I've become super sensitive to ads now, thanks to always blocking them online. Any service that doesn't let me block the ads (and I don't mind paying for that if it's worth it) just doesn't get used.

Note that the report on the scheme which lead to this decision states that they believe there was a net positive economic benefit, i.e. the extra economic activity generated by it was worth more than the cost of the scheme.

If you read the actual report it says that society benefited from a decent financial return on the investment. Not directly of course, but as best they could determine the economic boost from having artists be more free to work on their art was more than the cost of the scheme.

Art is an example of something that is important but also so diffuse that few people are willing to pay for it individually. Like clean air or largely theoretical scientific research that eventually leads to marketable new technologies and medical treatments.

It makes sense for societies to fund it for the benefit of everyone. Like with R&D, most art isn't that profound and may end up having little value by itself, but that's the nature of the thing - you have to fund all of it to get the rare but significant benefits.

Can you just turn down the brightness on the LED backlight? Seems easier than replacing the resistor, and has the same effect of running them at a lower current.

I suppose the cheaper ones might be doing PWM dimming which means that the peak current is still going to be high.

AI slop on YouTube is several years old at this point. It started before the AI boom with algorithm created videos. They were usually some poorly animated CG Disney characters in bizarre nonsense scenarios, randomly edited together, targeting small children for whom narrative was unimportant.

After that came videos that were an AI voiceover and a script ripped from a web page or book, with an auto generated montage of images from a web search.

What could they actually lock away though? It's all open source at the moment, so even the fairly crappy IDE could be forked. The rest is just code implementing the Arudino APIs, all of which is open source, and for most of the boards wasn't even written by Arduino.

Arduino the company has been kinda irrelevant for years now. They produce a crappy IDE, but beyond that all the interesting devices and add-on boards are from third parties and based on the original Arduino model (pinout and dimensions).

The open source community will keep providing libraries, and the various Chinese brands will keep providing boards and accessories. Qualcomm couldn't kill it if they wanted to.

The ones that come with devices are often crap anyway. For example the USB cables supplied with Pixel phones, at least up to a few years ago when I last bought one, are USB 2.0 data rate only. If you plug a USB 3 cable in you get much faster transfers, like 10x faster.

I have a load of crap cables and a few good ones I use. Not all the good ones are super fast, some are just very flexible or the right length.

The EU is doing stuff about it. Requirements to make products repairable, batteries swappable, minimum support periods, clear warnings that paid services are requires, refunds where functionality is significantly changed.

Props to Doctorow though. Coining such a compelling and accurate word has really helped with consumer understanding of the issue. Even in places like the US where the corporations make the rules, consumers are starting to understand and demand better.

I've thought about this kind of thing, but realized that in many cases the time and energy needed to build and maintain such a system outweighs the cost of replacing a commercial solution when it enshittifies every 5-10 years.

Similar thing with data. I could spend time sorting through all my photos and music, my old projects, freeing up space... But it's cheaper to just buy more storage, assuming I value my free time as low as minimum wage.

There are times when it is worth it. An OpenWRT router is a good example. Home Assistant seems to be worthwhile too, and crucially is actually stable and reliable.

Most Western countries are built on the assumption of endless growth.

The Baby Boomers were the largest generation at the time, and enjoyed the post-war boom years. They built a lot of policy on the assumption that the next generation would be an even larger cohort, and would be even richer than they were. Both assumptions turned out to be false, not least because of many disastrous policies that boomers introduced.

Governments have been extremely reluctant to admit those mistakes, because it's bad news with no easy solution. It needs redistribution of wealth and the breaking of promises made to boomers and older Gen X about pensions. It needs massive cuts in property prices, which is where a lot of boomer wealth is.

Many governments have been trying to fix it with immigration. Healthy, young immigrants, education paid for by someone else, making up the numbers. But now immigration is very unpopular too.

We should be creating more jobs that need degrees anyway. We are weak on R&D and innovation.