I think you're talking about "Weathered." About 150 years ago about 8m people died in India, because during an El Nino drought and famine British companies continued exporting food from India.

I guess you could call that "white people guilt" but you could also say that it's valuable context that the impacts of climate change can be exasperated by economic and national policies.

Its the exact same with NPR as well. There's actually a nice podcast that breaks down their ideological capture and downfall over the years. Its called All Things Reconsidered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPvNucxB7TI&list=PLYNjnJFU-6...

Same happens with Canadian streaming services like CBC Gem and Knowledge network

A PBS tote bag is a “good or service”. The broadcast isn’t, pedantry aside.

Perhaps they consider it some kind of perk that is not "paid for" by the donation. The receipt states "No goods or services were provided."

Or maybe they're lying, but I'm going with what the receipt says.

My CD collection is around 30 years old. Spotify is currently $13/month. $13 times 30 years is $4680. A lot of people could cover most of what they listen to with that much budgeted to buying CDs... and I'd remind people that the relevant price isn't list price but what you actually pay. Fetching a Michael Jackson album out of a bargain bin for $1 is that album for a $1, whatever someone else somewhere else somewhen else might have paid. I also buy my own movies, and there's a lot of "$5 for the entire Lethal Weapon series collection" sorts of purchases in there.

You're probably objecting to the fact that you don't have 30 years, which is correct, but is also the point of the "long term" part of the comment. Someone who listens to stuff that is on the streaming services and is literally constantly switching between artists and who doesn't mind if some stuff disappears from the services sometimes and so on and so on is perfect for the streaming services, yes. However, the more of those clauses aren't true, the less obviously advantageous the streaming services are, and I don't think most people are sitting down every week and sampling a dozen brand new artists. A lot of people could, with just a bit of care to buy things frugally and used, build a CD collection with $14/month faster than they will want new music.

It can help to jump start a bit and not compare this to building a new collection from scratch. It also helps that such a jump started collection can start by buying the cheap stuff that fills out collections quickly.

On the plus side, the "cosmic jukebox" seems to have mostly worked out for music streaming and most stuff is available from most services, which is a huge point in favor of the music streaming services. In my opinion for movies and TV shows that can be legally acquired (putting aside piracy for the moment) the analysis tips much more heavily in the direction of just building your own collection. I don't even know what it would cost you to buy a month's worth of access to, let's say, 80% of my movie & TV collection (since I have stuff that is just plain not available on streaming at all). They're so fragmented it's insane. And with my rate of consumption of TV, oh, call it $50/month just for a nice round number, that's way more than I'm spending on building out the collection anyhow. Maybe if Hollywood would hire more writers who have taken and passed Writing 101 my consumption rate would increase, but that's not the current situation.

> I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it

IMO, that can also be a problem. When I was young and buying CDs, occasionally you would buy one you didn't like at first. But since you had spent money on it, you'd listen to it. And I discovered some good music that way.

Same thing with movies and tv shows. Sometimes it takes a bit to get going, or I 'm in the wrong mindset for it, but repeated viewing or just sticking with it gets me through that.

Try before you buy is what piracy is for. I would prefer if there was another venue to try before paying, but the industry hasn't figured this out in the past hundred years, so piracy it is.

Streaming could be an acceptable compromise if it was $10 a year for everything in existence, but the catalogues are splintered across multiple services and even when you combine them all there are plenty of things not available.

I don't think that logic really holds but its pushed by spotify. People used to listen to a lot of varied music -- and theres a lot of ways to do that still without paying for spotify.

Anyways Spotify is just a platform/gatekeeper for record labels to push their products and theres no way that spotify prices ever become static. They will need to continue to push more products through the model to continue to grow and pay for company especially as all the other players have wizened up.

FWIW if you lapse in payment they kill all your downloaded content immediately. Super annoying service. I get why but like 10 days after probably about 10 years of subscription seems like a real jerk move. Even content that wasn't theirs and was mine -- they wiped it. You own nothing.

Tbh just recently I found the full extended version box set of LotR on DVD just lying on the street together with ~dozens more decent movies. I could probably fund my viewing habits entirely out of found stuff.

As for music; my dad ripped his whole CD collection many years ago, many thousands of CDs; more than I could listen to in a lifetime probably.

