Thinking about it now, he probably meant it was OK regarding their contracts with studios. Our engineering chain of command was completely obsessed with customer experience. The business side, not so much.
Such a metrics-driven company will surely know something about how incentives drive outcomes.
Not sure they really care about many metrics these days.
“Our primary investors are also leveraged heavily in the commercial real estate market and they’re losing their shirts and we need their money, so…”
And then we didn't have enough desks, outlets, and internet was slow. Lmao.
Plus, most TOSes have very little legal effect, in either direction.
Fascinating isn't it? It continues over decades. I cannot recall ever once opening an overt ad among, what, hundreds of thousands? Google `subverts' in search I've opened, but that only layers their more desperate enshittings. Newpipe escaped and saved me from Youtube's thousands of bearskin hoodies, butter and bowel movements, pink salt trick, something about men's erections and a tomato.
These must be smart people who engineer this, this `inverse' offensive ad targeting, it must be for some brilliant objective, but I remain completely lost at what it could possibly be.
Since my priorities were different than the original buyer, I repaid that discount amount.
Maybe one day they'll turn it into an yearly thing to avoid ads.
I respect that they offered the option at purchase time and then at any point after, and at a reasonable price.
And isn't this an option that the everything-is-a-market HN libertarians would like to have: People who want less expensive, say, TVs, can get the existing market price for that. And people who don't like that ads/surveillance, but want the nice economies-of-scale hardware, can pay what the brand would've made on advertising and surveillance, to opt-out, for that unit?
Ideally, a lot of the current surveillance and advertising (implemented almost entirely by HN's own field) would be outlawed, but paid opt-out can sometimes be a reasonable pragmatic individual compromise, for now.
Or maybe I'm wrong - did the $X you paid for ads-free also give you root access?
Which I bought for pragmatic business reasons.
Don't worry, I have a home full of Debian, OpenWrt, Coreboot, a non-'smart' TV, GrapheneOS, etc.
There are no IoT devices, and I go out of my way to avoid buying devices with IoT shoved in. For reasons obvious to people who know how they work, and who know what their business priorities and track records are.
Also, in startups, I usually use open source, avoid unwarranted vendor lock-in and certain known-jerk companies, and try to work with people who are similarly-minded about such practices (it's a useful signal of better-than-average people who care, IME).
No internet required. No sync software required. It’s quite nice!
The update script was pretty much this (on a laptop set up not to automatically mount removable filesystems):
#!/bin/sh -x
DeviceMountPoint="/media/pocketbook"
mount "$DeviceMountPoint" || exit 1
cd ~/doc || exit 1
rsync -crltv . "${DeviceMountPoint}/."
Status=$?
umount "$DeviceMountPoint"
exit $Status
/dev/disk/by-id/usb-USB-FS_PocketBook_MYSERIALNUMBER-0:0 /media/pocketbook vfat user,noauto 0 0Amazon can can go forth and multiply with itself.
That said, Kobo is great if they have the book you're looking for.
if buying isn't owning, copying isn't stealing.
Though, even with Special Offers disabled, it still puts oversized icons for marketing promotions, bursting out of the search bar at the top of the home screen. This is one of the reasons I find the home screen a little bit unpleasant to look at, and avoid it as much as possible.
[1] If you want to remove Special Offers from your own Kindle/Fire (I don't know about Echo Show), go to https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/alldevices , click on the icon for your device, and scroll down, to find an option to disable Special Offers by paying some amount. IIRC, it said the amount was the difference between the original retail prices of with-ads and ads-free versions of the device. I've also heard some people can get Special Offers removed for free by customer service, but in my case it seemed like a fair deal, so I just paid the modest fee.