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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 28th, 2023

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  • I worked at BlockBuster back when Netflix came out. It was legit a great contender, and an awesome service. BB had their own mail service, but it was just seen as a copycat. Also the franchise had a LOT of bad blood, and sometimes rightfully so. Depended on local management how much leeway you could have. The most lax stores that were lenient did the best.

    The reason it worked was because physical media is protected by the first sale doctrine. So if you could buy a disc, it could be under one roof as rentable inventory.

    Streaming and licenses is what fragmented everything and greed gave the appropriate incentive.

    It also somewhat killed direct competition. When everything was physical on a shelf in front of you, all for the same price, you had direct comparison and competition. You could have any show or movie from any studio all side by side. That $2-5 could get you anything, across the board.

    I saw this all coming from miles away. I don’t blame anyone, every step sounded like a great deal. I see a lot of the same things with Gamepass. It’s a great deal, and I don’t blame anyone for using it… But I don’t see it as being a long term net positive for the industry.





  • I’ve tried one that works surprisingly well. Each sentence had great pacing, cadence, and correct enunciation- even had tone right when someone was shouting or angry or sad.

    I wouldn’t really recommend it, though. While I couldn’t pick any single thing out that was wrong, overall it just didn’t quite flow. It’s like watching someone try to act that is technically doing everything right, but it just isn’t good. It basically didn’t understand the greater context of the story and was saying lines.

    It was uncanny valley, but exclusively with voice.








  • I have to do similar things when it comes to ‘raytracing’. It meant one thing, and then a company comes along and calls something sorta similar the same thing, then everyone has these ideas of what it should be vs. what it actually is doing. Then later, a better version comes out that nearly matches the original term, but there’s already a negative hype because it launched half baked and misnamed. Now they have to name the original thing something new new to market it because they destroyed the original name with a bad label and half baked product.


  • Generally speaking, you learn more about how something works when the core functionality is exposed to the user, and just janky enough to require fiddling with it and fixing things.

    This is true of lots of things like cars, drones, 3D printers, and computers. If you get a really nice one, it just works and you don’t have to figure anything out. A cheap one, or something you have to build yourself, makes you have to learn how it actually works to get it to run right.

    Now that things are so comodified and simplified, they just work and really discourage tinkering, so people learn less about core functionality and how things actually work. Not always true, but a trend I’ve experienced.