gdulli

Due to similar bad timing I got my first Playstation right before the hack in the early 2010s that took down the Playstation network for a whole month. When they offered a make-good to their customers I didn't qualify because my account was too new. I never bought another Sony product again.

Will you be happy when those models are five years old? Ten years? They'll age out in their ability and their cutoff date.

All well and good for now until the free lunch of free models ends, and the ones you can "freely" download have weights that tell you to drink Ovaltine or whatever other messaging gets sold.

We rightly restrict tobacco advertising because freedom to advertise is balanced with and does not always trump public health. Rights and responsibilities are not absolute, they exist in a complex tapestry of priorities.

Going from cable to streaming was a net increase in advertising because now the providers can make ads unskippable. (Also the ads are hypertargeted now.)

Going from traditional search to AI will echo that net worsening of ad-related user experience. The net surveillance is also greater because logged-out search will go away.

Maybe there's a general lesson that successive generations/disruptions of technology seem better at first but end up qualitatively worse.

A side effect of rapid technological change is that there are now multiple generations who didn't experience the pre-monetized internet.

It's like we've hit a tipping point where enshittification etc. are allowed to thrive because there's no longer a critical mass of people who know from first-hand experience that things don't have to be this bad.

It's become easy to pacify young people with the meme that older people didnt really have a better internet, they're remembering the past as better than it actually was.

People will eventually realize that they've become dependent on an increasingly expensive and worsening AI subscription in a way that echoes the worsening and rising costs of streaming services.

But the impact of depending on the tech giants for search and cognition and job skills will be significantly greater.

Why will employers five years from now pay for your $300 AI subscription when there exist other candidates who will absorb the cost themselves?

If you click on one of the related articles it says that they wanted to raise it to $7500 but "compromised" on $2500. So it's actually a bargain!

It's a disgrace what the "open" internet has become.

We're adults like you are and can manage both our emotions and the responsibility of understanding that headlines aren't the totality of information.

Social media has become so terrible in the last few years that I've grown to depend on it less without even making an effort to. I deleted my accounts on the worst sites and only visit anonymously, which has trailed off over time. I've joined newer/better sites but haven't let myself get attached to them. If they go away it won't feel like a big loss.

In that respect, the worsening of social media has been a gift. I'm still online but with the attitude of: "Don't ever let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner."

I would never be expected to clean my dishes after ordering room service in a hotel. The price of an AirBNB would have to be much cheaper than a hotel in order for me to do my own cleaning. And in my city at least, it never was.

Ironically (or fittingly) given that origin, the Xbox version of the Plex app may be the best one to use now because it's been abandoned and was never updated to the terrible redesign.

> Surveillance capitalists have built a truly miserable internet.

The way I saw it put recently: the internet used to be a library and now it's a store.