I was a BB customer and worked for Hollywood Video for quite a while, just as Netflix started taking over. It was sad.
There's a lot to be said about the "old school" way of movie rentals. Looking back and seeing Netflix and the other streaming options sprouting up, and the "cut the cord" movement.. it was neat. Until you look at where we are now. We're now paying and exponential amount of money for the same level of entertainment.
We all got swindled, and it's too late to do anything about it now.
> There's a lot to be said about the "old school" way of movie rentals.
Please do say it! I'm old enough to remember VHS and video clubs, but may be not old enough to have a lot of nostalgia about it.
I can't think of what was better then. Sometimes you'd get a kind and knowledgeable video club owner who'd made fantastic recommendations, but more often than not it was an underpayed kid who just wanted to go home.
May be people used to take watching a move more seriously, and therefore enjoy it more, when the process was more involved and you didn't have millions of movies and shows a few clicks away, but does that count as an advantage?
> We're now paying and exponential amount of money for the same level of entertainment.
This was certainly not true where I lived. The ammount of movies and shows that get watched in an average household these days would bankrupt the family in the 90s.
What I found better about it was the algorithm-free browsing experience. You would just look at the shelves and decide what to watch. The movies were broken down into basic genres, and sometimes there would be "staff picks" or something, but beyond that it was just you and the movies. This meant sometimes you watched really bad stuff, or good stuff, or stuff you wouldn't normally watch, or whatever.
No doubt there's a certain amount of nostalgia baked into these impressions. But definitely the thing I remember most fondly about that era was how decisions about things (movies, music, cereals, blenders, etc.) were made by looking at what was available and (maybe) doing a bit of research with external sources (like a "movie guide" book or whatever), rather than constantly wading through a morass of "recommendations", fake reviews, broken search functionality, and so on.
> What I found better about it was the algorithm-free browsing experience.
Not algorithm free, just a different kind of algorithm. Probably a mix of marketing and manual curation. Video stores (at least good ones) would be organized for you to find exactly what you were looking for… even if you didn’t know what you were looking for. If you saw a wall full of the most recent summer blockbuster movie, you might be drawn to rent that one. Why? Because you’re perceiving that movie to be “popular selection”. Or if there was a special section of “date night comedy”, you could browse there if that was what you were looking for.
But “staff picks” might have been a shelf with movies that weren’t performing well, with maybe one or two interesting movies to make the rest look better. Studios may have even paid for that placement (at larger chains). I have no idea if this really happened, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
As I see it, the algorithms are trying to bring order to a maddeningly long list of options[*]. The main goal being to help you find something you’d like to watch. If you like it, you’re happier and you’ll go back to that source (and keep paying for it). Regardless of told the source is YouTube, Disney+, Netflix, or Blockbuster Video.
In this way, we’ve always had curation… so effectively the algorithm wasn’t a “we think you’d like this”, maybe it was a “Randall” at the counter who you could ask for recommendations, or just a well organized store that led you to something you might like.
* - except the dark pattern algorithms that want you to just keep consuming media or increase “engagement”. I’m trying to look at it from a positive side.
I worked at blockbuster. Sure, we had the wall of new releases and occasional promotions, but the rest of the store was organized quite simply. First by genre, then alphabetically. You could opt into curation, but it wasn’t the majority of the store.
yeah. the primary algorithm used by bbv was which titles, and how many, were sent to the store. i worked for bbv and picked up shifts at different stores around my metro area and it was always interesting to see which stores had the “indie” titles and which had the high volume, popcorn title new releases. one of the biggest titles i can recall was independence day. my home store got a decent amount, but then i covered for someone at another store the next weekend at a high volume store and the number of id4 new releases was insane.
another store i transferred to had a healthy supply of laser disc titles and members of the local professional basketball team essentially supported that store’s laser disc business.
When I found out suggestions have low signal to noise ratio I simply don't look at suggestions anymore. Not in the grocery store, nor in streaming apps, nor on news websites. I go for the content I specifically went for. I do miss out on stuff though. For example, if I go to HBO Max I specifically look at HBO Originals.
The only thing we can do, as consumers, is stop paying for streaming, pay/rent physical media, and if we truly “need” on-demand streaming then piracy is always a moral option to abusive multi-billion dollar businesses. A $5/mo VPN is far more value than you can get out of streaming, especially if you invest the saved money into a Jellyfin server.
And VSCode is just one of many that run on Linux. This feels like some sort of a unwritten rule that if you are making a new DE you also have to make a new text editor (ElementaryOS makes Code, KDE makes Kate, Gnome makes Gnome Text Editor) which honestly is a bit ridiculous to me.
Exactly. Imagine if you had the resources to create your own CPU and SoC, selling it as a product then saying "stupid software developers" when nearly every application won't work properly on it.
When you put out new hardware and a new operating system and multiple pieces of software don't work that's hardly the developer's fault. Apple should be addressing these issues or rolling back to Rosetta more until the software developers can catch up.
Especially when you're charging premium prices for a machine that "just works".
> When you put out new hardware and a new operating system and multiple pieces of software don't work that's hardly the developer's fault.
Again, software bugs are only ever the developer's responsibility. It is not ever ever possible in any universe for a hardware manufacturer and os vendor to fix any developers' bugs. Apple is responsible for their hw working, and their os working. These work fine and continue to work fine even if an application crashes. Any application that chokes on Mac and/or macOS, or any hardware or any OS, can only be remedied by the developer of that application, namely, by fixing their bugs.
Guilty as charged. I stated that because multiple variables are at play. New OS, plus new chipset. I don't know which is the culprit of most of these problems.
Let's assume it is the new OS and new chipset: the culprit is still the buggy software. Developers need to fix bugs in their software, and they are the only ones who can. When the first ARM processor was released and x86 code would not work on it, the problem wasn't with the processor or OS; it is always with the application code. Though x86 code is not compatible with an ARM processor, thus would never work as is, there is still nothing wrong with the CPU or OS, technically making x86 code remarkably buggy on ARM CPUs.
Sorry, but your reply is really funny, even if it's a jab at me.
I outlined the reasons for the 4080, full knowing it's drastically less performance than the 4090. I balanced power usage, heat and noise vs how much performance I need.
Doesn't make your comment any less hilarious though.
There was no jab, just a typo. That was supposed to say "you're not wasting" money. But you only get an [edit] link for so long before your comment's permanent.
I was a BB customer and worked for Hollywood Video for quite a while, just as Netflix started taking over. It was sad.
There's a lot to be said about the "old school" way of movie rentals. Looking back and seeing Netflix and the other streaming options sprouting up, and the "cut the cord" movement.. it was neat. Until you look at where we are now. We're now paying and exponential amount of money for the same level of entertainment.
We all got swindled, and it's too late to do anything about it now.