I'm a fan. Injecting a huge catalog into Netflix is a win for consumers who want just one subscription. And injecting studio talent into Netflix (assuming the merge gives WB creatives influence) can only help.
HBO's tech sucks. Apple is (in my experience) hard to get running in the Android ecosystem. Most of the other options are too narrow in catalog, or ad ridden.
Consolidating streaming services down to a handful of offerings will make price competition more fierce because they'll have richer catalogs to do battle with.
> Consolidating streaming services down to a handful of offerings will make price competition more fierce because they'll have richer catalogs to do battle with.
Correct, but the current market is not working. 15+ streaming services is terrible for consumers. Catalogs are compromised. Bigger services can push prices up because they have more stuff. Clearly if there are too few players then there's less competition and no price pressure, but there's a sweet spot between what exists today and that.
Youtube, Android and Google Maps got better (and became financially viable at all) when Google bought them. Github got better and cheaper when Microsoft bought it.
I'm not necessarily talking about the product itself getting better, I'm talking about the overall consumer situation being better.
All these products were acquired very early in their lifespans, so them getting "better" was practically inevitable.
GitHub's acquisition effectively took at least one competitor off the market. Now, Microsoft doesn't have to seriously develop a competitor, they just bought their competitor and adopted it. They never had to improve Azure DevOps (VSTS) enough to be attractive, they just bought the market leader. If GitHub was never acquired, my company might be deciding between BitBucket, Gitlab, GitHub, and Azure Repos. Instead, Azure Repos is more of a niche offering where most of Microsoft's effort has focused on GitHub. Microsoft removed an option which likely raised prices or reduced user choice.
Google Maps was acquired in basically a prototype stage before it was ever a public product, so that case is irrelevant.
Android is worse in a number of ways due to Google's integration. Google Play Services APIs and other Google technologies have led to heavy Google lock-in. If Android continued as its own project, it would have been much more vendor-agnostic.
In the case of YouTube, I'd argue it's worse in a number of key ways: ads are wildly pervasive (sure, monetization would have had to happen anyway in some fashion), many of the platform changes are user-hostile (removed dislike count, background playback limited to premium subscription), content moderation more heavily influenced by Google's advertisement-based business model (e.g., if YouTube had continued on its own, it might have chosen a different monetization strategy less advertisement oriented, but Google is an advertisement company. Advertisers are more sensitive to their products being presented next to objectionable content) and competitors were snuffed out due to ecosystem integration (YouTube videos as Google search results rather than agnostic video results).
Remember the era where YouTube got extremely badly integrated in to Google+ and basically forced you to use it? That was a pretty terrible user experience.
Piracy is seeing a big uptick because streaming increasingly sucks. 10+ years ago before studios started chasing their own streaming platforms, and Netflix was the only game in town, it was an excellent deal. $10ish, as opposed to $50+ for cable (might be low on the cable subscription - I never had one).
If you wanted an equivalent catalog today, you'd need at least 3 or 4 streaming services, and you're paying $50+ or so. Netflix + WB (inc HBO) surely gets them back to roughly where they were. Will Netflix jack up their rates on the back of this acquisition? Inevitably, but I think they'll have a very hard time approaching a similar monthly rate. My gut says that they'll have a hard time getting beyond $30, with Disney and Youtube anchoring in the low teens. So, for the consumer, it's a win. For competing studios, of course, not so much.
You're assuming a free market working perfectly would bring the price down, but the free market is kneecapped by stupid and arbitrary licensing and IP games, which is the result desperate overreach of an industry hanging on by its fingernails as its business model has been upended multiple times over during the past 2 1/2 decades. But as we used to say about the music industry while happily napstering, your broken business model is not my problem.
Netflix have never been a streaming service to put loads of good content on their service and keep it there. I would imagine they will use this injection of content to drip feed and slowly rotate movie franchises in order to keep users interested.
Because PostHog's "Talk to a human" chat instead gets a grumpy gatekeeping robot (which also doesn't know how to get you to a working urgent support link), and there's nothing prominently on their home page or github about this:
Ahhh, TBH I didn't look on the right. I dug through the menu on the left, thinking the right hand bar (which has the rotated labels) was all getting-started/docs related things. In my defense I have a fairly wide monitor and tend to full-screen the browser.