Plus I buy music on bandcamp to support a few artists I really like.

Paying for streaming services is just fueling the wholesale of our culture or worse the military industrial complex

Some of us owned thousands of albums (or movies, or shows) on physical media before the legal streaming party even started.

Personally, I also listen to a lot of ad-free college radio and watch a lot of online videos. Depending on what type of entertainment you enjoy, it's really not hard to pay next to nothing for it without compromising.

Not everybody listens to music all of the time. I almost never listen to music. I watch few movies and mostly, I rewatch old ones that I like. Paying that amount of money for any subscription to a content faucet (while Youtube is still free, if you absolutely must watch video) sounds crazy to me.

It should be easy to calculate this for your own needs based on your playlists. The advantage of buying is that you build up your own catalog of artists that you listen to regularly which means you don’t have to keep paying for them. So, at first, buying the albums would be more expensive but after a few years it would become much less expensive. The exception would be if you are always looking for the latest tracks by a large number of artists but I don’t think that’s most people.

Older popular music can be purchased second hand or as a various artists album which also saves money.

I stream on youtube to discover and purchase LPs and FLACs on bandcamp and tickets for live shows to support the artist and not the rent seekers.

Buying breaking bad on DVD is <3 months of netflix subscription (no ads).

So if you watch <2 seasons per month on average, you already come out ahead, and this is assuming only a single subscription.

People tend to wastly overpay for subscriptions because they end up underutilized and are typically never cancelled quickly enough because people are lazy.

Movies and TV shows I can maybe see. There hasn't really be a show that I really wanted to watch for the past... two years, except a few that are on public broadcast or only available on DVD.

Music I don't get, you can't even buy a single CD for the price of a streaming music subscription, unless you buy used, in which case you can get as many as 10 CDs per month.

Video streaming and it's licensing model is horribly horribly broken, there's no reason why I should have three to five subscriptions just so HBO and Netflix can produce yet another drawn out true crime show about someone how got lost half way around the world in 1983.

buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.

Remembering that a song at full price on itunes store is $1~ and a monthly subscription to spotify is $13

There is a compounding effect, so buying my library as it is today will cost me about $300~, but that's because I've accumulated 300 songs over the course of about 12 years. (300/12) is about $25 per year.

So the delta is $131... for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.

The irony of course being that if I ever stop paying, I have access to nothing at all.

Seems weird to question their statement, right? Surely they know their life.

This is not that unusual. I also have never had any of these, or any other, streaming services. It's been wonderful.

How few songs run on loop on Spotify? Not to mention radio.

You can relisten the stuff you have.

LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, cd's, mp3 players, etc.

You didn't have the whole world at your hands. You had to pick what to listen to, what to buy, what to carry.

Yes, it's nice having the world available, but also, it's nice being able to sometimes think, ponder, make a decision, and explore that decision.

Based on all the responses, people need to learn to make a decision and live with it for a bit.

- Picked a song and it's not the perfect one? meh, okay. - Also learn to be in the quiet. Oh, the song is not meh, but bad? Turn it off. It's okay. - learn to read a book

A library of 10,000 songs can fit on most phones.

Until Sam Altman disrupted the entire computer economy, HDDs were cheap and when you replace your desktop, the old one becomes a server.

Our society overconsumes by insane degrees. TBH the world would probably be a better place if most people limited their consumption to what they could reasonably acquire on disk.

How much I would need to pay to get on Spotify songs not available there?

There is so much garbage on streaming platforms, I rather research and pay per song/movie than waste time on trash. And that was before AI slop. Only reason I have subscriptions is family (cheap babysitter)

They're $20-50 for complete series on dvd on Amazon right now. That's 14-35 new shows to get every year for the same price. I believe it's cheaper. This is why so many companies push subscriptions. If DVDs made them more money than they'd be pushing you to buy them.

These streaming services don't even support 4k hdr on linux, leaving people with no choice.

Because it's a pain to mess around subscribing/cancelling over and over. Time is far more valuable than money and the older I get the more the disparity grows.

Yes, and you don't support the people making the media either!

Same here, that's the main value I get from especially music streaming services: I hear about anartist, and can immediately go check otu their discography.

