A significant portion of piracy is opportunistic as far as I’m aware, in that people say “well, since it’s free I’ll grab it”. The opportunity cost is effectively zero.

What I’m getting at is that if you have 100 people who pirate the film, perhaps only 5 of those might have been willing to pay to see it, if only there was a convenient opportunity to do so. No money was lost through the other 95 - their decision was between ‘pirate’ and ‘don’t watch it’.

Of the remaining 5, yes, it’s lost revenue, but that’s because there likely wasn’t a convenient service with no ads at a price where people think they’re getting value. It’s all about convenience at the end of the day - if it’s more convenient to pirate it then your service is going to suffer. You have be more convenient.

Interesting concept though! I'm glad people are trying tests like this, regardless of whether this specific one is a perfect test or not.

If I would pay to watch it then yes, but I'm not going to pay money to a streaming platform only to watch ads.

Piracy is simple: when you make your product more convenient than piracy, people use it. Steam is popular for a reason - no crap, enormous game selection.. it’s just better than pirating. Netflix used to be the same - great selection, no ads.. now look: terrible selection and price is too high.

I enjoy being creative to an extent, but I like to solve problems, so I naturally gravitate to something with a long-term goal to achieve like Factorio (I rapidly lose interest after launching a rocket though).

From this page: https://archive.org/details/vddk_20260825

"Our matching donor wishes to remain anonymous, but we thank them for their generosity"

Simple.

That said, you say "it's normal to look forward to the weekend being over so you can sit down and work on the thing you're good at and know how to do" - this isn't what I'm getting at. I look forward to the weekend being over so that I can spend time away from my kids. I trudge through work for the week while trying to regain mental energy to tackle the after-school pickups and the next weekend. I'm just always running at a mental energy deficit. I enjoy my work, but I just have no energy to apply myself - the kids suck it out of me.

Saying something is "done at 7x speed" should be read as "done at seven times speed" not as "done at seven x speed". So using the 'times' (multiplication) symbol is the better form in my opinion; it just happens to be significantly easier to type "x" instead, which is how we got here.