Final Space and the (sweet) path to the Torrent

apogliaghi@gmail.com (Alessandro Pogliaghi) — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is the tweet that has gone viral in the last 24 hours.

any "digital purchase" that can be revoked without a full refund is not a purchase, it's a rental pic.twitter.com/sf538R4QDs
— Rachel Mae 💖 (@PixelatedWah) September 28, 2022

Basically WB pulled the plug on the show Final Space by treating it as a tax write-off.

The Good Old Times and $NFLX

I remember that I never really had any issues torrenting stuff when I was a little boy already diving into the net for ~~movies/tv-series/games~~ legal Linux distros 👀.

At some point, Netflix became available in most of Europe and suddenly a very nice UX with a growing catalogue of contents was available on major platforms for an affordable monthly price. I noticed that a lot of my friends back then, stopped downloading or streaming movies and started using Netflix.

Did Netflix reduced content pirating? I don’t have data to support this, but I can imagine that who did before Netflix came along, probably kept on doing it afterwards as well. Perhaps the numbers would be in favour of Netflix in terms of traffic share, just because of the sheer low barrier to entry for platform adoption, especially with respect to mobile traffic.

The thing that kept me using Netflix, is the UX of the mobile application. There’s no other service, to which I can legally obtain access, that remotely comes close in terms of user experience, in my opinion. Amazon Prime is aberrant, the app sucks, the search functionality is, God’s knows why, still broken and has items that can only be bought with a separate transaction. Haven’t used Disney+ too much, it seemed ok but the library content wasn’t enough for me to justify the subscription. AppleTV+ has had amazing shows lately and the experience is good, if you’re already into the 🍎 ecosystem.

Already the fact that we have all these applications (in the US the phenomena is even more striking) is basically calling for the end users to pirate stuff, most of the times you don’t even know where to watch something, you just want to watch it.

Final Space

Final Space has been removed from the face of the earth and has kind woke some people up regarding digital ownership of items, this is not something new, of course. Think about your Spotify library, if at some point Spotify kills your account, you’d loose everything in a heartbeat. Same with Netflix and all of the other services.

Five years of my life.s Three seasons. Blood, sweat, and tears… ….became a tax write-off for the network that owns Final Space. Yup. That’s it. That’s why it’s disappeared everywhere in the USA. Five years of work vanished.
When the license is up internationally, Netflix will take it down, and then it will be gone forever. There are no more physical copies of S1 and S2, and no physical copies of Season 3 were ever made. Your memory of Final Space will be the only proof it ever existed

So?

I remember the usual short video shown at the beginning of movies

You wouldn’t steal a car

But what if you bought a car and then, at some point, the car maker or the car salesman took it from you (moreover, without a refund)? I know, I’m exaggerating here but you get the gist.

On Prime the button clearly states “Buy Item” but then in the ToS in some obscure point, it reads

[..] revocable licensing [..]

our society is driven by legalese bs 🙈.

I don’t have a solution, but things like this certainly don’t help stopping people from using other ways to consume mediums.

The company Sandvine published a 2022 report and it’s interesting to notice the global traffic share per medium/service, FYI.

Software Midlife Crisis

apogliaghi@gmail.com (Alessandro Pogliaghi) — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It seems that, for us Software peeps, hosting a blog is like the sports car midlife crisis phase. It’s bound to happen, sooner or later, for almost all of us 😁

This is no different, I guess, I will use this blog to sometime express my thoughts on world events¹, software-related stuff and some personal projects that I would be working on.

The software situation

I have recently stumbled upon this fantastic talk by Jonathan Blow, entitled “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization” and, while I think some points are exaggerated, I really found it insightful.

I believe that the core, would be something along the lines of

Software is getting so complex that the knowledge for how to do the intricate or demanding things isn’t held by many people, which makes it brittle. Adding layers of complexity on top of each other has created a tower of abstraction that people usually only know a part of, which makes the entire stack brittle if not enough people know every part of it and something breaks.

There are cases in which this doesn’t hold true, of course. This blog, for example, is built with hugo, hosted on the “new Heroku”, fly.io, and I completely adore the DX there. Extremely simple setup, all you need is really just a Docker image to push. One could argue that having a docker image already implicates having too much complexity, I mean, this are just static files after all…

And that may be the problem that Blow is trying to underline, he suggest that simplifying the development processes and tools could help to reduce complexity and non-necessary dependencies.

Again, I completely agree with that statement. Another important concept is having deeper understanding of the technologies and the tools used at a lower level. This is hard, and takes time. A lot of companies, I imagine, don’t really care about this. The really sad part is that, I believe, the cost of issues down the road is so much more than the upfront one related to giving the possibility to the technical peeps of learning the intrinsic knowledge of things, and not to (usually) leave this task to 1 “senior” person on the team.

Personally, I really dislike the whole Electron-mania and javascript everywhere that slows down every piece of software it touches, everything is basically a small chromium instance running and eating RAM like crazy, it should not be like that, nor we need it to be like that. I am optimistic about the future, one has to be during these times with all that is happening, let’s see what will come next.

Who doesn’t like politics, amiright?! ↩︎

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Final Space and the (sweet) path to the Torrent

The Good Old Times and $NFLX #

Final Space #

So? #

Software Midlife Crisis

The software situation #

The Good Old Times and $NFLX

Final Space

So?

The software situation