Recent content by ncted

The people who run the games know that people want to play for larger jackpots. Mega used to be $1 while PowerBall was $2. Then Mega went to $2, and now $5. The bigger the jackpot, the more people play because people don't make smart decisions.

They finally realized they need to compete on price. As for 5G broadband, it is fine for most people if you can get good signal, and not too many people sign up for it nearby.

This is only somewhat applicable to the topic, but since it includes unwanted ads, I figured I'd share it: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/24/iphone-customers-upset-by-apple-wallet-ad-pushing-f1-movie/ I am already displeased with a number of things Apple has done over the past few years (along...

I have all of the following ad-free for the indicated monthly cost: AppleTV+ ($10) Netflix Premium ($25) Disney+/Hulu ($20) MAX Premium ($17.50) Paramount+ ($10) Peacock Premium Plus ($11.67) Total: $94.17 (I actually pay less through gift card deals and other discounts) Throw in the cost of...

There are several things we want to watch on Prime this month, so I paid the $3. At least they seems to have fixed the bug in the AppleTV app where if you paid for ad-free, it skips to the end of the episode whenever you reach the point at which an ad would have played.

https://gizmodo.com/david-zaslav-is-getting-a-pay-cut-2000617738

... in France https://www.theverge.com/news/689022/netflix-tf1-group-carriage-deal-tv-channels Interesting if they start doing the same elsewhere.

Well, in the case of my parents, they are paying for: 1. Local News 2. Live Sports 3. Cable News (ugh, I know) 4. Reruns of their favorite shows 5. All of the above via a single UI (YTTV) Without YTTV or a traditional linear TV service, they would have to navigate multiple apps and would...

The generic chatbots, like ChatGPT, are trained on the contents of the Internet, which is one reason why they make so many mistakes.

AI summaries are about as useful as individual opinions, so why waste so much energy creating them?

Seems like the more you watch on Prime, the more ads you see. My wife and I watched the latest season of Reacher. The first episode had no ads, but each subsequent episode had more and more ads. Pretty sure we were seeing more than 3 minutes worth at the end of the season.

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-prime-video-now-comes-with-double-the-ads-2000614638 This just makes me twice as unlikely to watch anything on Prime Video.

HBO-ish?

As my cousin often laments, "we've all devolved to arguing with strangers on the internet."

According to Spectrum.com, the upload for Gig should be 40: Speeds Provided with Plan Typical Download Speed 1036 Mbps...