Your status page isn't clear, but are all versions between the compromised and "safe to install" versions compromised or just the ones listed?
For example I installed `posthog-react-native` version `4.12.4` which is between the `4.11.1` version which is compromised and the safe to install version `4.13.0`. Is that version compromised or not?
Have a slack channel with them, these are the versions they mentioned:
posthog-node 4.18.1
posthog-js 1.297.3
posthog-react-native 4.11.1
posthog-docusaurus 2.0.6
I tried a prompt that consistently gets Gemini to badly hallucinate, and it responded correctly.
Prompt: "At a recent SINAC conference (approx Sept 2025) the presenters spoke about SINAC being underresourced and in crisis, and suggested better leveraging of and coordination with NGOs. Find the minutes of the conference, and who was advocating for better NGO interaction."
The conference was actually in Oct 2024. The approx date in parens causes Gemini to create an entirely false narrative, which includes real people quoted out of context. This happens in both Gemini regular chat and Gemini Deep Research (in which the narrative gets badly out of control).
Kagi reasonably enough answers: "I cannot find the minutes of a SINAC conference from approximately September 2025, nor any specific information about presenters advocating for better NGO coordination at such an event."
I also tried two hallucinations that I've seen in the latest Gemini and Claude. The first one is the famous "how many r in strawberry" and another one is asking about king sacrifice in chess where most LLMs tell you it's a very powerful move and tell you how to do it (obviously a nonsense since the point of the game is to protect the king).
Kagi actually got those two correct, explaining how losing your king means losing your chess game, which is quite impressive.
I tried both these prompts (along with the SINAC one as per GP) in Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3, and they both answered correctly for all three. Both also provided context on the chess question as well.
You might be interested to know your comment caused Gemini 3 to go meta on this question. This is what I found in its thinking:
```
Evaluating Date Discrepancies
I've just uncovered a significant discrepancy: a "Hacker News" result flags a date error originating from the very format of parenthetical dates. The system appears to be misinterpreting these, leading to demonstrably false information. This warrants further investigation to understand the root cause and ensure data integrity.
Analyzing Date Ambiguity
I'm now grappling with the user's date. The Hacker News comment suggests the user's prompt might be flawed, as it contradicts the actual date of an event I've indexed. Specifically, the conference referenced occurred in October 2024, not September 2025 as the prompt implies. This leads me to question the user's understanding of the timeline or if the prompt refers to an unrelated event in September 2025. This inconsistency demands further clarification.
...
Investigating User Prompt Intent
I've just realized that the Hacker News snippet reveals this might be a specific problematic test prompt. My strategy is to focus on the October 2024 forum, a strong match, organized by Kattia Cambronero and CCT. I'll verify if there was a 2025 event, but the 2024 event fits the described "crisis" and "NGO coordination". If the user says "approx Sept 2025," they likely mean a recent event.
```
I think Claude Code makes TilingWMs doable. I've always given up in the past because there have been reams of configs necessary to get to a fairly usable state, and I don't love reading manuals for desktop environments - but now it's all pretty easy to crank out.
I've been on HyprLand for a week now and haven't hit any blockers yet that'd force me to go back to KDE.
I believe it saves time, the documentation is available and easily digestible, and there's thousands of existing dotfiles to take from. I'd be disappointed to hear Claude couldn't do this.
I'm mostly pointing out that the documentation is very easy to read and implement for most tiling WMs, without the need for a coding agent.
But I'm primarily talking about the missing pieces that most tiling window managers have that you need to implement yourself, or the annoying bugs that are buried in github.
I need a lock screen; fine, hyperidle. How is it configured? Once it works it works.15 seconds with Claude or 2-3 minutes googling and implementing. Why the hell would you not use it?
QT apps have fuzzy fonts in Hyprland. Turns out that's because I was using 1.5 fractional scaling on my 4k monitor, which was information buried in some github that has barely any traffic, which Claude found while I was doing actual work.
