Technology

Did anyone actually expect anything else?

Capitalism will never cost less in the long term.

Back to pirating 🏴‍☠️ Arrrr!

If you subscribe to all the services, it can be expensive. But it's still FAR more flexible than traditional cable, since you can pick and choose which services you want on any given month, and cancel when you've binged all the shows. The shows that don't shove ads down your throat every 5 minutes, BTW.

This just reads like an ad for cable companies. "Please stay with the worst customer service in the country, the competition is just as expensive if you ignore how people actually use it!"

Last month, Google, the third-largest cloud provider, started a pilot program where thousands of its employees are limited to using work computers that are not connected to the internet, according to CNBC.

That's not even close to accurate reporting.

They removed internet access from engineers' build machines, not from peoples' workstations.

Builds at Google are reproducible and do not require external network access. See Bazel.

Uber was unsustainably underpriced in order to gain market share. Pricing is temporary; the core benefit as a consumer was always the ability to request one from anywhere using an app (where you also paid) and have them come directly to you instead of needing to hail one. Taxi companies added that ability and now everything is better. There's no reason why the approximate cost should vary much, outside of limited promotions. An Uber, a Lyft, and a taxi should cost roughly the same. Why wouldn't they? Perpetual VC-funded pricing wasn't what we were promised; the promise was convenient ordering and stress-free payments.

The cloud was never cheap.

What a strange idea.

My mother was a journalist, her heyday was in the 80s-early 00s, she covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia. We had a long phone call last weekend where we ended up talking about Twitter, the online service that changed journalism. I explained to her that the current owner put a foot in his mouth and was forced to buy it at a higher price than the initial valuation while grumbling that it was not turning profit, she guffawed at this. She said, "When has the media ever made profit??"

The only difference between old media and new online media is that online media also sell user data to make more revenue (along with old time subscription models and selling ad spaces), and even with this they're still not making profit.

It's almost like the underlying premise doesn't change with tech.

The things that can/should be broken is the stupid medallion system.

Honestly, given the current fragmentation of Streaming Service, it has become completely anti-consumer.

People don't like to spend so much money just to watch one or two shows from one platform. They like the concept of AIO platforms and being on-demand & ad-free. All three of them have been broken.

Same rodeo, new clowns.

i have an inconsistent internet connection. it's fine, but i refuse to ruin a movie by trying to stream it. since netflix and others don't give you a way to pre-download the movie, they can completely suck my balls. 0/10. 🚽🪠

I've ditched both and have gone mostly back to physical media. Even standard 1080p Blu-ray from 2007 look better than any streaming app as the bitrate is significantly higher, and you can find used Blu Ray for super cheap right now. New releases are a little expensive but there are still rental options

I find these kinds of posts to be so entitled and pessimistic. Yeah, prices have definitely gone up, but the tech solutions are almost unilaterally better than their replacements.

• Streaming: you don’t actually have to subscribe to every single streaming service, and most are dead simple to cancel (good luck canceling your cable service). Most are very lax about sharing passwords, or have cheaper ad-based tiers if you want to save a bit.
• Uber: you can summon a comfortable car that seats up to 6 and can set your destination as well as multiple stops, and have it pull right up to where you are, often in 5 minutes or less, without needing to talk to or hail someone. In the US prices have crept up but in other countries it’s still a bargain compared to taxis, which are sometimes run like a racket.
• Cloud: I don’t even know what this is doing here since we are talking consumer tech and this is more about B2B services. For the consumer the cloud is still dirt cheap and transformative, and doesn’t even have a “back in my day” equivalent.

Everything is amazing and no one is happy.

So for half these things, early on the costs of doing business were carried by other people. Streaming services relied on studios to produce content, and Uber relied on drivers to carry maintenance costs and downtime cost.

Now Netflix is a full studio and all the other services that are competitive have original content. Uber drivers are unionized.

Cloud services are fine for set low computation things, but once you scale past a certain point keeping your own IT staff busy is easy, and they provide a tailor made infrastructure.

All the technology we need for ultimate entertainment is already here. Profits for the "big boys" is the only.piece that they think is missing. The truth is, everything works perfect before you have to inject a way to make money with it.

The point on the cloud is quite arbitrary to be honest. Yeah aws is coming to charge for extra unused ipv4 addresses, because there's a damn shortage of them and it's literally impossible to "produce more". The solution is ipv6 but the infrastructure is not ready yet, which is embarrassing by now.

The point about security seems so god damn stupid. If you can work with limited outside access, it's going to be more secure, the point of cloud being more secure is not to compare to your personal pc, it's to compare to pcs that you expose to the exterior. In fact, Internet access and cloud servers don't necessarily need to be the same thing, when people talks about Internet access they usually mean the web, and servers talk with each other with a myriad of other protocols that are not https.

I'm amazed I even read half of that, and even more that it was such uninformed bullshit.

What's even the point of this post, I'm clearly not it's target audience.

These are three topics that people love to focus on price against traditional services without looking any deeper.

Streaming is only just as expensive as cable if you subscribe to a bunch of them, but if you pick and choose, start and stop, it is cheaper. Further, it is a better experience. You can watch what you want, when you want. You don't need an annoying DVR setup, etc. The experience is better, even if you do choose to pay the same.

For Uber and Lyft, I don't use them because they are cheaper; I use them because they are better than traditional taxis. Seriously, how many people who say they aren't better than taxis have even used taxis heavily while traveling? Using taxis sucks, except possibly around airports or in the rare city you can walk outside and hail a cab. Outside of that you often have to call in, wait for an extended time with no ETA, etc. Lyft and Uber are a better experience, especially when you are outside major tourist or travel hubs.

Finally, cloud is more expensive, but gets you all sorts of benefits. Those benefits may or may not be worth the cost depending on you or your org, but it is not 1-1 to running on prem. On AWS you can trivially automate events across the entire ecosystem of services, run serverless infrastructure, etc. There are many great use cases for spending the money on the cloud, and most organizations should have a hybrid approach.

Sorry, end rant, but I always get tired of the false equivalence of these three things and the tunnel vision on price.

Streaming and storage on my file server remains stable in pricing

Don't forget plastic money, when we're promised to use "free" debit cards. There is always a fee, and one way or another we have to pay it. Problem I see is that there is more and more difficult to use cash. All except one cash machines were removed from where I live. The one's left behind 80% of time doesn't work. We're in tech "utopia" trap.