Personally, I don’t feel that analogy is a fair comparison.

Begging a dev for new features for free would definitely be entitlement, because it’s demanding more, but what OP is upset about is reduction in the service they already had.

I don’t think any free tier user of any service could have any right to be upset if new features were added only for paying customers, but changing the free tier level is different.

In my opinion, even if you aren’t paying for it, the free tier is a service level like any other. People make decisions about whether or not to use a service based on if the free tier covers their needs or not. Companies will absolutely try to upsell you to a higher tier and that’s cool, that’s business after all, but they shouldn’t mess around with what they already offered you.

When companies offer a really great free tier but then suddenly reduce what is on it, then in my opinion that’s a baiting strategy. They used a compelling offering to intentionally draw in a huge userbase (from which they benefit) and build up the popularity and market share of the service, and then chopped it to force users - who at this point may be embedded and find it difficult to switch - to pay.

So yeah, it doesn’t matter in my opinion that the tier is free. It’s still a change in what you were promised after the fact, and that’s not cool regardless of whether there is money involved or not.

Very kind and polite of you

To play the role of the annoying five year old, “And why is that bad?”

I do want to play the Dead Space remake, but I won’t buy it unless the DRM is removed from it on Steam.

That’s part of it, but it’s certainly ALSO a mechanism to encourage people to use an account, or to register if they haven’t, because that’s more trackable and monetisable.

Same reason why when you hit an X post or an Instagram post it normally lets you see a little tease but roadblocks you to sign in as soon as you start scrolling. They want you signed in for their own reasons.

If google wanted, they could implement a range of measures to disincentivise bots, like not counting views apart from signed-in users so there’s less reason for bots to be engaging with the platform, but that also is bad for their ad view monetisation metrics so they surely don’t want to do that. They’d rather inconvenience the user.

Sus timing, though it’s certainly just branding.

The whole “My-” prefix for “My Documents” and “My Computer” and all that is something that was around since the 90s, and really served to emphasise the “Personal” in “Personal Computer” at a time when PCs were coming into the home for the first time.

Nowadays that branding is really unnecessary and feels pretty antiquated too, especially in an era where most stuff for most people is online, and the emphasis is more on connected seamless stuff rather than a cute little folder to put your things in.

Lucky escape! It shows how good these con-artists are at what they do, when you went in fully expecting it would be a huge scam, and still got talked into it!

My strategy these days is to never commit to any significant purchase on the spot. Car, sofa, whatever it is, they will always try to lay on the pressure and make it seem like it’s urgent and if you don’t get it now you’ll miss the limited deal, or someone else will buy it or whatever the trick is, but you have to stay firm.

My go to line is “I’ll take that away and think about it”- which gets me out of loads of trouble.

Slimy sales people have plenty of psychological tricks they weave into conversations to get you invested and ready to buy. They want you yourself even to be saying “Yeah that seems like a good deal!” because once you say that, they’ve basically got you - you can’t back out because you’d be disagreeing with yourself, and it’s human nature and pride almost that we ‘stick’ with our decisions.

That’s why never making a decision on the day is the strongest defence. It means you don’t have to be a skilled conversationalist who can spot all the sweet talk and see through the tricks. You’re totally free to get suckered and say “That sounds great!” but not have that become a commitment.

If it sounds great now it will still sound great after you go home and think about it, after all.

I’m trying to swear less. Or rather, to swear only where a swear is warranted.

My Dad has a habit of interjecting constant cuss words into everything he says, like “I was at the fucking supermarket right and then I’m just trying to find a fucking tin of beans…” and it’s just so unnecessary, to the point where the swears mean nothing because they are just peppered everywhere. I have to keep reminding him, “Dad, please tone it down a little”

And that’s an easy habit to get into but its exactly what I don’t want to be doing - swearing just as punctuation.

If a situation calls for a swear then I will swear quite happily, “Ouch, my fucking toe!!” and I’ll use the proper word. There’s no need to find childish swear-alternatives.

