. I use MediaMonkey since v0.1

I think that’s one of the ones I tried. It’s just more convenient to have unlimited access to music, whether I own it or not.

as she runs into walls now when the system is down because there is no light.

What do you do for lights? Like motion/position detection into each room? Or voice control?

I’ve wanted to get into automation several times, and I’m never settled enough in a house to spend the money. There’s always some reason we want to move and I don’t want to do all that permanent work to move. I even worked at an IoT company for a few years on backend and embedded code, so I have literally no excuse…

At least we have that mandatory 14-days-return-policy.

Not sure where that is. That would be nice (except that they could reduce the cashback anyway). Consumer Protections these days have been eroding in the US. Even our so-called consumer protection laws have landmines to protect the businesses.

I’ve used playnite a few times. I always forget about it for some reason or another. Gog has a built-in tool like playnite and I fail to use that, too.

Still do that. For over 25yrs I nourish my library. Just the MP3s made room for FLACs.

I still have it somewhere I’m sure, but I really gave up on it, for the convenience of youtube music of all things. Literally every song I ever had including a couple super-obscure albums I’d lost. And it’s SO convenient. It just works for me everywhere I want it.

Yeah ok, I get that. I’ve got 2 servers running 24/7 with proxmox/hyper-v, so those tools all run in seperate VMs. But especially in this case, it’s practically no maintenance

Every time I mean to start setting up servers, some reason (or my wife) talk me out of it. I’m jealous. It’s on my bucket list. I’m the only guy I know who has run server clusters professionally who has never had his own.

I must say that i’m in the warez-scene since the early 90s and I never had a virus-problem.

I have had a couple over the years; usually use the “nuke and restart” solution. Only one was REALLY major and I was never sure whether it was software or a dumb family member. My password-protected screenshare app went live one day and started buying Chinese gift cards with a clearly automated script. Thank god someone was in the office when it happened and they only got through a couple hundred dollars before we pulled the plug and called our bank.

You won’t see that elsewhere here. No way. First you gotta prove it wasn’t YOU that broke it at home. I could on for hours…

I know resellers hate Amazon returns, but they agree to them. I will literally make buying decisions based on the presence or lack of the “Free Returns” flag. I would literally pay for “return insurance” if AllState started to do that, too. I hate return hassles.

a game i actually played on epic.

Here’s a few of mine (not sure if any come from Amazon): Control (this was awesome!), shapez (almost bought it, then it was in my inbox), loop hero, Guardians of the Galaxy (Christmas free games), Outer Worlds (ditto), Evil WIthin 1 and 2, most of the fallout games, Death Stranding, Gloomhaven… I’m only on page 5 of 20 lol. Only 1 out of 5 of their free games are any good, but between big giveaways and the like, that’s still ~15 good free games a year lol. So needless to say, Epic is always installed on my computer.

It just never occurred as a prime (no pun intended) reason to pay… Errr… Prime

Perhaps THE problem with Prime right now is that none of their services except maybe TV is worth $11/mo on its own. Their free games aren’t Humble Monthly, but HM is just games. Their TV isn’t Netflix, but it’s $4/mo cheaper. You can get free shipping without Prime now (that wasn’t true before), but next day is phenomenal. As for books, there’s not really any replacement I know of. It’s not perfect (has this annoying thing about having books 2 on in some series, without book 1), but if you read a book a month, it pays for itself.

Warez were never convenient. Just “free”. Yet, with a tiny amount of “work”

For sure. It’s always been a baseline of convenience. I remember the old days of curating my mp3 collection every 6 months, removing dupes and fixing organizational shifting. But if I do that stuff for apps, I have to maintain freaking sandbox environments for each app, make sure my computer is backed up in case I have to wipe it, make sure nothing auto-logins so a remote attack doesn’t happen, etc. About 1 in 2 cracked apps show up as a virus and you can never know whether it’s a false positive, so you have to use a computer condom and then STILL get tested.

Dishing out 100 bucks would need a lot of benefits to convince me. Though i get you. Trading money for tinkering-time. All depends on our preference and skill and nerdiness 😂

I’m in an ok place right now. And Amazon is still the cheapest place to buy anything, for me. If I spend over $1000/yr there on everything, a lot more if you count the holidays, then Prime has already justified itself. And slower or not, Amazon with Prime is STILL the fastest Christmas shipper.

Anecdote… We bought Ring cameras from the Ring site for a family member in November. By mid-December, they still hadn’t shipped because Christmas orders were so backlogged. So we bought them again on Amazon and they were on our doorstep 2 days later, just a couple days before Christmas. Was it next day? No. Was it worth it? YEAH.

