They get paid by Sky in my case, and a lot of people still buy snacks from them.

UK we have the Vue chain that has adult tickets to the latest films for as little as £5. They are often given as free monthly rewards for services like Sky TV, its why I go once a month. Sure its hardly IMAX or plush reclining seating but I have those nearby if the film warrants spending more.

UK also allows you to take your own snacks and drinks.

Except in the UK you can’t as they don’t sell them. They also ended UK support for their smoke detectors as well.

I switched to opentherm hardware and its now on my HA properly rather than via the cloud.

I did get a good ten years out the Nest hardware, I consider that reasonable for what it cost. Sure old fashioned controllers last longer, but i want the smart features

Quality of the system is such a massive dependency here, I can well believe that someone watching old reruns from a shitty streaming service that is upscaled to 1080p or 4k by their TV they purchased from the supermarket with coupons collected from their breakfast cereal is going to struggle to tell the difference.

Likewise if you fed the TVs with a high end 4k blu ray player and any blu ray considered reference such as Interstellar, you are still going to struggle to tell the difference, even with a more midrange TV unless the TVs get comically large for the viewing distance so that the 1080p screen starts to look pixelated.

I think very few people would expect their old wired apple earphones they got free with their iphone 4 would expect amazing sound from them, yet people seem to be ignoring the same for cheap TVs. I am not advocating for ultra high end audio/videophile nonsense with systems costing 10s of thousands, just that quite large and noticeable gains are available much lower down the scale.

Depending what you watch and how you watch it, good quality HDR for the right content is an absolute home run for difference between standard 1080p and 4k HDR if your TV can do true black. Shit TVs do HDR shitterly, its just not comparable to a decent TV and source. Its like playing high rez loss less audio on those old apple wired earphones vs. playing low bitrate MP3s.

I would rather live on the streets than put up with that, I could not cope with it as I get woke up by people in the same house being quiet let alone noisy cunts like that.

Typically I get about six. Had a long weekend had did nine and half each day for three days straight, which never happens, then last night I got four hours and undid all that goodness.

I would like between seven and eight hours on the regular, just not going to happen unless I retire and live on my own as I am a very light sleeper.

Same, perfect start to a new trilogy rather than the bookend to what people think is the orginal trilogy but isn’t.

I’m pretty sure Garland and Boyle hate the second one and don’t count it, it was awful without the involvement. They signed away the rights to the sequel for more control over the first one.

I would buy a feature phone today, preferably something eink, if it was painless to switch my SIM between it and my smart phone. Having to take the SIM out of one, put it in the other, then turn on the phone is not painless and they do not design the little draws to support thousands of open/closes against the contacts to read the SIM.

There are times I want the smart phone to have the SIM because I will want or need the extra functionality and if you just make the feature phone do everything then its just morphed into a smart phone with extra steps. I want the feature phone to be basic as I can get away with.

That said, I really want google wallet or similar that I can share between the two phones for my passes and tickets, audio streaming support, and maps. Something like a Hisense A9 would fit the bill but the temptation to add more apps than the basics would be too great, plus I still need a way to switch SIMs between the phones.

I cannot replace my smart phone, rather than supplement, with any feature phone because I use it for such a wide range of things. I can ssh from it to my home devices, I can manage my bank accounts, it tracks my health, it provides video and audio streaming on and offline, I can read and write documents/spreadsheets, plus anything you can do via a web browser.

What this chart is missing is the impact of the quality of the screen and the source material being played on it.

A shit screen is a shit screen, just like a badly filmed TV show from the 80s will look like crap on anything other than an old CRT.

People buying a 4k screen from Wallmart for $200 then wondering why they cant tell its any better than their old 1080p screen.

The problem with pushing up resolution is the cost to get a good set right now is so much its a niche within a niche of people who actually want it. Even a good 4k set with proper HDR support and big enough to make a different is expensive. Even when 8k moves away from early adopter markups its still going to be expensive, especially when compared to the tat you can by at the supermarket.

Does he put forward his case that he is the anti christ? As he sure comes across as someone who would want that. He has always felt like the sort of motherfucker who would read the Stand and identify with Randall Flagg

Yeah it pushed me to finally put in an order, got to wait till December now as I’m in the third batch.

I wanted to wait till we had proof thst the graphics card would be updatable and a better one would be available as their AMD card is a bit too lightweight for me.

I would rather it had been a better AMD card, I have a 7900 xtx in my desktop, but i will take what I can get at this point, especially as I know I can upgrade later.

It is this exactly, and is the same problem film, tv, and music has. They are all populated by people who are good at becoming and staying at the exec level, not people who are good at whatever field they are working in. Often the really creative are difficult to work with, they do not make a “good fit” with other execs, particularly when they actually understand the medium.

Its the same group of people who are heavily invested in AI to replace creative people in these fields as they do not understand the difference between AI doing a passable copy of someone elses style and someone actually creative creating a new style or approach.

With CDs they were negatively impacted by the loudness war as it became much more widespread. Having to hunt around for the right recording, often the earlier ones, can be expensive. Normalisation of the recordings by streaming companies is just an awful idea as it doesn’t fix the bad parts of the mix just turns everything down.

I prefer SACDs to CDs, mostly because they tended to be mastered and mixed better than the CDs of the past two decades. The surround audio mixes are mostly just gimmicky, although they are a good fit for some records, but they almost always had a two channel mix that you could pick instead. The higher frequency range is mostly pointless.

I read the manual before i buy a product, I watch the product reviews, and if I can I watch the repair videos as well.

Big part of my enjoyment from buying things is the work I do upfront. I tend to do the same with any tech project.

But how do you pay the overseers to enforce it when money is no longer valid? And the overseers are bigger and tougher than your average billionaire?

Slavery only works when there is money to pay the overseers and a legal system to protect the owner class from being extorted by the overseers.

ICE is in a similar boat and they have to pay significant amounts to attract people to carry out ICE fascism.

Who is he going to staff it with? There is zero chance he will cook and clean for himself and he will need a substantial army to protect himself from the collapse of the human race.

If he goes with people how long before the security guards realise they can dump his scrawny ass off a cliff and have a better quality of life as money becomes irrelevant? If he goes with robots how long before they break beyond what they can self repair? If he goes with robots with human engineers, how long before the engineers realise the same thing as the security guards and program the robots to kill Bezos?

Hes also exactly the type of person who this would cause a massive hissy fit over and demand immediate changes to Grok that would further stunt its working

Yeah that’s the point of the license from Ofcom, to approve the endpoint address used for the VPN. Most work places don’t use some random IP address but a small pool of known DNS entries for their endpoint. Just because you are using a VPN doesn’t mean nobody can see which endpoint you using.

It has always been the main aim of legislation like this to nobble VPNs, they just needed the “child” “violent pornography” etc. excuse to do so. UK government already monitors all of the internet traffic for the UK, except for MPs who are exempt, VPNs are a blocker for this.

Obviously, not even the UK government would expect a private VPN ban (work VPNs would likely need an Ofcom license) to stop everybody from using a VPN or suitable alternative, its not the aim. The aim is to stop the majority from doing so and criminalize the minority who do still bypass the block as it gives them the power to seize equipment, ask for your logins (its illegal punishable with jail time to not supply this in the UK), request ISP logs etc. to deep dive into your life.

Work based VPNs would likely have to obtain a license from Ofcom, it would be highly unlikely to block them completely. Probably be requesting a back door into the work VPNs at the same time just like they have for other encryption, lol.