Well they do have an alternative. ESPN and I'm sure plenty of other live events will often play ads. But if you have a pihole or some issue that causes the ad not to play, the screen will just display something like, "Ad cannot be loaded. Event will resume in 1 minute and xx seconds."

Is that a GREAT alternative to seeing an ad? Nope. But in many peoples opions it sbetter than being force fed the same ads over and over when you paid for an ad free service.

And if you read the wiki in full you will see it also is talking about preroll content. I dont HATE the HBO pre roll ads for their own shows that play before I start an episode but it is still an ad. Its for content I might actually enjoy instead of for paper towels or insurance but it is still an ad. This is something that is entirely optional and that disney/hulu has decided doesnt count as an ad.

Others have said it but free to play option and it ran in browser. I had no money and knew WoW was more popular but my low end pc couldn’t run WoW very well and I couldn’t afford the $15 a month subscription.

I think I did end up paying for a RuneScape membership but even then it was only $5 a month.

Eventually.

I'd suspect that the goal isn't to destroy coral reefs and the damage is "accidental." And/or the reefs are already largely fucked, so additional damage is "minimal."

To be clear, coral reefs are essentially collectors/attractors/homes for a huge number of fish species. If you go away from a coral reef (even 50 meters), there is large drop-off in the amount of fish in the water column -- almost none. They are absolutely bomb fishing within coral reefs because there are lots of fish.

Yeah, but the reefs aren't the goal. They're probably mostly not blowing up reef, but occasionally do it it - hence why so many bombs clears so little reef. If it was massively reducing reef coverage, you'd expect to see the method die off once too much reef is gone.

Fishers, I would guess, are aware of fish wanting to be near reefs.

Yup. It also seems like the latest and greatest is a smaller and smaller gap everytime. I will continue using the second best more affordable model until a new model comes out, everyone talks about how great it is, and the last greatest model becomes the second best and costs the same as the previous model I was using.

It certainly feels like they are throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

Makes sense to me. The cost of shipping products is lower than ever and they have lots of talented folks who want to ship things. No one knows what could be the next killer app.

> his flagship application is held together with brittle shell scripts, a sloppy codebase, bad abstractions, piles of markdown files and an ouroboros of generated tests

you just described lots of codebases at highly values companies. Plenty of places, maybe even the majority, do not care about code quality if the code results in a functional application.

Plenty of good companies have awful recruiting and interviewing practices. The reverse is true as well.

Ha. Interviewing is about answering questions in the way your interviewer wants them to be answered. It is a game of trying to "read minds" by figuring out the most common/best possible interview answer for any given question even if it doesnt reflect your own personal opinion.

People will say this is bad but then when they interview folks judge the interviewee if they dont answer questions how they expected the question to be answered.

Yup. ChatGPT has become Chat General Contractor at my house. I am moderately handy. But talking through a project with an llm before I start it has been great at helping me evaluate its difficulty level, rough estimate of how long it will take, to dos and not to dos, and helping me get unstuck or fix a mistake.

And frankly its convinced me several times that I should just hire someone to do x instead of trying to do it myself.

The alternative is watching youtube videos which are almost always diy people who try to tell you that you can do everything yourself.