Technology has started to make it easier and easier to be anti consumer. To maximise how much you can extract out of consumers.

It is making it easier to understand and control exactly how they use products and services. This allows you to structure your price and offering to give them the minimum amount they’ll accept at the maximum price. Allows you to strip features out and offer them for extra. Allows you to hide things behind ongoing subscriptions. Allows you to better lock people into products and services, making it more difficult to switch/leave.

All of this was possible (and being done) before, but technology makes this so much easier/better.

Technologies often start out by making something easier for the consumer. But beyond the early stages, it’s all about making the world better - for the corporations developing and selling products and services.

Exactly!

This pretty much summarises it.

A good alternative. I moved across too.

Youtube is the only thing there isn’t a really viable alternative to at this stage.

I’m out of the loop, what happened in January to cause that sudden growth?

I have an account but I’m not active. Just not much of a social media guy in general.

March 2000. Bigpond Cable. Such a step up in speed (although I can’t remember what that initial cable speed was) and suddenly we were always connected.

I had a faster connection than anyone I knew at that time :)

I don’t disagree.

There is one forum I still participate in:

https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum/

It’s mostly tech-focussed and Australia-centric, but it does have other topics like sport, TV etc…

I wish there were more like this.

I hate that the bulk of online discussion is now owned/monopolised by a couple of huge corporations.

A decent percentage of Gen X and early millennials grew up familiar with computers. You kind of had to be, to some extent. Stuff didn’t always work smoothly or easily, so some tinkering and understanding of how things work beneath the surface was required.

We’re moving towards a future where a computer becomes just like an appliance, like a TV. Both the hardware and software will be locked down and set up to work. You just tap and press buttons to get it to do its thing.

Eventually, we may even get to the point where computers are required to be locked down “for our safety”.

If we get that far, then I can imagine those who want to build their own and have full freedom to install and customise it any way they want could be considered the very fringe/fanatical elements of society.

“Hey, you want an illegal unauthorised computer, why on earth would you need that, are you a terrorist or criminal or something?”

I hope things don’t go quite that far. But I don’t think it’s out of the question.

Very nice!

Also appreciate the comments on how you edited. Always find that interesting.

It’s a good point/observation.

Makes me wonder how different things might be if the mainstream media were more neutral and less prone to sensationalising everything and stirring outrage.

Social media just adds another layer on top of this.

Thanks for sharing.

All too often the free and open alternatives (or these days even just the non-subscription alternatives!) involve compromising some features or convenience.

But not always.

For me, I think adding Projectivity Launcher over the top of it took it from a good device to a great one.

It’s let me customise the thing just how I want it.

As for voice, I find it handy rather than typing text with the remote when searching in YouTube etc.

It’s long, but well worth the read.

Sounds like you don’t want to do this, but I am loving my Nvidia Shield TV Pro.

I’ve installed Projectivity Launcher on it and all the apps I want. It’s such a smooth, clean experience.

Whether it’s Netflix, Tivimate, Kodi or Plex, it all runs super smoothly, no stutters, no ads. Highly recommend.

The backlit, voice capable remote is really nice too.

Only kids and teens? Pretty much everyone around here has their head down starting at one.

(He says while scrolling through Lemmy on his phone…)

Is this a surprise to anyone?

This was already my understanding when I got the first pre-release one in 2014.

In that time, it has mainly learned how to"dim the living area lights to 50%" and “set the AC to 22 degrees”. That is about 99% of it’s use.

Wonder if that’s helped it’s AI much…