..."until I want to do something that the default Apple behavior does not do."

To oversimplify, it's like saying "you can do these 10 things and they're guaranteed to work". On some platforms, you can do things 11-20 as well, but there's a chance they may not work as desired. This may still be preferable to a total inability to go past the first 10 due to restrictions.

I find that a lot of computing devices work fine out of the box if you use them exactly the way the included first-party options were tested to work. It's gotten to the point where I'm less concerned about how nicely they succeed at the "common" things than how well I can deal with them when they "fail" (to do the thing I want them to do).

I appreciate easy and convenient as much as the next person, but if I have to choose between "must install app or change configuration to do what I need" and "nope, you can't do that", I'll take the former.

Running around in first person while sitting or standing in a room took some real getting used to. But cockpit games or mostly stationary (in a reasonably small volume) standing-perspective games were fine.

I use Projectivy for the same reason. Sucks, because Android TV still has some of the best flexibility in a TV-appropriate OS (compared with other options I could find at least) but their priorities don't line up with mine regarding the ads.

It's just that in the past, these were sold by janky companies selling them as spy/hidden cameras, not massive multinational data brokers like Meta.

Seems a little on the nose to me, but I guess some days it's hard to tell what's a gag and what's a legit pitch.

I'm with you there. It's the same for shooting still photos.

...but that doesn't stop people from shooting portrait video and then constantly panning back and forth because the whole (crowd, landscape, giant sea monster, whatever) doesn't fit in the frame.

Theoretically it could add up to a passable paycheck for retail, but they had it set up so that only a few senior staff ever got enough hours/good shifts where you could conceivably hit the addon percentages needed to qualify for commissions. So the only way to make any money was to sell cell plans, phones, and accessories. The whole store was totally focused on hawking cell plans.

Then we had to go to monthly meetings an hour out of town on our own dime. That's where they talked at us about the company and how cool and great it was. Such a shitty place to work. IIRC there was a dedicated web forum called "RadioShackSucks" or something like that where staff complained to each other.

In the end, a helpful discord member was already at the store, purchased a GPU for me, and held it until I could get there and buy it off him. Due to the shortage there was no risk of him stuck holding the "bag" but it was a huge favor from my end. Wasn't scalping but I still threw in an extra $20 just for helping out.

And that's when they're not just "pirated" themselves?

Seems at that point you might as well just skip paying whatever questionable middleman in involved if you're not concerned about abiding by TOS or license.

In 2020/21 I was working from home like many people. I'd been lucky enough to get an RTX3080 for my new computer build and decided to experiment with mining ETH during downtime - it was winter and the office was cold anyway...

"Made" a few hundred bucks over the course of a couple of months and had it in Coinbase. They had a setup where you could sell for USD and deposit in a Paypal account, so I logged into mine - which I hadn't used in a few years - and deposited the funds.

Shortly after, my account was frozen for suspicious activity. I was told that there was no way to reverse this or obtain any further info or explanation. The funds were not returned to my Coinbase account.

In the end I just said screw it and chalked it up as a learning experience. I hadn't really created anything of value so I didn't feel as angry as if I'd been cheated out of actual work. Still, it pissed me off that as far as I can tell, Paypal essentially stole a few hundred dollars from me and there was nothing I could do about it.

I had figured that by using "legit" services and following along with all of their KYC/tax policies I would be safe. In retrospect I probably would've been better off cashing out via some questionable crypto exchange. Haven't messed with any of it since.