Then we had to fight with Ring for 2 weeks because they wouldn’t cancel the order. We got the Cameras the 2nd week of January and my wife was on the phone with them 6 or 7 times before they finally approved a return. Amazon has this thing called “Free Returns” on most items. You can literally write in “I was drunk shopping” for your return reason and nobody bats an eyelash.

But i doubt it just downloads and that’s it. No tracking? No phoning home? No play-statistics? Hmm

I can’t be positive. I’ve never run any network traces on it. But it doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of service DRMs. No “connecting” popup or login prompt. I’ve played Amazon-downloaded games offline. If there’s a hidden DRM, it’s more-or-less obscured.

Let’s be honest, though. Amazon gives the games away for free in an app that will never be used to sell products; and they do it as a bullet-point for Prime and to nudge people towards Luna. It’s obviously the games they get for free that they give away. I see no reason for them to do more work than they have to, plugging in a DRM.

But i never heard of anyone actually using the app instead of maybe even playing one of those freebies and then quitting the app again 😁

It’s hard to remember what games I got through Amazon vs Epic, but I clearly remember a few times I was excited about an Amazon Games offering added an Epic game.

In Amazon Games natively, my happy games are Autonauts, Terraformers, Close to the Sun (recently), and a few of those short adventure games I completed that nobody wants to spend $20 on but everyone loves to play.

I tried watching like 3 things. And one i could rent, the others pay extra and i was like “wtf? This is prime? Fuckit”

Their rent thing sucks, but I *never *see rentals in front of me when I use Prime Video on my TV. I named 3 of their big exclusives, but there’s plenty more either exclusive or just licensed. It’s never the most awesome shows of any service, but I could still find a few hours per day of video if I tried.

It just sucks that you’d need like 5 services and still can’t watch EVERYTHING

Yeah, I’m with you 5000% on that. That’s where Gabe Newall is right. I’d probably be willing to drop drop $100/mo or more on a service if it had EVERYTHING on-demand, convenient, with no DRM of any kind. And I’d never once think to download-and-unsub or distribute or anything.

…as for your experience, I say wave that damn Jolly Roger. Gimme convenience or give me death. I pay because things are convenient for me. If it wasn’t, I probably wouldn’t be paying either.

The games are on their app (nope, thanks) or epic (no thanks).

Their app is surpisingly fair. No inherent DRM, just click “download” and it downloads. Epic… well, I have 100+ games I got for free, so I have it anyway. I probably have a $1000 collection of “free” games on Epic at this point.

The tv stuff is the worst I’ve seen back when i actually paid for my series/movies

With all the subscription services, I think that’s the rule. If you like what they have, you love it. If not, you go elsewhere. At least Prime is cheaper than some of them, but at the end of the day it’s about the stuff you enjoy.

For me, it’s WoT, Reacher, Good Omens on top, along with a few of their FreeVee partnership shows. But I have to respect they also have The Boys, which I’ve been meaning to get into.

I mean, to me they beat Apple+ and Hulu, lose to Disney+ and Netflix. At $11/mo, I get all those things along with the expedited shipping and the books. Convenient, but also not overpriced.

And when the other website costs more, has worse return policies, slower shipping, and possibly is even a scam site? The problem with Amazon is how good it is even when it’s being evil.

As I said elswhere, I look EVERYWHERE before Amazon first. That involves me checking out BBB on mom&pop storefronts and trying to filter out the scam stores or the ones with significant issues. It involves me price-checking, coupon-checking, seeing if services like Rakuten can get the price to match Amazon’s. I don’t expect most people to do all those things and neither should you.

And even then, I end up buying from Amazon about 2/3 the time. Because I won’t pay 20% more in some meaningless protest that isn’t going anywhere.

It’s an extreme-case prisoner’s dilemma. For shoppers to prevent a Walmart/Amazon monopoly, people would have to both give up convenience AND affordability in hope that everyone else had the same radical values. There were PLENTY of boycotters for both, but they just weren’t anywhere near enough.

At some point, when you’re starving and Sam Walton comes by and offers you food your family can afford, you pull the trigger. And I don’t fault someone who does that.

It’s the Walmart problem. People buy from Amazon because they can’t afford some necessities at MSRP when going to a local store.

Some of the stuff I can get in bulk on Amazon are as much as 50% cheaper than getting those same things in bulk from a restaurant supply (which is cheaper than buying them at a grocery store). And that’s before Subscribe&Save’s 15% off. Coffee (for example) costs would drive me into the poor house if I didn’t get my beans from Amazon… and I end up getting higher quality beans than my grocery store at that lower price.