That depends on your jurisdiction. In mine it is legal to rip DVDs or BDs I own to watch later and for backup.

I own many of my favourites in this way.

If you buy the DVD and rip it to make it easier to watch / as a backup, it might be legal in your jurisdiction.

Taking Netflix as example - it has been going downhill steadily, they have a habit of canceling good shows after one or two seasons etc. It is no wonder users get annoyed when they have to pay more over time, and get less for their money. Increasing prices is never going to be popular even when it is justified, but users are more likely to tolerate if the price increase comes with better features or at minimum, no drop in features/quality.

Another egregious thing these subscriptions do is all kinds of dark patterns. Making it super easy to subscribe but super hard to cancel, not informing before charging (how hard can it be to send an email "upcoming charge next week"), showing ads in supposedly "ad-free" services etc. All this just add to the frustration which leads users to cancel.

That may be the case but they are getting so aggressive that I am constantly having to reconfirm devices within my own home. Luckily I just run my own server now but we have HBO for free with my cell plan so that’s the ones subscription we still have. I have to do email 2FA probably every 4th or 5th time we open it because it’s on “too many devices.”

Showing the CPI next to these price increases wouldn’t hurt. If anything, it shows the problem with a single measure of inflation.

No, it's like making a snow report for a handful of skiing areas in a small geographical area (e.g. Sierras) and then contextualizing it against the snow report for all skiing areas in the broader region (e.g. Western US).

I assume you got that > 50% number from actual CPI data and not just vibes, right?

Or another way of reading it: a 61% increase over 5 years indicates a 10% annual pace of inflation for this particular basket of goods.

That’s the average household cable tv subscription, no?

I subscribe to YouTube and my partner subscribes to Prime. We have a joint cable-like tv package too, and one of us pays for Disney Plus. In the past we’d have been consolidated into one cable subscription consumption, but now we appear in the stats as lots of distinct consumptions.

I think all-in, streamers plus other subscription based entertainment services are nearer to the $140 figure per household than the individual figures describe.

But inflation is calculated entirely based on costs like these subscriptions...

How did you come up with the 26% number?

I haven't actually paid for Apple TV in some time but I remember thinking it had the worst interface of any streamer I've tried. Impossible to know which show card you had selected.

Prime's app is ridiculously bad imo. I'm not sure why that is, but everything is slower and takes more clicks and digging than similar apps on the same device. There are also significantly more ads than on Disney+ or Netflix ad tiers.

I find that Netflix and Paramount+ are the American services that offer the best app experience on my (very low-end) smart TV.

I was in the same boat with Netflix.

I picked a random film, Titanic, and supposedly it's $4 to rent on Amazon or Apple TV.

A Netflix account costs $9 with ads or $20 without, so I guess it depends on whether you watch more or fewer films than that per month?

> the fourth I have to take due to state apparatus' nagging and legal threats.

I get a letter every month from the licencing people, it just goes in the bin. I've had 1 visit, he asked to come in, I said no. That was basically the end of it.

(For the record, I have a TV but I currently have no way to watch live TV on it, so why should I have a licence! I don't use their service)

The TV license is insane to me, as a non-brit moving to the uk. I am happy to pay a reasonable price for something I use. But the threats I get about a GBP 1,000 is very un-british. I don't know who runs the TV licensing scheme but they need to be sacked. Thankfully if you can look past this gamesmanship then it is possible to call them and decline to participate in this nonsense.

I never paid for the licence for I never used iPlayer and the investigators were welcomed into my house to take a look at the chromecast dongle.

Easy, just make kids pay for these, if they need them this much.

Tell your kids ‘no’

Bring some sanity back to the world.

You're rejecting information solely based on the aesthetic quality of the delivery medium?

If you want guaranteed future access, then this is probably the only online option that actually fulfills this guarantee... other than that, physical media.

With that attitude from the corporations, why wouldn't anyone pirate?

>Likely dead due to obvious LLM writing

I think it's the look of the page: dark background and bright colours with an halo.

Realistically you don't absolutely need a VPS to run your own tunnel through for bittorrent. You can do something like install a virtualbox machine that mounts your local samba file share across the LAN (to store downloaded stuff), and otherwise has a default route outbound to the world through a $5/mo VPN that exits to the Internet in like, Chișinău Moldova. Or similar.

