounts. People are incredibly easy to finger print with just their browser and all the data it surrenders as a standard.


  • I’m not OP, but a big one was breaking a fair number of extensions/add-ons with a major browser update. I forget the exact details, and am not privy to the technical arguments within Mozilla, but I can see how it is a huge turn off for users.

    FireFox was also extremely resource intensive at one point.

    And their mobile apps are stubbornly bad. There’s no reason not to implement a real tab bar, for example. Card view is terrible on tablet devices.

    It just seems like there are a lot of little things they do with FireFox.

    Still, it isn’t FireFox trying to end adblocking and start blacklisting people from using services with no actual alternative.

    Alphabet needs to be broken up, as does Microsoft and Apple.