Missed it by 2 days. I said under 15 and it was 16.

Read all about it in this month’s issue of DUH.

I still use Gmail, Gcal, and Google Drive, but when they killed GReader is the closest I’ve ever come to dumping all things Google. In the end it was just too much hassle to move everything, let everyone know my new email, etc., but I’m still not over it.

That said, it’s not free, but I’ve been on NewsBlur since the GReader shutdown, and that’s been 10 years now I think. It’s very similar in use to GReader, and has got a lot of great features and customization options. It’s also run by one very active dev who keeps it updated, fixes anything that breaks, and answers questions on the forums. So I’m supporting an independent developer and not a company. It’s well worth the cost to me, and I use it multiple times a day every day.

Yeah, I wanted to root for them, because Flacco coming off the couch to lead them to the playoffs was such a good story. But as long as Watson is on the team, I can’t and won’t root for them.

I was thinking it kinda did, but kinda didn’t, and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Someone in another post nailed it for me. Whoever made this used all of George’s stand up specials to train the AI on his voice and cadence, so George of course sounded young in his early work and old in the later ones. The AI mixed that together, so you get a voice that’s not quite his younger voice and not quite his older voice either. That made perfect sense to me why it sounds like George, but still a little off.

I’m going to just leave this here…. 🤣

https://youtu.be/_ZceiVvshwA?si=edSuesnlmmv0auZr

7 hours, 34 minutes, and 3 laughs.

You could be right, but my understanding was that content owners pulled content from Netflix because they thought they could make more money setting up their own streaming services. Most are at worst losing money, and at best not bringing in projected profits, so they’re moving content back to Netflix and taking the licensing money.

The bit about AI Bill Cosby made me laugh the hardest. “You get all of the Cosby jokes with none of the Cosby rapes!”

See, I disagree. Someone retelling their memory of some of his bits, or your nephew performing at his birthday party would be telling old George Carlin jokes. This was new material and was topical, which I think is cool. It’s hard to know what George would really think about today’s climate, but I can’t imagine it would be too far off from the this.

Was it perfect? No. But if I know what it is going in, I can sit back and just enjoy it for what it is - entertainment.

Y’know, I was a pretty big Carlin fan, I had a few of his albums and even saw him live in concert once. I listened to the whole thing while driving, and I thought this was okay. It’s obviously not George Carlin, but it sounded a lot like him, and I can imagine he would approve of many of the jokes. It wasn’t a laugh-a-minute, but I did get lost in it a couple of times and forget that it wasn’t really him, and I did laugh out loud a few times as well. (The joke about the best comedian for AI being Bill Cosby got me!)

Carlin’s comedy was very topical, which doesn’t always translate to today, so having new, up-to-date Carlin bits are actually cool. I can understand his daughter’s apprehension, but at least people are talking about her dad again, so I would think that’s a good thing.

This isn’t about cable, they’re sinking themselves by burying their head in the sand and pretending like streaming isn’t a threat - all while bleeding subscribers.

As for Netflix, you’ve got your take backwards. Netflix was licensing all of the content and paying the content owners fees. NBC, CBS, Paramount, HBO (now Max), AMC, Disney… they all got greedy. They saw the money Netflix was making, and they thought they could make more by keeping the content, creating their own services, and raking in the cash. Unfortunately that created a glut of new problems. Some of these providers don’t have enough content to justify their price to consumers. Consumers struggle to find shows they want to watch now because content is spread so thin, so they give up. Most importantly, consumers feel nickeled & dimed. They don’t want to pay for numerous services, so it becomes a game of “which one(s) am I going to subscribe to, and which am I going to ignore?”. Many of these services have struggled and lost money, so they’ve decided that it’s easier to license the content back to Netflix, let Netflix handle pricing, infrastructure, subscriber retention, etc., and they can cash the licensing checks.

I’ve never heard of it, and my wife & I are on Netflix multiple times a week.

As a side note, other streaming services that took their stuff off of Netflix to make their own service because “hurr durr we want that money!”, have discovered that it’s hard to run and not always profitable. There are a LOT of things that have been gone off of Netflix for awhile that have suddenly started to show back up because content owners have discovered that it’s much easier to let Netflix deal with the infrastructure and just get paid. I remember when Netflix had almost everything you could want to watch in one place, and it was glorious! If you’ve cancelled over the lack of content, maybe give it another look. If you cancelled over the cost, maybe it’s more worth it now?

I’m not a Netflix shill, I just remember the days when it was awesome because of the massive selection, and I’m hopefully seeing it slowly coming back around.

NGL, I didn’t see that punchline coming.

Neither did her brother… HEYOH! 🤣

Thanks for the offer, but I don’t think Kbin/mbin is for me. I signed up for a smaller mbin instance to give it a try. I realized that I would have to manually move all my communities over (which is too many to do), and that some of the ones I follow and are active in aren’t federated with mbin.

Yeah, I definitely understand, which is why I moved off of lemmy.world. But the other mbin instances are really small in terms of members, so that makes me nervous that they aren’t going to be around long term. I get it, there’s no guarantee with any instance, but one that has a miniscule number of users makes me gun shy.

Okay, I’ll give it a few and try again.

Gotcha. I’m not a huge fan of PWAs when it comes to Lemmy/kbin/mbin, but I’m willing to give it a try.

Yes, sorry, I didn’t realize that when I replied. Unfortunately I’m on iOS, and Interstellar is only for Android/Linux right now.

I just tried signing up at fedia.io, and I got the response “429 Too Many Requests”. It doesn’t inspire confidence that I can’t sign up for the largest and most popular (and represented in the screenshot above) instance.