The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.

> Who cares if the site is LLM generated?

Lots of people. Even on HN, which is wildly unrepresentative of the US as a whole, comments that "this site was AI-generated" are commonly upvoted to the top because people do care.

That includes me. If it's AI-generated, I don't care about it - if it wasn't worth their time to write, it's not worth my time to read. I can generate it myself.

> The content is what’s interesting

If it's generated, the odds of it being wrong are far higher, because people who publish generated content are far less likely to care about quality or correctness.

> Who cares if the site is LLM generated?

Me. Because if there's no human checking the content I don't actually have a reliable signal that what I'm reading is true.

I'm not a subject matter expert here but I know that list includes Disney+ at $18.99 and Hulu at $18.99... but Disney and Hulu bundled together is $19.99. From the exact source the site cites:

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/23/disney-plus-price-incre...

A human doing the research would likely have picked up on that. An LLM that just reads everything literally does not.

> Using AI to spit out cookie cutter layouts is fine, offloading your thinking onto AI is not something I support.

This is the core of the problem, I have absolutely no confidence that any of the specific number figures or parameters listed anywhere in the website are factual. For all I know they're AI hallucinations. Or wildly out of date based on the final training date of some model. It absolutely does not look like data that somebody collected "by hand" and verified as true.

If I can generate the site myself with an LLM, it's a lot less compelling. Maybe just share the prompt in that case.

Another issue is that "This site was made with AI" just doesn't really add much to the conversation. There will very likely come a time soon when 95-99% of the sites that make the HN front page will be AI-assisted or AI-generated. What are these people going to do? Comment "This site was made with AI" on every single article? Why not just add a disclaimer to the top of HN that says "Most of these articles are made with AI" so the commenters don't have to log in just to tell us each and every time?

I used to get downvoted when I complained that a site uses 6 point font, or when it renders all of its text in a small 5cm vertical strip down the middle of the page, or when it didn't work without JavaScript... and all my other personal bug-a-boos. I stopped because I realized those comments add nothing to the conversation.

"This is AI" similarly adds nothing.

You don’t get it do you? The content is wrong and this aesthetic means: you cannot trust this. As someone who makes a living making website I wouldn’t have expected the tide to turn so fast. Clients now hire me to absolutely NOT have this aesthetic

As long as these comments come up, people haven't given up against this flood. It's a good sign. Also consider cause and effect. These comments only exist because of AI content.

> LLM generated

This is a proxy for "the author didn't give a shit"..Not always, but often.

we're looking for author voices, not claude proxies.

> Who cares if the site is LLM generated?

Good people do.

> I’m not meaning to be abrasive here, but these comments are also getting old and tired.

I always check the comment section first because I do not wish to engage with slop content.

> The content is what’s interesting, and it is.

Can you trust AI content at face value? No you can't. AI has been shown time and time again to just hallucinate shit out of thin air.

And that is why I want to avoid interacting with any kind of GenAI/LLM/... garbage. I always find the need to second-check whatever I'm reading and it is highly annoying.

Looking the same is not itself the problem. This is a same-looking that indicates a lack of human thought underlying it. That is a problem, and it is concerning to me if one does not think this.

Honestly, this feels like we're in the Geocities era again. Tons of people are making stuff again.

I'm excited by that.

And even LLM design tropes are better than seeing the same platform design on every page. The same Instagram, Reddit, X pages over and over and over forever. It's monotonous design. Platforms suck in more ways than that, though - you're forced into their constraints, algo bait, spam, hyper-drama, Reddit mods, contrarian view downvoting, etc.

It feels like we're entering the 90's - 2008 era again. The indie web. Microformats and self-distribution and hacking and remixing.

I would say, because not everyone cares as deeply as you do.

If it's readable and aesthetic, it is perfectly serviceable for the purpose of reading a post.

Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles, so most of what's going on is actually your feelings about AI taking primacy.

I appreciate the obviousness of it. Isn't it a good thing if the lack of effort jumps out in seconds?

This is good! Taste still remains a differentiator so far in our tokenmaxxing era.

