You can get a cheap Android TV Player for about $50 that will connect to your TV via HDMI, connect to your network via Wi-Fi or even Ethernet (I suggest you the latter if you can - much better performance, no hiccups if the Wi-Fi channel you’re using is also used by a lot of other stuff) and play any MKV videos it can access on your network (so, for example, you could share them in a Windows share).

This is kinda the setup I had maybe a decade and a half ago (only back then they were called TV Media Players and it was before Android).

You can get a TV Stick which is sorta the same but smaller, hangs from the HDMI port on your TV and those never have Ethernet.

You can get any of the hardware supported by LibreELEC - the cheapest being ARM-based Single Board Computers like Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi - and install LibreELEC in it and use that. Basically works like the Android TV Player only less bloated and you control that device fully.

Personally I now have an N100 Mini-PC on my living room with Lubutu (I installed Lubunto because I thought that it would be too little PC for a more normal distro, but frankly that thing can run a normal distro just fine) with Kodi always ON and on front (so from the TV side it just looks like a Media browsing and playing interface). The reason for having a bit more generic hardware there is that the machine is ALSO my Torrent server (with QBittorrent, which you can remotey add torrents to from your personal PC using a browser plugin and remotely manage from a browser) AND it’s also my home NAS (so, same place were the media files end up stored).

It’s connected directly to my router via Ethernet so it downloads and uploads at 1Gbps. I generally manage it remotely via SSH from my own PC and have a wireless remote for it (which works just like a normal remote, except that you can’t use it to switch the machine ON, only OFF, plus do other buttons just do the normal play, stop and all the other standard functions in Kodi) so for using it as a media player in my living room it works like a dedicated TV Media Player or a Smart TV and doesn’t at all look like there’s a PC in my living room connected to my TV, but I have full control over what’s running there and it isn’t selling my personal data to anybody or shoving adverts in front of me.

That’s actually not especially good in the EU as far as I can tell (also in the EU, have the same, €15 a month).

That said, it’s pretty easy and cheap to get the rest of one’s setup (router, Ethernet cables, the actual torrent machine) with Gigabit-Ethernet so that it all actual works at 1Gbps end-to-end but costs a bit more to upgrade one’s internal network and download machines (I use a MiniPC next to the router) to go above that - everything pretty much supports 1Gbps by default nowadays, whilst only some stuff supports 2.5Gbps, and you definitely have to pay quite a bit extra for 10Gbps.

The kit I had for years already supported Gigabit Ethernet all the way and I would need newer kit to really use properly a fibre Internet connection above 1Gbps, which is why I personally did not go for the 2.5Gbps or even 10Gbps (the latter would be €45/month). That and downloading an x265 1080p torrent of a 1h episode of a TV series from a popular public tracker taking between 30s and a minute is good enough for me and I don’t really want to spend more money to bring that down to 10-20s or less.

All countries I lived in were Capitalist.

The UK was the most class stratified, with the lowest social mobility of all, with the most dynastic elites and land-ownership concentration.

Also I have literally never lived anywhere else were there was a language accent specifically for rich people - everywhere has regional accents, but a “rich people” accent is very rare.

Wealth segregation is a core structural element of British society and at the upper economic layers Britain is much more cronyist and nepotist than even Southern Europe.

It massivelly depends on what changes and how well in terms of software design the whole is done, and judging from what I’ve seen, for multiple reasons (it’s easier to exploit yound and naived developers and those don’t know how to do good software design; performance tends to be a big thing in games dev and performance optiomizantion generally goes against good software design; it’s an area that tends towards experimentalism rather than well though integrated software design) gamedev isn’t an area of software development were software design tends to be good.

Modern Neoliberal Politics, both the “center”-Right and the “opposing” performance of “center”-“Left”.

Whilst politicians, the media and (ideally for them) the public opinion are talking about gender minorities’ access to toilets, they’re not talking of wealth inequality, the lack of access to housing and general empoverishmnt of young people and the “World-beating” bad management of Britain for the last 4 decades (especially since 2007, extra specially so since the Leave Referendum).

The more politicians talk about moral subjects and scapegoat foreigners (“immigrants” when performing a “Right” character, “foreign interference” when performing a “Left” character) for a country’s mismanagement, the more they’re hidding how much they’re mismanaging the country when it comes to what affects everyday life for most people, be it because those politicians’ only real competence is in managing appearances and deceit or because they’re only really motivated by the rewards they will get from the very rich friends they make by making laws and managing the country for the benefit of very rich, very thankful people (and screw everybody else).