Do I NEED coffee to live? No. But it’s not exactly a luxury in the modern world, and beans are much cheaper than going to Dunkin. There are things I buy that I need; there are things that I buy that I want. And as much as I hate it, most of them are not available locally or are FAR more expensive locally. I never go to Amazon first, but I very often find myself landing at Amazon last.

And yes, that doesn’t justify Prime on its own. But because I have Prime, I get those things that I couldn’t find cheaper elsewhere the very next day. Prime will never be necessary when there’s free shipping options, but boy have they packed it out with more features than (for example) Walmart’s subscription model.

Here’s what I get with Prime that I appreciate:

1. Free games every month, some of which are pretty awesome
2. that fast shipping
3. A fairly average TV service with a few of the best exclusives out there (imo THE best but I’m a WoT-head).
4. Tons of included books and I live in a family of readers

I mean, a lot of it I could get on the High Seas as it were, but it’s the law of convenience. They make it easy and there’s a value prop there for me.

If I JUST wanted free shipping, Prime would be a complete waste of money to me. But I’d still end up giving Amazon my damn paycheck because the alternatives are just not there where I live.

If I had to guess, probably for the same reason you can’t sue for not being able to pick what apps you install on your toaster.

Google probably opened themselves up to this monopoly shit by trying not to be as much of a monopoly as Apple is trying to be.

I’ve heard a lot of lawyers say that the law punishes virtually every good behavior because that behavior can be construed in a way that you can be sued for, and that it favors being a dick more than anything. In this case, that might be what happened?

I mean, not that Google is a saint at all.

It becomes delicious. That’s part of the whole addiction process. Taste/smell is one (or two, however you count it) of the most unique senses in that it is largely driven by links in the brain. Tastes beget memories, and our favorite foods and beverages are the ones tied positively. Drugs tie us positively.

I used to hate the smell of skunks. I’ve used to have one of those things where smells effect me worse than other people and I cannot handle them. I would actually retch up from the smell of skunk. It got worse after the family dogs were sprayed near their eyes and my memories tied a night of chaos and stressed mother to it all. Fast forward YEARS later; I smoked a little pot when I was younger. I dunno if you’ve ever heard of the term “skunk weed”. Guess why? Well, after that, immediately after that, the smell of skunk was pleasant to me and I didn’t retch at all. And it’s stayed that way. I STILL like the smell of skunk spray.

The same with whiskey. Distilling is legal where I live. As such, I’ve acquired a taste for high-proofs. Things that would make most other whiskey drinkers spit out their drink saying the it would taste like rocket fuel. Why? Because a distilling run is a nice, mostly chill, 8 hour process where I hang out and have a sip here, a sip there. For a while, I stopped drinking regular-proof whiskeys entirely in favor of barrel-proofs. It may come as no surprise that wanting to drink 120-proof whiskey over 80-proof whiskey has almost nothing to do with the tasting notes.

Not at all. I don’t suggest any bans. I said elsewhere I would not oppose pre-rolled cigarette bans because they are especially dangerous and would not reduce access to the product itself. But I also don’t suggest pre-rolled cigarette bans.

But we know that inhaling PM2.5 is unhealthy and those size particles are present in vape

This is no more true than saying “we know sunlight is unhealthy”. What we know is that PM2.5 is unhealthy in large quantities for long periods of time. We know the same thing about sunlight for a lot of the same reasons. Occasional 15-minute stretches in the sun is more healthy than consistent long-term exposure.

You are free to take whatever risks you would like with your body.

As are you. I’m just talking about what is or is not science vs propaganda, here. From a different branch, I would wager that vaped medications could reach a point of being healthier for us than injected medications.

I didn’t say it wasn’t. I said we have a lot more context than people want to pretend about vaping in general.

And I’m not trying to say “it’s a mini hookah”, nor am I trying to say you should vape.

Vaping doesn’t burn anything, unlike a hookah, but the vaporized oils still contain toxins and novel toxins not in the smoke from cigarettes or hookah

If they contain toxins, we probably know quite a bit about those toxins right now. But what about pure vaporized solids? In the CBD and Cannabis community, dry herb vaporizing is the hot new thing specifically because 99% of complaints about vaping being unhealthy are irrelevant. All they do is get the herbs hot without burning it, run it through cooling, and inhale it. I laugh, but I used to do that with lavender with an aromatic herb heating unit.