I don't at all get the whole "making websites must feel like a 996 shift in a Nike sweatshop"

Software dev has never been a hard job

It's been so paint by numbers for years now for me it's incredibly boring mind numbing dead end toil

In the spirit of not speedrunning towards the dead internet theory, then what we need is a slop-detector that detects things that have been run through a script to "make this obviously not look like slop", in a recursive looping battle royale until the heat death of the universe.

Cant generate ad content

I could tell from the HN submission title + domain name.

New proposal for LLM-on-LLM wars: Have an automated system that retrieves every front page URL link on HN and feeds it into a "smart" LLM for analysis of whether or not the site html, css, JS and general template layout match that of a known LLM generation engine. Then give it a "probably vibe coded slop" rank number. If you can't beat 'em, let them fight...

An old co-worker used a term to describe sites with similar eye strain issues: OSHA violation.

That's the surprising part. It's pretty obviously spit out by /frontend-design, the tells are too obvious because Claude has built me too many of these, but /frontend-design by default will give you both a dark and a light theme and make it adapt to system theme with no prompting at all, so why would someone build a lazy stock /frontend-design but override that specifically?

i'm curious, would a white background with green/red figures be any better?

I assure you that I am a meat based mammal that engages in normal human activities such as respiration and generation of saliva. I also enjoy consuming calories and watching branded entertainment products.

That's a false dichotomy. An imperfectly measured inflation adjustment IS STILL VASTLY SUPERIOR to a non-adjusted number. By an enormous amount.

Economists exists, we have data on this. Don't be silly.

Emdashes.

Is this different than what Radarr and similar tools do?

Using the word “retarded” in 2026, you sound smart

M4 Pro but there are still builds for Intel based macs.

I'm not fully convinced here. Objectively it's a lot easier than it was 15 years ago and that is partially because now more people have the skills to expand the ecosystem and the resources to focus on creature comforts. Since 2022 and the last 2 years more than ever, I decided to cut ties to all cloud providers and host everything myself for 4 reasons:

1. I have 0 trust in software companies to have the ability to protect my data, even if they have the best intentions. Partially because of 2

2. AI: everything has to be fed into it, whatever it spits out is treated as gospel by most tech companies and people that 10 years ago were taught to question everything.

3. Price.

4. It is actually easy to setup and if you put in some real thinking into it, it becomes both secure and easy to pass around. Jellyfin is a good example. I installed wireguard on my mum's computer, "double click this, click this button, open your browser, click on this icon" and she has access to my library.

Part of the reason for the overinflated prices and budget cuts in those exact companies is this exact thing: many people got fed up with minor convenience at an ever-increasing price and "amazon for this, netflix for that". Many of us grew up pirating because we had no other choice. Now we do have a choice but instead of a decent trade-off in price-vs-convenience, we got a price to pay and ultimately a ton of inconvenience.

Nope, not a Netflix exec. One would imagine if I was, I'd have used Netflix as my example.

I dunno about you, but in my lifetime, if I would have invested in owning VHS, DVD, or HD-DVD, that would not have paid off for me. (I might have owned a lot, but I wouldn't have been happy.)

I guess Blu-Ray has stuck around, but I find that I don't rewatch a ton of movies anyways. I've never felt comfortable buying digital video because I never liked the idea of buying into an ecosystem.

And...discs aren't cheap anyways? Just did a random search - Tron: Legacy (a movie that's been out for awhile, I like, I would re-watch) costs $27.99 to buy a physical copy. So again: $28 to acquire one movie; $31 for me to watch that movie or hundreds of others I want within the course of a month.

Thanks for making me think of this, it's another bullet in support of what I was saying before.

I, for one, don't see any problem here.

If you go to a restaurant for a meal, you own nothing after that, but you can be happy. If you go to an entertainment park, you own nothing after that for your ticket, but you can be happy.

Making customer happy is an extraordinary valuable service one can provide, and that doesn't have to require connection with materially owning anything.

As someone who loves buying music - yeah, I hear that.

I just never really felt like the incentives were quite the same to purchase movies. They've always been constrained by their formats/vendors in a way that was never as true for music, they've always cost more, I don't rewatch movies as much as I'll re-listen to albums, and I think the...I dunno...nature, telos of movies lends itself better to ephemeral access.