The idea is that people will be willing to pay a recurring fee to use Alexa if it can do more advanced things, like perform multiple commands without the user having to say “Alexa” repeatedly, be more conversational, and manage smart homes more intuitively. Amazon is considering charging $5 to $10 per month for generative AI Alexa,

I don’t know if that’s worth $5-10/mo. I use Google Nest products at home, mainly to control lights. And yeah it sometimes annoying to be like, “Hey Google do this…Hey Google, do that…Hey Google, do whatever…” But at that point, I usually just use the Google Home app or a specific IoT app. And that’s free.

I’m sure they do, but I feel like even on r/datahoarders, I only ever see people talk about masses of HDDs, tape drives, or cloud storage.

You could also add toxic glue. It’s edible! Probably only once though.

This is now going to be added to some LLM-generated answer in the probably near future.

My parents were the ones who pointed me to the high seas. I was a kid (12-13yo) when Napster came out. Being the family geek, they told me to look into it since they heard about it on the news and wanted free music (early case of the Streissand Effect before it was termed as such). So I did. And we got free music. Even asked them to get me a CD burner for my birthday after that and they did.

As a kid on the earlier days of the Internet, I came across all sorts of ways to get free stuff. Games and Music at first, especially game cracks/warez. Then once torrents came on the scene, movies and shows.

I actually don’t pirate much anymore. Rarely pirate music since I’ve had Spotify for like 10+yrs now. Same with games since Steam and all the other digital storefronts have so many sales. I still pirate emulator ROMs once in a blue moon. Movies/shows would be where I pirate the most (though like once a month if that), even though I have Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and Crunchyroll. Even between those 4, I can’t find everything I want to watch.

But yeah, 99% of the time, I just don’t want to pay for things. The other 1% is that I can’t pay for something (mainly in the emulators/ROMs space). That’s all.

I don’t pirate very often anymore, but when I do, I use whatever computer I happen to be on. I just turn on a VPN and bind the torrenting client to the VPN only. This is how I’ve torrented for years, since the late 2000s. I’ve gotten a couple strikes from my ISP several years ago, but that was before I had a commercial VPN. Otherwise, I’ve no issues.

What are the potential security upsides of doing it on a VM/container or a dedicated machine? I can imagine some performance upsides, but that’s about it.

That’s a bot, right? That can’t be real.

I’ve met plenty of idiots. Some days, I’m probably one of them. But I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone who’s pro anti-piracy. Usually people are just neutral about it. Even the most law-abiding people I know, when I’ve told them I can download movies for free, are like “Oh, are you able to get this movie for me? Thanks!”

I think it’s worse here than on reddit when it comes to this. Redditors these days (*takes out the walker and cane*) are shitty, but I feel like I’m somewhat insulated from a lot of it due to where I lurk/participate on reddit. But on Lemmy, I see it pretty much everywhere. Smaller userbase compared to reddit, so maybe the rudeness is more visible.

Oof. Sorry to hear that happened. Vehicle repairs suck.

I do remember my parents talking about $800 for the windshield specifically, but maybe they were just simplifying out of anger. With the dealer, with me, whoever. It very well could’ve been the estimate for the total damage. I can certainly imagine some dents and scratched paint. And yeah labor is often the highest cost.

A motorcycle back in the late 90s when I was like 9 or 10?

We were at a dealership because my dad was thinking about buying a motorcycle. At one point, they put my younger brother on a motorcycle because it was cute or whatever. After they took him off the bike, and my parents and the salesguy moved onto another motorcycle, I wanted to try. So I did. And I tried to be careful, knowing it could fall over.

Getting on was no issue. And getting off was no problem either. Until I was like a few feet away from the bike…and it fell over. Shattered the windshield.

Even though it was an accident, the dealer tried to get my parent’s to pay up. And I think my parents would’ve been willing to pay something…except the dealer wanted, I believe, $800. The bike was probably only a few thousand bucks – I actually have no clue how much the bike was, but, as an adult, I know how much bikes are. No way a windshield was a third of the price of the bike. Not in the 90s, not today. So my dad and the dealer got into a shouting match. We left, and the dealer tried to get our license plate number as we drove off.

Nothing ever happened with that. No cops were called or anything, as far as we know. Besides, the dealer should have insurance for these situations. But since I wasn’t supposed to be on the bike in the first place…I got in tons of trouble. Got my ass beat by my mom, got grounded, couldn’t go to a sleepover I was supposed to go to…

Definitely the most expensive thing I broke. At least based on what the dealer was demanding.

So this morning, I had a dream where I was going to a coffee shop. After trying to figure out if I could order like a Frappuccino or other blended drink, I realized this coffee shop had really good bread. I guess it’d be more aptly called a bakery. So I ordered a loaf of their bread, and then they had some kinda really good honey butter. So my friend – I was there with a friend apparently, one I hadn’t talked to in several months – and I tried some. And it was really good. Though I also remember it not tasting sweet or like anything. So Idk how that worked.