The health consequences of that are not well understood, but are probably not as bad as cigarette smoking. That’s the best we’ve got.

Despite your incredulity, you really haven’t shown that. The consequences are not perfectly understood, but we understand enough to start making educated opinions about vaping. Even your points about hookahs work towards that, with the worst cons being that you still get Carbon Monoxide and the intensity of Nicotine is high. The problem is that we don’t want to tell people that the educated opinion is “probably better for you than that glazed donut”

You’re not that stupid. You know the difference between inhaling concentrated particulates from a cigarette or vape and smelling a fucking flower

And you’re not that stupid. You know that fine particulate matter in the air every breath we take is different from someone vaping sometimes. There’s a reason your linked study doesn’t mention vaping AND why scientists are still saying the risks of vaping are unclear.

Your second study is more useful, but it really is not intellectually defensible to take it results as saying vaping is unhealthy. Instead, its results are saying that we need to keep regulations to control air quality with regards to vaping.

I’ll reiterate my original critique.

“Don’t inhale particulate matter of any kind” is an excellent rule of thumb for all humans in all situations

…is something I disagree with, like most extreme naive generalities.

So you’re against smelling flowers, too? And scented candles?

The problem is that we “inhale particulate matter” all the time. Every day of our lives.

The full effects of vaping are not well understood, and while they’re almost certainly not as bad as cigarettes, they’re also almost certainly still bad for you

That used to say that about artificial sweeteners. The question shouldn’t be “is it bad for you” but “is it worse for you than 99 other things you do in a day”. And vaping nicotine is “almost certainly bad for you” because of the nicotine, and nicotine is a known quantity - we know how bad it is and isn’t. We don’t have evidence that the mechanism of vaping is bad for you, and there’s no “almost certainly” on that.

And the truth is, I have problems with people who lean on “poorly understood” for vaping. Evidence shows vaping as a mechanism (for THC as it were) going back over 2000 years to ancient Egypt. Widespread use of hookahs started in the 19th century and has tons mechanically in common with modern vaporization. There are some differences, but short of a few badly-designed vapes that let air reach the lungs while superheated, it looks a lot like people are saying “not well understood” because they cannot seem to “understand” bad things and they don’t want to say good things. We have TONS of research precedent around room-temperature air with vaporized herbs in it.

If I were going to imbibe nicotine (or CBD or THC for that matter), I would probably prefer to vape it. I think the stigma against vaping needs to step aside for the vaccine research considering using vapes as an alternative to needle injection.

Probably, yes. Even the age restrictions are kinda silly.

I do think it’s ok to ban sale of “prepared smokables” like cigarettes. The harm level is known to be severe. But if someone wants to buy their own tobacco+papers and roll their own cigarettes, that’s on them.

Of course, I don’t think it would be effective to ban cigarettes. Just ethically coherent.

…because there isn’t a pill that instantly cures all addiction. Addiction is a complicated thing that combines a lot of factors between physical dependence, pleasure-seeking, memory formation, and a lot more.

The problem with addiction is that it’s safe to say that NOTHING is good if used to excess.

I used to be so hooked on caffeine I drank a 30-cup pot each day. It was giving me all kinds of issues, and I was only in my 20’s. I’m still addicted, but I’ve learned to moderate. It took me years. And my 4th latte of the day is telling me that I’m not exactly great at it.

If I smoked/vaped Nicotine, I would have serious problems of taking too much all the time.

There are different qualities of air of course, and microparticles in it that could cause harm, but on the whole it’s more or less all the same.

Absolutely, and that’s the problem. The same argument you just posed could also be used against intentionally smelling flowers, or sticking your nose over a pot of boiling broth to smell that chicken deliciousness.

We don’t know that vaped nicotine is more harmful than most things we breathe. In fact, I’d say there are non-drug things people do that we already know to be worse than vaping. Ever go camping? The smoke from that fire is worse than vaping, worse than almost any substance you might want to smoke.

So the question is how bad vaping (the action, not the drug) is. Is it as bad as sniffing a rose, as bad as lighting a scented candle? As bad as incense? As bad as a campfire? If, as many suspect, it’s near the beginning of that scale, then the only critique we can rightly have is towards the substance vaped. If it’s near the end of the scale, we kinda need some research to support that claim.

Its like dumping garbage into a sink vs. a paper bag

As of yet, the medical and scientific community have not found solid evidence that it’s “like…garbage” at all if you don’t like it on fire.

Which is where things get complicated. Because it MIGHT be terrible for you. Or it might not be bad at all.