Companies aren’t run to earn profit based on goods and services generated anymore. They are investment vehicles for wealthy VC to use and abuse until they run them into the ground while they jump to the next disposable company. Someday this will result in no effective company existing anymore, but the investors don’t care.

If governments were actually functioning they’d recognize this danger and crack down on this behavior because it weakens the country as a whole, but most of the politicians are already bought and paid for.

Almost like voting with your wallet doesn’t actually work. Or only works in same way ‘communism’ and ‘well regulated free market capitalism’ concepts work… in theory only.

I mean it won’t be too long until they don’t need any human VAs at all, so they could just completely ignore the union.

Yep, even if they don’t clone an existing VA, they’ll be able to find others willing to sell their voice for AI, or just have an AI generate a voice from a mixture of different people. The existing VAs will then never be hired.

Accurate and well executed computer voice is a goal of too many technologies to remain unsolved for long. It sucks for the VAs, but there’s no way to go back.

To me there’s a bit of a difference because humans are not controllable and cannot (legally) be slaves. So in the case of this hypothetical artificial brain, that brain could leave and take the profits of it’s work elsewhere, with the creator no longer benefiting.

I mean tears of the kingdom make $700 million + and Diablo Immortal made 525 million in it’s first year despite being almost universally rebuked online. Really seems like micro transactions have a really solid, if maybe not top tier return. Lots of companies try to make something like Horizon Zero Dawn and it totally flops instead.

The old ‘most reviews’ sort on newegg.com was honestly the best way to find decent stuff. Well that combined with comprehensive filters to narrow the search down significantly. There are certain products you just can’t successfully search for on Amazon because there’s no way to filter out the irrelevant trash.

What do you do for contractors, Doctors, etc?

Sort of. Mostly this is just what happens when you build a platform that allows basically anyone to sell something on it. Local businesses have limited space, so necessarily they needed to limit product to trusted brands/partners/publishers.

Amazon has actually made it possible for self publishing to exist. There are a lot of successful authors now that never would have made it in the old ‘local bookstore buys books from publishing house’ paradigm.

But this of course has also opened the floodgates for scammers which utilize those same indie-friendly options to try to exploit people.

I think the issues are a little more nuanced than just ‘local business good, Amazon bad’. Not that I think Amazon is good, I just think there are real, valid reasons why small bookstores (and their large book publishers) had problems.

Yep. We ran into this issue and we didn’t even do it sight unseen, we were just moving so fast that we got sloppy. It’s hard to continue to be diligent after 30+ failed bids. Ended up with a bid for a house that needed significant and immediate repairs that we couldn’t afford. Ended up walking away and losing our earnest money instead of keeping the house, but we’re much happier for it.

Our budget also continually increased throughout our search. The same houses we were bidding on at the start increased by 50k just in the couple of months spent searching. We only found inventory once we broke into not a starter home budget category. This has resulted in us being pretty house poor to start, but ultimately we plan to stay here for 20+ years so it hasn’t mattered after those lean first few years.

That’s fair. Using moon reader makes the library and store tabs useless. I have the store ‘disabled’ but the tab remains. Moon reader doesn’t like it when I open books via the library tab (creates a duplicate) so I stopped using it. Personally I rarely need to exit the moon reader app, so the base UI really doesn’t impact me much.

Haven’t noticed moon reader hogging the battery. I keep Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off and use a decent amount of backlight and still get a couple of weeks out of it. Which is so much better than the 2-4 days my oasis got.

Part of the reason I love mine is that it supports TTS so I can create my own audiobooks. Currently using Google wavenet to read books to me. This is nice for car rides especially cause I read a lot of books that will never get audio book versions (translated Chinese cultural cultivation fantasy)

I just bought the onyx boox page and I’m not seeing much, if any bloat. It’s a premium ebook reader ($250), but I bought it to replace my aging Kindle Oasis. I use moon reader pro instead of the built in reader. Google Play worked fine straight out of the box. It has a micro SD card slot for more storage as well.

Overall I’m very satisfied with it and it is completely comparable to Amazons premium ereaders (honestly way longer battery life than my oasis ever had).

Time will tell on OS updates, but truthfully I don’t really care much about that. At least until my apps stop working.

As an RTS player who only ever plays for the story and does not care about multiplayer at all, new RTS games with a decent story and gameplay are kind of thin on the ground these days.

I can’t even play C&C RA2 anymore because I can’t get it to run on my PC. Tried several guides, but it refuses to run properly.