Did you know that cats taught themselves to mimic the sound of a crying child to get the attention of humans? I think it’s some evolution thing, ionno. Maybe someone smarter than me can explain 😅
Close - they meow for their cat mothers too in the wild, it’s just that humans keep cats in a permanently juvenile state when we keep them as pets. Also, our patting them mimics their mother’s tongue action, which causes them to purr, which is also an entirely natural sound for them to signal the mother that they are alive and content. We did not change them so much as co-opt what was already there, using it for the benefit of both human & cat:-). From there, some things like level of aggression and body size were bred to suit our mutual partnership better.
Dropbox, Spotify, and a VPN are worth it: fight me.
Sure, Spotify doesn’t pay artists enough and I miss having Neil Young available for streaming, but what are the other options that work well in the car? I’m not going to go back to using discs or plugging in MP3 players to the aux port, and I don’t mind paying the bands directly for merch/albums if I’m really a fan. Considering I mostly listen to vinyl at home, I’m not paying Spotify for music; I’m paying Spotify for the convenience of being able to not listen to terrestrial radio and to be able to listen to what I like in the car or at work without the need for Youtube.
And my personal Dropbox account that I also use for work is well worth 15$/mo for 2TB of storage. It’s saved me so much grief to be able to back up phone photos, access my work files from any computer, keep records of my personal documents, etc., and the software is both more cost effective and better designed than Google Drive or OneDrive. PDF’s of my RPG books/characters/maps? Dropbox. Grocery list text file? Dropbox. Place to stash tabs/sheet music that is easily kept organized without the need for a physical copy? Dropbox. Phone number of that parent who saw my partner’s car get tagged in the parking lot at school? Wait, I think I have her phone number in an spreadsheet from when I coached her daughter in tee-ball…gimme a sec…yep, it’s in my Dropbox. In a side note, Dropbox may have turned me into a digital hoarder.
But the rest of this subscription-based garbage can get bent.
Agreed Spotify is totally worth it. I use it a lot to go on like rabbit-hole deep dives into some artist or genre or something, I use it a lot for stuff I will listen once and never again. That would be completely impossible if I was buying individual songs or albums or whatever. Paying for a nearly infinite database of music I can peruse at will following whatever random interests I have that day, that is absolutely worth the subscription fee.
I can’t speak to that as I don’t use any of the recommended playlists. It’s pretty easy to avoid artists you don’t like if you make your own playlists or pick your own music
Pandora is cheaper than Spotify and arguably better at picking new and random content based on your input. But it won’t play specific songs that you request like Spotify does. And Pandora works via Bluetooth, car apps, etc.
I used Pandora a ton a decade ago when there weren’t really any mainstream streaming services to compete with. But as someone who listens to albums and makes my own playlists, Pandora won’t cut it for me. I’m enough of a music snob that when I say I want to listen to The Stones, I want to listen to Let It Bleed front to back.
For some applications, Pandora is great, but it’s not what I need.
I loved and used Pandora for a long time. It was really good at recommending songs. I quit when they started playing ads in my feed despite paying for an ad free experience. These were like voice ads for concerts or similar from artists. I contacted customer support and the response was basically “we don’t think those are ads, they are ‘special messages’ from the artists so they aren’t going to stop.”
The problem is that I mostly use music streaming as background at work. Having a 30 second clip of some guy’s voice saying “Hey I’m Bobby from the Bobbles and we are excited to be touring in your area next month! Come check out our show for a Bobbling-Good-Time!” is very disruptive in the same way an ad for anything else is. They were clear that they weren’t going to stop so I walked away.
I recently switched from Spotify to Deezer. They offer high fidelity audio streaming which is a very noticable difference. Also, they’re a bit cheaper, and you can easily move all your songs/saved playlists to Deezer
You need to be a certain kind of person to perceive audio quality difference. One, you need to be able to detect the difference. Two, you need to be able to appreciate the difference. And Three, which everyone seems to ignore, you need to have bought a sufficiently expensive device that can make the difference.