The google meet PIP window strobes because who the hell knows why, but that too was solved by Claude finding the right github ticket and applying opacity 0.999 instead of 1.0 for that window specifically. Where is that documented in the hyprland manual?
The point is that tiling window managers _in my experience_ always have rough edges, and I've been dipping in and out of them for 20 years. Now that many people (I guess not including your good self) are using LLMs all day every day to move faster in producing code, you can apply the same tooling to bring the tiling environment up to the same level of quality that we're used to with the bigger DMs that have a lot more resources and eyes on them.
From a marketing perspective perhaps, but it's still a supported LTS release of Ubuntu at heart and having two different version numbers would create ambiguity.
Things that should work on that particular Ubuntu LTS should work in Pop_OS! And at least you don't have to cross reference things.
Thankfully they keep important things more up to date with newer kernels/hardware support than the version numbers would suggest, but I think that it's a common point of confusion.
I have extremely strong personal feelings about how confusing Google Maps can be about something eerily similar to this. For several years up until earlier this year, I lived in apartment in Brooklyn that (along with several other apartments) was in a building that happened to be above a deli. The address of the deli was the same as our apartments, but with no apartment number. However, the entrance to get into the apartments was past the end of the deli itself due to having a small lobby area on the ground floor containing the staircase leading up to the apartments, whereas the entrance to the deli was situated very slightly around the corner that it was on, enough that the door essentially looked to be facing outward diagonally in person, but showing up as slightly on the cross street side when looking at google maps. Because the addresses were so similar, we'd sometimes get mail intended for the deli, and I have to imagine some of our stuff sometimes went there.
Frustratingly, Google Maps only considered the deli entrance to actually be the location of our building, and the visualization it gave depicted entering through the door of the deli despite there being absolutely no way to go upstairs from there (even in the areas not accessible to customers; it was fully separated from the apartments themselves). Due to an unfortunate coincidence, an apartment building slightly further around the corner from us had an address with the same number on the cross street (making up numbers here, but essentially our apartment was 123 4th Ave, and the apartment around the corner was 123 56th St). Street View did not have any address shown when viewing the actual entrance of my apartment building; as far as Google Maps was concerned, that door did not belong to any building. Quite frequently, people seemed to trust Google Maps and assume that the entrance must be on the cross street. When we ordered food for delivery, it was not at all uncommon for the delivery people to ignore the instructions I put (which got increasingly attention-grabbing over the years, ending up with several repeated lines in all caps saying "ENTRANCE IS ON <the name of the avenue>" and "DO NOT GO TO <the name of the street>") and ring the doorbell of the apartment around the corner. Once, an entire desk was even delivered outside of that apartment building around the corner (which was quite annoying due to it being quite heavy and that building being downhill from the avenue). This culminated in our neighbor literally storming into our building with the delivery person to yell at me for being an "asshole" for not being able to do anything about this (although they of course had absolutely no interest in listening to anything I had to say, let alone any ideas I had about how we might be able to work together to get this handled better once and for all).
In the aftermath of that incident, I spent a lot of time trying to find ways to get Google Maps to properly show where the entrance of our apartment was. When I tried to contact their support to get this handled, I was informed that they only supported marking a single location as the entrance for a given address, regardless of apartment number (or the lack thereof), and that my only recourse would be to get the city to give my apartment building an entirely separate address. I asked for them to just slightly move the entrance marker over to be on the same street as the entrance to my building, with the rationale that people would still have absolutely no trouble finding the entrance to the deli since they'd be looking at the corner itself and it would be plainly visible, but it would no longer mislead people into thinking that they needed to enter on the cross street, but my request was ignored. I tried giving feedback within the Maps app itself saying that the location of the entrance was incorrect and suggesting a different pin, but unsurprisingly nothing ever seemed to change.
tl;dr Please do not blindly trust Google Maps as a source of truth for the location of an apartment building's entrance in Brooklyn; I have the emotional scars to prove it. (Probably a decent rule of thumb for other cities too, but I don't have firsthand experience anywhere else).
My address used to be "Apartment 2, [Building], [Street]". There was also "Unit 2, [Building], [Street]" which was a bar in the same structure, but not particularly close to the entrance to the apartments. Google maps did... not deal well with this.