And then I woke up.

Within the last year, I’ve definitely had some replies to old threads of mine. And if it’s a question, I’ll respond. And I think I did comment on another’s thread at least once, confirming and thanking them for the solution. All of these were tech support related. I feel like that’s one of the few topical areas where that’s acceptable.

While I have work friends, and we do go out and drink, it’s almost always within or adjacent to the context of a work event. Like maybe we’re doing a co-workers happy hour. Or we had some work function that stretched into the evening, so we’ll go out for dinner and drinks together afterwards. There’s definitely been a few times where we were drinking for like 8hrs after a late lunch! But it’s very rare for me to hang out with them outside of that. Like I can count on one hand the times I met up with co-workers on like a weekend just to head to a bar.

As far as topics, they’re still friends, so we talk about all sorts of stuff. But there’s definitely more of a focus on things happening at work and less about our private lives, especially spouses/SOs. My current “work best friend” will sometimes call me afterhours and we’ll chat and vent about stress at work and stuff, and even some of our stresses at home/personal lives, but the latter tends to be more surface level. With my non-work friends, we’d certainly get deeper into those topics if desired.

It comes down to professionalism. That’s really the “firewall” between my work friends and non-work friends. Yes my work friends and I can have fun, joke around, get a little loose when drinking, share deeper stuff about ourselves, but we never want to cross that line. Sometimes it’s thin, and sometimes it’s even a little blurry or dotted. But we all still strive to never (or very, very, very rarely) cross it.

NO MOM NOOOO

Yeah it was waaaaay earlier, which I found out too when I was writing my comment. But I did start working in the early/mid 2000s, when I was 16. Even in 2000s, it was still typical to go to the public library and grab tax forms. Or print them out from the IRS website.

I bought a few boxes of checks when I started working. I still have most of them.

In the first several years of working, I mailed in paper income tax returns. The govt would even send the blank forms out to everyone via postal mail. I think paper submissions were the norm, though electronic filing certainly existed.

I think taking the time in the morning to enjoy myself. I WFH these days so it’s a easier (yet sometimes harder) to do that, but when I was commuting, I’d wake up early enough to get ready of course, but also take sometime to have a cup of coffee and read some news and such. Maybe even have a breakfast sandwich or something. Because for many years, I did the whole wake up the last minute, get ready, and get out the door ASAP thing. I always felt like I was in a panic.

I can’t say it led me to be more productive or whatever. But it just felt nicer. To not be so rushed. And that’s worth something.

Banning lobbying would mean no one would be able to talk to a politician/official about an issue. Not even writing your local officials, proposing a local ordinance to making bike lanes or spending money to fix-up/improve a local park. Because that’s lobbying. You’re asking a government to wield their official power and/or spend public money, for your (and potentially others’) benefit.

Even lobbying groups aren’t necessarily bad. The Sierra Club, EFF, ACLU. These are American, but I’m sure there are equivalents of these in other countries.

So banning lobbying doesn’t really work. Now if you’re talking financial contributions and gifts and nice dinners from those who lobby, yeah that probably needs to be more highly regulated or stopped altogether. Generally speaking, any kind of quid pro quo.

But just talking to a politician should not be made illegal. In democracies, talking to people, talking to politicians, and trying to convince them to align with your view is the name of the game.

I think pirating educational materials is less morally bad than pirating entertainment.

College textbooks, for example, are insanely expensive. I once paid like $300 for a single chemistry book. I never made that mistake again. Not because I pirated; I just started buying used or past editions. It’s not like chemistry for a 100 level class is cutting edge stuff. It’s the same ideas and knowledge we’ve had for decades or a hundred or hundreds of years. It’s all public knowledge at this point.

But you may need the book to do readings and assignments. So if you can’t afford the book, even used or past editions, then it makes sense to turn to piracy. I would sometimes grab the library reference copy of a textbook and just go crazy with a copy machine. That might technically still be piracy.

Entertainment, on the other hand, isn’t really required at all. So to me, that’s worse.

That all said, 99% of the stuff I’ve pirated is entertainment. My immorality is only bounded by the size of my SSDs!

Nope, this was in the Midwest! Missouri, to be somewhat more specific. I do know our principal (who I didn’t mind) was often in the lunchroom. Maybe she was from the south? No clue.

No talking during lunch. This was in a public elementary school in the early/mid 90s, at the first school I attended through second grade. Literally the only school I attended that was like that. It was so fucking stupid.

Of course, kids tried to talk to their friends, whispering and such. I got in trouble once because a teacher saw me whisper to my friend who asked me a question and so I got moved to sitting with older kids I didn’t know for the rest of the lunch period. That was the first time I got in trouble at school, so I was crying.

Never understood why we couldn’t talk. I think because it’d eventually get too loud in there? Which, who cares? Didn’t matter; family moved and I switched schools. Where it was totally normal and acceptable to socialize during lunch.