TL;DR - this shit is just yet another Act in the Theatrical Production which is mainstream politics in Neoliberalism and its purpose is to entertain people to make them forget that the purpose of elected politicians in Representative Democracy is to Manage a country well in the interest of their voters, not to be Improv Thespians for the entertainment of the masses.

What a spectacular display of how the right wing posh cunts in the UK are little more than unthinking morons (in the technical sense of “moron”, even) who barelly managed to learn a posh accent and dress code in whatever £40k/year public school they attended.

Not only did it took a quite a lot of explaining INCLUDING at the end repeating some things in a “For dummies” short format to get that posh cunt to understandstand the problem, his reaction makes it painfully obvious that he didn’t even thought about things properly until that very moment.

I lived in the UK for over a decade and came out thinking that the country is profoundly and structurally anti-Meritocratic.

It think they were talking about the undead monster one.

The absence of their influence in Politics will make a massive difference.

The resources captured by the rich are probably a far smaller part of the problems they make than how they use the money they have to shape Politics and Public Opinion (via the Media they own), hence policies, hence the way our society and economy operates to maximized their own wealth.

Most Overconsumption and Negative Externality problems (both things that serve to maximized the profits that end up in the hands of Asset Owners and both the kind of thing that most damages the Environment) could be legislated away, but there is no will and there is no will because the politicians and the media are bought by those who benefit from things being as they are, and they are bought because those people have lots of money to buy them with.

Take the power to buy politicians and deciding what the press puts out away from the rich and all of a sudden profit-reducing pro-Environmental policies are not just politically acceptable but even demanded by public opinion, and given that said rich people would never give up on that without a massivelly destructive fight (literally Revolution), the safest and best option for about 99.9998% of people (8 billion minus 10,000 out of 8 billion) would probably be that a handful of rich people just die.

Most of the destruction is Capitalism and Consumer Society overproduction and overexploitation - a lot of unecessary shit is done and a lot of what’s done is done in unecessarily destructive ways (with lots of Negative Externatities) when it could’ve been done in far less destructive but less profit-generating ways, all because our political and economic structures are dedicated to the maximization of the wealth of the richest people.

(It’s not by chance that Ecologist parties are generally leftwing - the politicies for protecting the Environment are generally diametrally opposite of the politicies that maximize the investment profits of those who own most shit and have the most money)

I bet that only about 100 people need to die (all billionaires) to save the planet, an acceptable sacrifice.

It’s even better than that: it’s buying the farm by indebting the farm itself to then butcher the cattle, sell all buildings, sell the lands and sell the tractors, keeping the money.

Private Equity keeps the money from selling the valuable parts of the company whilst the debt is owed by the company, which is now bankrupt and if they properly use Bankruptcy Law or even just Tax Law (by having the bankrupty of their “investment” go down on their books as a loss) they might even manage to extract a bit more money out of the rotting corpse.

The Saudi Absolute Monarchy aren’t exactly know for their concern for the average person or their ability in managing anything that’s not the kind of business which is basically a self-operating money printing machine, like Oil.

Well, the natural evolution from “keep on squeezing existing IP without inventing anything new” is "“keep in squeezing long published games without publishing any new games” .

Given their bubby buddy relationship with the Zionist Supremacist Nation, it will more likely be “Saudi Victory Over The Persians”.

So, destroy its game making capabilities and just make money for the next 20 years from of microtransaction on existing content.

Kinda of a natural progression of AAA game publishers given the way things are nowadays.

Oh yeah - as I said, I lived in Britain for over a decade and I totally get how one can hear people who have no familiarity with Britain talking about the “British accent” and mentaly comment “you have no clue what’s you’re talking about”.

It’s just because I actually like learning languages, can notice accents in various languages and have thought about it, that I came up with an intellectual explanation of why that would be and that’s what I put forward (well, only part of the explanation, the whole thing would end up talking about Eskimo familiarity with ice and snow and how they have far more words for variants of it in their laguage than everybody else).

