Lived in 8 different states in the US - never had anything above 1 Gbps. Typically been 300-500 mbps, with only the past and current state state where I’ve gotten 1gbps. Poster is just assuming because we’re a first world country that we have good internet. We don’t. I hear Europe has better speeds than us.

Throwing my anecdotal 2 cents in -

Married at 23 (wife just turned 21) straight out of college. We were both very immature, and we divorced two years later after she fooled around with her 55 year old boss. Left me devastated at 25 going on 26 thinking I was used goods. After a lot of maturing, a few more relationships, I remarried at 33.

It takes a lot of self reflection - because even though I could chalk up the previous marriage to “lol she a hoe” - I had piss poor financial skills, was very immature and lacked a lot of self confidence which manifested itself in toxic behavior all around. There are times I just cringe at who I was at that age. Not that I’m a perfect person now, I’m just more aware of what I needed to improve in myself to be a decent person and partner.

Part of it is the age old wisdom of learning to love yourself and figuring out what you like, versus just trying to mold yourself into the person you think your partner wants. And not to say that “oh I’m an asshole, They have to deal with it” but truly understanding what makes you tick and finding someone who loves and accepts that part of you.

I’ve been slowly whittling down my subscriptions over time. At one point I think I had like 12-14 subs to various services, be it streaming, games, etc. But I was also up to my eyeballs in credit card debt and I had extremely poor personal finance skills and practices. When I met my wife, who was the exact opposite of me (extremely responsible with her finances, knew where every single one of her dollars was going), I knew I had to cut back significantly.

Right now I have the following 5 subs per month;

Apple 50gb data (1/month) YouTube Premium Family (22/month) Crunchyroll (8/month) Prime (15/month) ChatGPT (20/month)

Basically 66/month in hard earned dollars.

Prior to this I had the equivalent of an overblown cable package with all the bells and whistles, spending easily 350+ per month.

I don’t judge anyone who decides to save their money, because we’re getting nickel and dimed to death. And by decentralizing the cost of subs to the point where it makes an Applebees menu look small, it makes it incredibly hard to figure out where your dollars are going, and hard to cancel as you need to contact a laundry list of independent service providers.

My wife and I use YouTube and Crunchyroll as our primary entertainment sources, so we can justify those expenses. But all other sources (Netflix, HBO, Disney, Paramount, Hulu, etc) are so infrequent that we only sub for a single month if there is something we absolutely want to watch, and even then, we wait until the season is wrapping up so we can binge it in a week and then cancel the sub immediately.

Just my perspective on it, and if we didn’t watch YouTube almost every night, we’d probably just figure out a way to hack the AppleTV to circumvent ads.

Edit: My bad. I did the thing where I read like the first two sentences and didn’t read the rest. Reading the rest of the reply basically acknowledged my refute.

The majority of this waste is coming from businesses that now need to upgrade. That’s why there are IT departments to figure it out for the tech illiterate. As long as they can open their email client, a text editor and excel, you’ve overcome 90% of what a business needs for their computers.

You are right, Grandma Jones with her 800x600 resolution screen, 10 downloaded tool bars and Microsoft Edge ain’t going to get it, but Grandma Jones is still using XP, a CRT and a Gateway Computer she bought back in 2006

Agreed, there has to be a level of understanding. Just because you live in a space and pay rent doesn’t mean you can go wild and let the place crawl with refuse and roaches. I have an upstairs neighbor in my apartment complex that is the quintessential definition of the renter from hell. And we get all their roaches even though we keep the place spotless. And not to paint the landlords as martyrs here, as they have their own issues, but some people have a bad case of main character complex and think the rest of us that have to suffer with the stench and infestation are just the NPCs.

You’re absolutely right regarding Unity. And yeah, going back to pilfer your clients piggy banks is horrible optics.

The only times I can think of when a company is justified in retroactively requisitioning cash from a client/business partner is when that client/business partner is either A) They (client/business partner) failed to honor their end of the agreement B) They lit your building on fire (i.e. damages)

Barring those two, not really anything else I can think of that warrants a company saying “oh you also owe us more money now based on your past sales.”

When I was thinking of short notice, however, I was thinking Reddit.

You’re spot on. The changes we’re seeing are seen as “radical”, as users had previously utilized them on the cheap. Given the recent changes in the overall market, shareholders are making radical demands. So companies have to think of something to pivot.

When we look at video games, we’ve seen micro transactions creep up, a slow boil if you will, so consumers have adjusted to the increases in these “optional” purchases. Video games overall have been largely stagnant in terms of price per copy. Even accounting for inflation, we’ve really only seen a 20 dollar increase over the years for the raw “license” of a game. Then you add in premium packs and other “optional” nonsense and most have just accepted it.

I think where people get heartburn on these things is when you introduce such a whiplash of a change with such short notice. I think even if Unity changed the pricing to 2 cents an install starting 2024, then upped it to 5 cents in 2025 and kept it at an incremental increase, it would have been a better “slow boil.” By going outright with the 20 cents per install for the entry level, the market reacted just as radically as the proposed changes.

While I don’t personally agree with the changes, I can understand through your point why they’re trying it. Late stage capitalism and all that

Interesting to see Valve at 6.5 bn, I would have guessed they were higher given the extent of Steam as a distribution platform. But I guess that makes sense some other companies have a myriad of other digital and physical products, where Valve has only their small slice in both (Half Life, Counter Strike, L4D, Ricochet for digital, and Steam Deck, Index, some merchandise for physical)

Appreciate the recommendation man!! Thanks for sharing!

I too am curious about this. I still have some old school hip hop that I listen to. Living Legends and their songs “Never Falling Down” and “Moving at the Speed of Life”.

They announced a new business model effective next year. It’s plastered all over the net, just look up “Unity news” and you’ll get a ton of hits on it. Lots of coverage on YouTube as well.

My wife and I watched the whole thing, and I’ve frequently watched LTT in the past. We both agreed that the humor wasn’t really well placed, given the situation and came off a bit cringey in my opinion. I know some folks are saying damned if you do, damned if you don’t, which is fair. However I think that if they kept the humor out and it was a “generic apology video” there would be less criticism about it. But again, that’s just my opinion.

It wasn’t .99 but it was 2.50 at one point, and that was Terraria. Poured over a thousand hours into it. The consistent free mega updates they push out breathe life into it and I’ve been floored how much they’ve supported the game well over a decade since it’s launch. The team there could have just walked away after the 1.1 launch which helped fix some bugs and introduced some new things and called it a wrap. I’m very glad they didn’t

Yup. A quick tap of the horn or double tap is fine. Even a 1 second blast. Once we get into 2 seconds blast territory, it transitions to rude, with 3+ seconds going up linearly on the deranged jackass scale

This makes me think of Titanfall

The electrical tape approach is what I did and it did wonders. Went from having a myriad of green and blue LEDs on my fans/portable AC/etc to complete wonderful darkness when I retired for the night. Made a distinct difference in my ability to fall asleep faster at night. I hate having lights when going to bed. Darkness or bust.