They should start making good quality products and charging a price people are willing to pay then. Do you realise piracy is just about the only leverage consumers have here?
It's not unprecedented either. Basically every time in history that the common people got rights, it was a reaction to the common people ceasing to give the nobles what the nobles needed, forcing them to the bargaining table.
This sounds more complicated than the existing processes to recycle the acid and the electrodes separately and make new batteries from the raw materials.
It would be much easier if lead acid batteries were designed to allow flushing them easily. The biggest problem is the fill holes are absolutely terrible access for flushing and cleaning.
If they were easier to reuse like that and it was done more often then disposal for that lead saturated acid would likely be more available.
Yep, a big similarity to remanufacturing lithium batteries may be having more physical than chemical renewal, where the recycling process focuses on dismantling old and rebuilding new from reclaimed materials.
Restoring the functioning of the original electrodes in situ is a bit of a different ordeal. But they're working on it :)
For now. One more ternary model type breakthrough, or MoE, engram thing (I don't fully understand those for the record, I just know they speed things up and use less VRAM) could see a few GB sized weights with quite the capabilities. On a gaming PC, savvy teens can already use them to cook up quite an interesting array of likely illegal items and substances. If it goes much further and runs on phones, you can assume word will get around that unlimited private AI is available and kids will run into all sorts of issues. Or mentally unwell people. I'm thinking a year or two down the line only.
They're pretty basic and hallucinate a lot. There are some hard limits to how good you can get on a model that fits on a phone.
Qwen3 and Gemma level models that run on mid-high end laptops and desktops can be pretty good. Not frontier grade, but shockingly competent for something that runs on a single PC. But the hardware you need to run those fast is at least $1000-$2000. Cheap hardware can run them, but slooooooow.
The production crew is getting peanuts anyway. If one out of 100 people donates them some money, they come out ahead.
Also maybe it's their job to come up with a business model that everyone doesn't hate. If they'd just syndicate to all streaming platforms, piracy wouldn't be a problem for them.
Kinda, but the back catalog has never been bigger or more valuable. There is good stuff from every era, and it only accumulates. What happens when the viewing mix is 10% new stuff, 90% classics?
I've worked for one of these companies as it rolled out a new app. Surprisingly, it didn't seem malicious. It was just platform/framework churn + "we need to unify all these apps into one common codebase"
I don't really mind their unification efforts making me have to install a new app which for me on its own is only a minor annoyance and absolutely not worth getting at all upset about.
It's that they made no effort to bring over profiles and their associated watchlists, "continue watching" is my most used section of all the streaming apps (which they love moving every time I relaunch the app, but that's a different topic) and they didn't even apologize for essentially throwing away years' worth of tracking what the last episode I watched was.
VPNs only help you with Bittorrent piracy. The kind where you buy a set-top box is still most easily caught by a police officer seeing you using the box, or selling you the box, not by anything they can do on the internet.
Even with the lack of competition, shouldn't you have at least some pride on the product your offering? That's really what gets me every time, the fact that many companies actually don't really care about their product and clearly doesn't take any pride in it.
The people making the movies and shows, writes, actors, production crew, all of those, probably do care, but in the management layers at Disney, Netflix, HBO, you name it, they don't seem care about the actual product. While the hell would you work at e.g. Disney, if you don't care about movies, cartoons and stories?
No, why should they have pride? Having pride is more expensive than not having it, and the ones with pride have been naturally selected out of the market. The people making the movies don't care either, haven't you seen all the complaints about Hollywood becoming a slop factory?
There's always competition for the consumer dollar, unless you are the only business selling necessities for survival such as electricity, gas, food, and such.
I don't think it's that. Most people simply don't care.
I'd stop paying them, but it always amazes me just how unbothered the average person is to watch 3 minutes of ads for 10 mins of content. Especially when it comes to platforms like YouTube.
I think this might be a miscalculation on disney's behalf unless they don't turn it on, on the childrens profiles. Like, I'll watch 5 sections of gaming adds on the last episode of reacher because I'm too cheap to pay the extra 29 dkr before I cancel my subscription anyway, but I canceled Disney the monent they added the advertising to things my children were watching. It wasn't even real advertising, just testing the waters where they'd put a 40ish second add for one of their own movies that you could skip, but I don't want that for my children.
It's not unprecedented either. Basically every time in history that the common people got rights, it was a reaction to the common people ceasing to give the nobles what the nobles needed, forcing them to the bargaining table.
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