Man I haven’t thought about kkrieger in a looooong time. Thanks for that!

I agree though. I think it’s been happening for years. Hardware has gotten so fast compared to where we were a few years ago. But it hasn’t caused rapid innovation like everyone thought it would. It’s just made devs lazy and we get massive unoptimized piles of shit released that take hundreds of gigs of space, require 8gb of vram and 16gb of RAM and still run like trash.

I’d love to see another era where we have game developers truly innovating and really trying to get the most out of hardware but I wonder if things have gotten so complicated that those days are gone.

I think colloquially people have begun expanding use of the word to include anything where features or product are removed but the price stays the same.

Maybe there’s a better word for that, but I understand the parallel.

Sounds like you just had a badly made one. Not all franchises are equal.

A well made big Mac tastes good. There’s a reason it’s been around this long.

You know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese??

It’s worth trying if you’re interested, IMO.

Nothing mind-blowing (except the morning crunch wrap, which is mind-blowing). But they are pretty consistent, and have a lot more options than most fast food places when it comes to healthy-ish options.

It’s not Mexican food, it’s not even tex-mex. It’s just taco bell. It’s its own category of food. Go in without preconceived ideas of what it should be and you might find that you enjoy it.

I like McDonald’s. I know, wrong opinion.

Maybe it’s because it was an occasional treat when I was a kid, but there is something nostalgic about it. Sometimes I just want it.

But it’s definitely hard when eating at McDonald’s with our family of 4 is equivalent to eating at a fast casual place, and starting to approach the cost of a sit-down restaurant. The big happy meals are over 6 bucks now, and that’s starting not to be enough food as our kids get older. If we get a value meal it’s $8-10 each for me and my wife. So even if we go minimal, which usually results in people still being hungry, we are already at ~$30. It’s not hard to get up close to $40.

Remember the dollar menu?? I mean if we break each of those meals down to their components of sandwich/fry/drink, if we stayed on the dollar menu what now costs $30 could have been bought for $12. Obviously inflation comes into play a little bit but I’m not sure prices needed to nearly triple.

Sit down restaurants obviously have increased a ton too, but if they have a reasonable kids menu we can do it for $50 or $60 depending on the place. Yes, more than McDonald’s, but McDonald’s also has no business being that close in price.

Appreciate you finding numbers when I didn’t go to that effort. It makes me wonder if numbers are pretty similar globally. 2% having chronic insomnia doesn’t sound completely out of line to me.

I think because it’s a pretty gross mischaracterization of the demographic? Usually hyperbole is used for effect to more emphatically illustrate a generally true or accepted point.

The number of Americans who use nightly sleep aids is extremely low. Like, a vast vast majority of people never take them. I don’t know anyone who regularly takes them, and honestly I don’t know many who take them even occasionally.

So this meme uses hyperbole to drive home the idea that Americans have a pill problem regarding sleep aids and no one in Europe does. I have no idea how the numbers shake out in Europe but I can say in America it is not as characterized. So it’s less hyperbole (exaggeration of a fact) and more like a lie.

I’ve just started dipping my toes back into the waters again too, also after many years of downloading absolutely nothing. It’s a combo of things prompting me.

First, costs have gotten out of control and prices just keep creeping up. This is happening at the same time as content libraries per service dwindle. I make more money than I used to, yet it feels like it goes not nearly as far these days with prices of everything skyrocketing.

Second, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger pain in the ass to find things. Part of the issue for me is interfaces (though I can get around that, generally). Part is content shuffling from one service to the next. But a big issue is all the trash content companies like Netflix are shitting out to pad their libraries. You have to wade through oceans of garbage to find a single thing worth your time. This experience is exactly why I dropped traditional cable years ago! I hate endless filler trash. I don’t want the illusion of a large library to make it seem like I’m getting value. I just want actual good content.

I’ve heard that from people and I’m eager to eventually have a chance to try one. Our gas stove is under 10 years old and works fine, so a new induction range isn’t really on the horizon for us financially.

But I’m definitely interested to try one.

Sorry if it sounded like a freak out. That wasn’t intended.

How did I change the point? You said all electric ranges are fine. I contend they are not and tried to support that argument. Happy to hear your interpretation of what I said beyond dismissing it.

And again what I said wasn’t intended as a personal attack on you. But if the argument is that electric and gas are equivalently effective at cooking, that’s a difficult discussion to have because it’s coming from a place of factual inaccuracy.

Completely fair question.

Tons of things require this. Eggs are much easier this way. Anything that needs to be brought to a boil then dropped to a simmer. Anything that needs to not be overcooked but still needs to hit temp. Fish and chicken come to mind. It also just enables fine adjustments while cooking. If I am searing something but realize I crowded the plate and things have started steaming instead, it’s easy and fast to turn the heat up one notch.

Granted some of this comes down to what kind of pan you have too. I cook a lot with a carbon steel pan and it’s very quickly responsive to heat changes. I have a set of all-clad pans and they also respond relatively quickly. But like, my cast irons obviously don’t so it’s a bit moot for them.

I’m sorry, it is unbelievable to me that anyone who has done a good amount of cooking on both gas and old-style electric stoves would say they are equivalent. It simply tells me you do not have adequate experience, or are not observant enough to notice.

