chisel

The idea of storing age in the OS is that end programs don’t actually access it directly. They get age ranges, like child/adult, not the actual birthdate. In theory, it’s much more private than uploading your id and photo to every random website/app that you use.

Well, AT&T for example requires that you use their provided modem+router combo, which they provide for free (unless you include their plans being generally more expensive than their competitors as an extra fee). They do try to sell you on range extenders for, what I assume to be, the shit router they give you.

Their router gives you less control than you’d get with your own router, helps with lock-in because it makes it harder to change providers, and allows AT&T full root access to your network, so I wouldn’t recommend it for self-hosters. However, it is the cheapest option since you’re requited to use it anyway. Besides, of course, using a different ISP, which saves me tooons of money over AT&T.

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Non-profits want to maximize their impact and spend efficiency. If they track how people use their services, they know better where to focus their efforts for improvements. If they know how people are finding their site, they know where to focus their marketing spend to help the most people per dollar spent. Marketing and user analytics are an important part of even altruistic goals.

Lmao, I promise streaming services and CDNs employ world-class experts in encoding, both in tuning and development. They have already poured through maximized quality vs cost. Tuning your encoder to allow for more bits in some scenes by definition ups the average bitrate of the file, unless you’re also taking bits away from other scenes. Streaming services have already found a balance of video quality vs storage/bandwith costs that they are willing to accept, which tends to be around 15mbps for 4k. That will unarguably provide a drastically worse experience on a high-enough quality tv than a 40mbps+ bluray. Like, day and night in most scenes and even more in others.

Calibrating your tv, while a great idea, can only do so much vs low-bitrate encodings and the fake HDR services build in solely to trigger the HDR popup on your tv and trick it into upping the brightness rather than to actuality improve the color accuracy/vibrancy.

They don’t really care about the quality, they care that subscribers will keep their subscriptions. They go as low quality as possible to cut costs while retaining subs.

Blu-rays don’t have this same issue because there are no storage or bandwith costs to the provider, and people buying blu-rays are typically more informed, have higher quality equipment, and care more about image quality than your typical streaming subscriber.