I was thinking that somebody from an English speaking country has to be exceptionally ignorant to think there is a “British accent” - even I as a Portuguese and well before going to live in Britain recognized “Scottish” accents from “Irish” accents from “English” accents, if only because in films you generally hear actors make those 3 highly distinctive kinds of accent. If I remember it correctly I could even spot scouse and cockney accents as different, even though I had no idea were they came from, but I’m thinking that I myself as a Portuguese can’t really tell any of the Brasilian accents apart and it all sounds like a “Brasilian” accent to me, so maybe there’s more it it than that - I could long tell apart multiple accents from Britain in a language that’s not my native one but can’t tell apart Brasilian accents in my own native language, so mere “ignorance” doesn’t seem a good explanation.

That said, I also picked up “y’all” from a friend in college, so it’s a mixed bag.

When I went to live in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) as an immigrant from Portugal I actually picked up the version of the Dutch “good morning” (“goedemorgen”) from the south of the country even though I was living in Amsterdam (totally opposite side of the country) because some colleagues in the first company I worked in and were I started to learn Dutch, said it like that (it was pretty much the first Dutch word I learned).

After a while there learning the language and Dutch customs I eventually figured out I was saying good morning with basically a farmer accent from the south, by I just kept doing if for fun plus by then I abused the shit out of what I called the “foreigner excuse” (you can have tons of fun knowingly humouristically “misunderstanding” local expressions and “misusing” their language and if the joke falls flat get away with it because the locals hear your accent and think “just a foreigner, doesn’t know our language well”).

It’s not just “usage without discernment”, it’s that AI flattens some costs which are very obvious and very measurable (coding) in such a way that it introduces or amplifies other costs which are much more diffused and hard to measure (code and design reviewing, bug fixing, maintenance, adding new requirements), plus AI is totally incapable of doing the higher level tasks that shape what code needs to be done (technical analysis, requirements analysis and in bigger companies technical architecture).

People who are non-experts, aren’t really senior domain experts or have some kinds of unbalanced expertise (they’ve never really progressed beyond being a coder, or they don’t have full life-cycle experience with big projects or they’re in an industry or position where they just make the code, shove it out the door and it’s not their problem anymore) just look at the one thing they in their ignorance think is THE cost in programming - coding - and go “hey, this AI thing is amazing” even while AI is creating all sorts of much more time consuming problems which they don’t really understand formally (they think those things are just “bad luck”, “there’s nothing we can do about avoiding this” and “it’s just the way things are in programming”) that require the time of people with higher expertise levels (i.e. who are more costly) to solve and AI doesn’t even help with the kind of stuff which if done wrongly or not at all can condemn a software project to fail before it even starts like just half-way decent Technical and Requirements Analysis.

That’s why you get some programmers going “this AI shit is amazing” whilst the really senior software development types are just nodding their heads and thinking “these people are ignorant as fuck juniors”.

I speak a couple of languages with enough fluency to spot accents (including English, having lived in Britain for more than a decade) and in my experience even small countries have lots of distinct regional accents.

That which you describe is pretty much true everywhere with all languages - people from abroad who don’t speak the language can’t really spot accents unless they’re at the fluency level of speaking that language and even those from countries were the same language is spoken can’t really tell apart most of the accents in that different country beyond rough categories (so for the British Isles that would be “English” accent, “Scottish” accent and “Irish” accent).

You’re kidding, but the “posh” accent of the British upper classes is to a greater or lesser extent trained rather than merely acquired when one is learning the language as a child.

Also people with regional accents often actively make an effort to change their accent to RP (aka the BBC accent) when they move to places like London, though I supposed that’s pretty common the World over when people whose regional accents are from places deemed “provincial” move to the big cities in more prosperous regions.

Oh, and immigrants, I almost forgot immigrants: many people with foreign accents do make a lot of effort to speak the local language with the local accent. In fact, for many immigrants in Britain this joke is pretty close to reality.

So there’s actually a drop of truth in the joke.

Most of the shit going on right now can be explained by fatcats in the West, having run out of Economic growth to capture as the West’s growth rate pretty much collapsed (quite possible due to the very actions those fatcats during the Neoliberal era, were amongst other things Social Mobility collapsed), have increasingly started pillaging the wealth and productive capacity of the rest of society, or in other words, exploiting everybody else.

It’s a vicious cycle were the tightening of the screws on everybody else leads to lower productivity and higher discontent which in turn leads to further tightening of the screws on everybody else in order for the elites to keep on getting wealthier at the same rate.

AI was supposed to be a way for the fatcats to be able to extract even more wealth from the rest whist having less exposure to all those pesky natural human and societal responses to that.