I don’t mean this as a personal attack. It’s just…this isn’t an opinion. Gas is dramatically more responsive and precise for heat control. This is objective. If the way you cook does not leverage fine heat control or require quick changes to heat levels, then no you will not notice.

But the difference is stark and noticeable for someone who wants and uses this level of precision.

Speed to boil water is not at all the selling point of gas.

It’s speed and precision of temperature control.

Coils stay hot. When you turn the gas off, the heat is off RIGHT NOW. When you turn it on it’s on RIGHT NOW.

Many coils pulse full heat to simulate different heat levels. Gas gives you very precise control over exact heat levels and it is instantly responsive to change.

I’m not here to argue about the possible health concerns, I don’t know anything about that and would need to read more. But people who argue electric ranges are just as effective as gas simply haven’t cooked as much. I’m certain of this because I used to think that too until I switched to gas. Gas is plainly better.

I’ve heard great things about induction and maybe that’s the way I’ll go next. Not sure yet. I’m certainly curious.

Multi comms are a good idea, agreed.

As for weak discoverability encouraging tendency to gather on larger comms…I agree, but I would just add that it does require motivated and proactive users. This isn’t a given. In my hypothetical, those people started their own communities about something they like, and had a few users but not many. Do they at some point decide to give up and search for another community? Or do they just forget about it because there’s never any activity and they don’t go there? How many searches should they do without finding anything?

As a real life example of my own, I’m a Green Bay Packers fan. I wanted to find a place to take part in active discussions about the team. I joined what seemed to be the biggest community and posted a few things, commented in threads. Most would get one or maybe two replies. Often nothing. A month or two later I searched again and found a few more communities that had popped up. All around the same size and activity level. Joined them, also crickets. The members there didn’t congregate around a larger instance, they created more small instances and then all of them ended up largely abandoned.

I don’t know exactly why that is, but I’ve had this experience with other topics too. Maybe instance tagging with a recommendation algorithm that suggests similar communities in the fediverse based on the community you’re in?

The problem really is that lemmy doesn’t have the critical mass of users to support many small communities that are all self sustaining. And discoverability is so bad for communities it’s entirely likely that if there are 8 people out there that want to discuss X in the fediverse, 3 are in one community, 2 in another, and 3 in a third, and none of them ever finds the others. The lack of users causes a lack of content and they all the up not engaging at all.

If you have enough users the idea of multiple communities holds water a little better. But I think it’s a significant barrier to actually gaining those users.

Fully agree with you on artists not getting their fair share, and I would argue that the issue is sadly endemic across the entire music industry and was that way long before streaming services even existed. Spotify is merely the most visible representation of a long festering issue that spans generations.

I can only speak for myself but I do actually still buy CDs for bands I really like. I will also occasionally buy merch or go to shows. Some of these bands I very certainly would never have discovered without Spotify (or a service like it).

Ultimately I agree that I’d like people to understand their options. I think the biggest likely barrier is convenience. I have a NAS server, and a virtual host set up that runs a Linux server with Plex on it, and I have that open so I can use Plexamp to play live albums or any other stuff I own that isn’t on Spotify. But like… That’s a massive barrier to entry to simply create something close to the experience Spotify offers out of the box. And it’s definitely not as polished. I do it because I’m a hobbyist, but most people aren’t like that. So then if you want to buy music individually, you’re stuck listening to actual physical CDs, or ripping them and loading them on your phone or mp3 player. Old school cool for sure, but new school convenience is sure hard to beat once you’ve had a taste.

This is your rationale and that is ok for you. Ownership is important to you. That is ok. But people who make the point you are making never understand the point those of us who like Spotify are making.

We do not care that we don’t own anything after paying. I am not paying to own it. Never felt like I was, never felt like I needed to. In fact, it’s almost a perk that I don’t because then I am not sitting amidst towers of CDs (something that was definitely possible if I had continued my pre-spotify trajectory). Anyway, I pay for access. No more, no less. I pay for access to Spotify’s library, which is many orders of magnitude larger than anything I could ever hope to amass myself, even if I was pirating shit.

I want to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, instantly. I don’t want to go pirate it, I don’t want to go find it at a store, if someone suggests me a song or album or artist I want to go listen to it right now. Spotify enables that. I have discovered so much music I would absolutely never have tried without Spotify.

And again, I am 100% comfortable paying for access to something not owned by me. I’m a member at our local zoo. I don’t expect to own the animals, I pay to just to get in. I’m a member at our museum. I don’t feel like I should own the artifacts, I pay for the privilege of seeing them. I am a member at a community pool. I don’t own the water, I pay to get in, and have someone else handle all the hassle of maintaining that pool.

Spotify is the exact same for me.

I’ve been reading that there are ways to roll your own version of some of the old 3rd party apps using your own API key. I might look into it, if only so I am not relegated to using the shit web interface when I do need to check a few things on reddit. I refuse to install their official app though.

Yeah if Lemmy ever hits whatever saturation point is needed that niche communities are more relevant my participation will increase. As it is I’m honestly having to visit reddit occasionally to get answers from those niche type communities because they are simply non-existent here. There is nowhere but reddit to interact with these groups, as much as I hate that.