In short, if you have an $18 desktop speaker, get the FLAC outta here.
Not really. It’s noticeable over Bluetooth as well, if your device supports codecs with a high enough bitrate. Obviously Bluetooth is still lossy, but listening experience is way better. The headphones I’m wearing now use aptxHD, with a bitrate of 576kbps. Spotify only offers AAC, with a bitrate of 256kbps.
As far as who can appreciate the difference, I guess? But you don’t need to be a concert pianist to appreciate audio. That said, I play many instruments, so maybe I’m biased.
It also has an absolutely terrible algorithm for recommending music in my experience. I’ve tried Apple Music several times over the past few years as I’m heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem. My experience never changes. I put in a random artist like Green Day or Hans Zimmer or Gregory Alan Isakov and within 4-5 songs the station is playing hip hop or rap. No matter what genre I start with the stream always turns into hip hop or rap and it’s mostly nobody artists that aren’t good. I have some songs in those genres in my library but the majority are not. (Also if I’m starting a station with an orchestral film score it stands to reason I probably want to hear more film scores not rap.)
All I can say is I’m glad I haven’t had the same experience. Not huge into rap or hip-hop and have never had them come up. It seems pretty good at recommending new songs to me. Not sure if it uses my current library or my searches but I’ve been happy with it.
It is a little pricey, but when I tried hosting my own server, it was way too much hassle (for me). Frankly, I don’t mind paying Dropbox because they make the experience so fool-proof and borderline invisible.
Dropbox runs in the background and just acts like just a local folder in your Documents folder (or wherever you put it). When you save anything there, it’s automatically backed up online in real-time and added to any other computers you use that have Dropbox installed. If you have too much online for some of your devices, it will use a a “shadow file” that is just a link to the online file so it takes up zero space on your other local devices while acting just like the file is already local (in terms of being able to right-click, access properties, open it from other programs, etc.). Plus, it has built in functionality for sharing files or entire folders by giving you a quick download link with just two clicks, which is great for sharing files that are too large to send via email.
Could I get all that functionality cheaper? Almost certainly. Could I find something cheaper that is also just as user-friendly? I’m open to it, but I haven’t found anything yet that is close to competitive.
Have you checked out OneDrive (Microsoft)? It’s what I use for school. I don’t store pictures or anything, strictly school documents and random odds and ends.
I have a OneDrive account through my work, so I’ve used it a bit, but it doesn’t seem like it handles downloads and uploads as quickly, nor keeping the right files local intuitively the way Dropbox does.
Plus, it’s almost as expensive as Dropbox per TB with a personal plan, and Microsoft doesn’t need any more of my money or information.
I hate people defending subscriptions. They are not required for anything other than insurance or something you guaranteed will keep, like phone contracts. If they need more money for content, release content packs and dlc. Online should not cost, especially if someone like Nintendo is using peer2peer or will shut down the online servers anyways at some point.
Paying with your money and your data is more likely. The issue is not subscriptions imo either. It is getting sucked into megacorp schemes that will destroy competition with cheap prices and then enshittify and or raise prises once there is no alternative. Oh, and influence legislators to make competition illegal (youtube got big on copyright infringement).
Therefore I reduce megacorp stuff. I shop local, watch my dvds and started buying music again.
They can fuck off. So can everyone who has this neat reason why resistance to mehacorps is futile.
Subscription based service makes data harvesting much easier. Spotify can force you to connect to their server even if you downloaded your song, in the name of “verifying your subscription”.
Buy the songs, buy the movie, take them offline.
That being said there are good subscription based service, like home assistant cloud, where all your communications are always E2E encrypted and cannot be seen by their server. Their subscription model is justified, as they rent their servers.
Sure, I too would prefer to pay with money instead of data. But that’s a false dichotomy. Many of the services that require subscription also collect your data. Whereas offline local solutions do not collect your data. There are things were you pay with money and data, there are things where you pay with just money, or just data, and there are things where you don’t pay at all. So it isn’t really a ‘both sides’ issue.