Bitwig is my favorite software - it really is all in one music production software, and they have great support for Linux. I have used it hooked up to a room full of synths, but these days (due to space constraints) I make music with just the software (with occasionally a midi keyboard). No need for any VSTs (unless you really want to) - the built in synths and effects plugins are high quality.
(I started out using trackers in the 90s - Fast, Impulse, and eventually Buzz. I held off using DAWs for a long time because I didn't like the lack of information density that trackers are good at, but turns out I really don't miss that in Bitwig.)
Highly recommend the Dirtyave M8 [1] for a tracker fix that comes in hardware firm and is a gift that keeps in giving with increasingly good firmware updates.
I really wish there was something between Furnace and OpenMPT - where you could mix hardware-reproducible chiptune sequencing seamlessly with more modern soft synth and samplers. Renose is plenty capable, but it’s felt awkward to fiddle with when I’ve tried it - I really just need to sit down and devote a period of extended experimentation to it.
Some background on Buzz for others: Buzz was a tragic case of not using version control. Apparently the author had a hard drive die, and his only copy of the source control went with it.
I believe the event you describe is pretty ancient, and Buzz recovered and continued development for many years after. I wrote some plugins for the more recent versions of Buzz, the plugin API was always nice to work with (compared to VST at least!)
Sounds like a tragic case of not making backups, to me. Even if the author used a VCS, when the drive died it would have taken the repo with it all the same.
Actually from 2008 to 2016 there was updates, they sent off the disk to a recovery firm and got a mostly latest copy and built from that. The newer versions used .NET and the main improvment in those builds was a new pattern-system (XP-patterns) so you could make patterns that selected parameters from one or more machines.
So the annoyance of having to work in different patterns when your "instrument" was made out of a chain of discrete modules went away (also useful for making chords from primitive machines since you could hook multiple generators in one pattern).
> Buzz was a tragic case of not using version control. Apparently the author had a hard drive die, and his only copy of the source control went with it.
Yeah, lemme go ahead and commit this code I've been working on for weeks without creating a repo...
Buzz was so great. I came across it when I learned James Holden produced his early stuff on it and was hooked. It had a good community with hundreds of synths and effects you could download from Buzzmachines. It was such a shame they lost the source code, I’d have loved to see how it developed.
This made me google Buzz and it turns out it was recoded by the author and there was an update in 2022. Not sure if it’s still developed. I’m not on a Windows machine so won’t be able to try it easily unfortunately, wish it was open source so it could be ported to Mac
Oh i see thanks. That's a dark design pattern, hiding stuff like that.
No one cares about anything else but they have lots of superflous text and they are calling it "help us get better", blah blah, it's "help us earn more money and potentially sell or leak your extremely private info", so they are lying.
Considering cancelling my subscription right this moment.
I hope EU at leat considers banning or extreme-fining companies trying to retroactively use peoples extremely private data like this, it's completely over the line.
EU or not, it baffled me that people don't see this glaring conflict of interest. AI companies both produce the model and rent out inference. In other words, you're expecting that the company that (a) desperately crave your data the most and (b) that also happen to collect large amounts of high quality data from you will simply not use it. It's like asking a child to keep your candy safe.
I'd love to live in a society where laws could effectively regulate these things. I would also like a Pony.
This is why we need actual regulation, and not the semi fascist monopolist corporatocracy we've evolved into now.
Its only utopian because it's become so incredibly bad.
We shouldn't expect less, we shouldn't push guilt or responsibility onto the consumer we should push for more, unless you actively want your neighbour, you mom, and 95% of the population to be in constant trouble with absolutely everything from tech to food safety, chemicals or healthcare - most people aren't rich engineers like on this forum and i don't want to research for 5 hours every time i buy something because some absolute psychopaths have removed all regulation and sensible defaults so someone can party on a yacht.
HBO's tech sucks. Apple is (in my experience) hard to get running in the Android ecosystem. Most of the other options are too narrow in catalog, or ad ridden.
Consolidating streaming services down to a handful of offerings will make price competition more fierce because they'll have richer catalogs to do battle with.
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