But I don’t want to sound like I can’t even stop it.

She could call her parents on the phone and tell them herself, but she doesn’t want to because she knows it will be a difficult conversation.

Therefore she wants to put that undesirable conversation on bro instead, so she doesn’t have to.

Being straight? Not a red flag.

Being a woman? Not a red flag.

Being Christian? Not a red flag either, unless you’re the sort of Christian who wants to force your views upon others who do not share them.

The only real red flag is that you said you “don’t understand” being queer. What is there to understand about it? Person A loves person B and that’s all there is to know. If that doesn’t make sense to you, then that perhaps may be the root of the issue, because it positions queer people as something alien.

Edit: Genuine advice - the key to being a good ally is internalised acceptance. You can’t be an ally if you see queer people as a different species, because even if you are “kind” and say “nice” things, there’s still a huge wall. You need to believe, truly, that queer people are exactly the same as you, and treat them exactly as anyone else - which ironically means no special treatment at all. Special treatment, even if it is seemingly ‘positive’ and well meant, is still strange and alienating.

This painting wasn’t done carefully with a brush or roller, it was done by spraying with a jet of paint.

It took them no time at all to paint this, because they just blasted it at the same time they were doing the rest of the wall, without even caring it was there.

What would have taken time would be to try and carefully spray around without getting any paint on it (or the proper solution, to remove it from the wall before painting)

How so?

Combination, right.

Landlord wants the job done fast, meanwhile the contractors know that the landlord isn’t the one actually living there so they can get away with cutting corners.

Lots of great money to be made in theft, apparently.

Read/write/execute file permissions.

Having them set incorrectly can cause problems, such as creating a file as root then leaving you unable to modify it as user, being unable to execute a script because execute is not set, or being unable to use your SSH keyfile because you left the permissions too open.

It’s more actually like “Why is it, when something doesn’t happen, is it always you three”

The person you replied to isn’t entirely wrong, though.

“ricing” was a term in use in the car modding scene around the 80s and 90s especially, where among certain groups it was popular to modify Japanese import cars with kits and decals etc to mimic the look of the Japanese racing scene.

Some people considered these mods to be tacky and worthless because they usually tended to focus more on aesthetics than performance, purely tricking the car up visually with no other changes. Due to the Asian origin of these mods and the stereotype that Asians eat a lot of rice, the cars were insultingly dubbed “rice burners” or " ricers" and the process of doing it “ricing”

It was intended 100% as an insult, basically meaning “Your car looks like shit because of all that Japanese crap you put on it”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

Like many insults of course, the insult is often “reclaimed” by the group it targets, who begin to use it between themselves in a favourable way, without any insult or negative connotation.

Ricing in the context of computers where people are styling, theming and “tricking out” their desktop almost certainly was borrowed from the car scene.

By this point there is basically no negative intent around the term at all, and especially not racist, but the place the term came from was.

One could argue that Tado should have had more certainty about their business model before they started selling promises they couldn’t keep, but that’s business I suppose.

Presumably Tado anticipated they could capture customers on a free tier and upsell later, but it turns out that when customers have a fully functional basic tier, they generally don’t want to pay money for extras they don’t care about.

And so now, Tado are left with an online service that costs them money to run, but no ongoing revenue. So of course they will try to monetise the subscription.

Of course, part of the problem is that customers have almost been conditioned to expect cloud stuff to be free. And so that’s the price Tado tried to aim for, and now that is causing problems.

Either way though, what they are doing now represents “changing the deal” Darth Vader style - the product previously was a one time purchase and then free after, and they are now trying to make it paid after selling it as free. And that is bad.

It was to figure out if they /really did/ start charging for it, how many people would actually pay.

I hope Tado goes bust because they don’t deserve to survive, treating customers like that.

If it’s not broke…

Personally I have had plenty of issues, and find this meme very relatable.