Thats true, and as it is, its impossible to be completely rid of data harvesting services. I made the switch to proton to get out of googles mail, drive and photo solutions, the have a vpn included aswell. but yeah, I would never trust Google, Microsoft, meta or any of those to not collect data, no matter what they promise.
I suspect that this was considered a feature when it was fist envisioned and technology progressed so quickly that you needed a new phone each year just to use available services. In that light, it didn’t matter if your battery only lasted 2 years.
Now that you can run your cell phone easily for 5 - 7 years, batteries are important again. Thank you EU for requiring replaceable ones in the future, you may have helped the entire world.
It’s a pain. I love replaceable batteries too. It took me hours to change mine on my pixel. But why is it hard to get out: phones are slimmer and processor more. So you need to get the battery wedged in there and properly thermally insulated. It’s a lot harder to do that while also making it easily field replaceable
Biography Not even the oldest or wisest of the gods knows Thoth’s true origin. Thoth can not remember the earlier part of his existence. He knows that he was very different and there is something in the back of his mind, but he just can’t remember. Thoth symbolizes wisdom, knowledge, and invention. Yet, despite his learning and knowledge, there is a bit of larceny in his heart, for he admires cunning, deception and people who use their wits and a quick tongue. Thus, he is the patron of magic, and of all fast speaking, thieving, quick-witted creatures. Thoth himself is a great orator, scholar, and author of many books about magic and history. Books about magic circles, symbols, wards, magic spells, a study of alchemy, an alchemy recipe book, and many others are among his credits. He writes all of his books in a secret code (hieroglyph and runes), although a few have been stolen and translated. Legend attributes Thoth as the inventor of rune magic, the runic alphabet, Diabolism and wards, pyramid magic, and all the sciences. He is cursed with eternal curiosity and cannot remember the days of his youth. Thoth is one of the few beings who has a complete knowledge of rune magic and it is he who has constructed many of the greatest rune weapons in the possession of the gods of Ma’ip, both good and evil. He is constantly experimenting, exploring or investigating something. Just about any magic device or component, herb, potion, magic component and the exotic are available to Thoth. He has dozens of magic wands, staves, enchanted cauldrons, manacles, amulets, books, and many other things of magic in his massive personal collection. Thoth also has a small zoo, and books and artifacts from dozens of different civilizations.
The songs you listen to when you are listening on random are often ads. Record companies will do “pay for placement” deals to get songs and artists they promote out there.
They used to call it payola when it was on the radio and it was illegal.
On mobile i’ve got an app that lets me play youtube videos with the screen locked so i use that as well.
It’s a bit annoying cause the app does have ads as well, but only when you open it. If you put a video on and close it (leaving it playing on the background), there’s no ads
My YouTube algorithm is just terrible. It will circle back the same 5-10 videos I have watched or liked some years ago, sprinkle in some rightwing political bullshit, or show only very tangentially related results.
Recent example: an underground artist popped into my head I used to listen to during my school days, and I wanted to go through their album for nostalgia.
Entering the artist and album name gives me two tracks from that album, a handful of other artists who have at some point collaborated, and the aforementioned unrelated or political results. Clicking through some of the videos always cycles back to the same few suggestions.
I even tried this on incognito mode to see if my login bricked the algorithm, but it was equally shitty. Apparently google can’t even get their own content indexed properly, not to mention actual web search.
bandcamp is pretty great. Granted, they are still a for-profit company; a popular community based solution would be nice. But they do let you download lossless file to self-host or just listen on device.
The only complain is the lack of classical music (not modern/contemporary classical) on there. But I would imagine most classical music is public domain by now. I just don’t know where to find them…
Edit: found it: www.classiccat.net or internet archive has a huge collection of classical music.
who is downvoting this? 😂 maybe they live in a poor country, or maybe they’re making an obscure joke. Why would people go past this comment and be like “nope, fuck this person”
memes
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.