I've gotten the pop-up once or twice, but updating uBlock fixed that.
I have instead noticed a large decrease in quality, things like frozen images/pages and endless buffering. I don't know if all that is related, but it did start around the time YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers.
The most profoundly puzzling thing to me is their insistence that magic words will somehow make authorities back off.
Like, they believe that there is this grand conspiracy involving the Federal Reserve and maritime law and birth names and whatever else. And yet they also believe that the forces behind this conspiracy must acquiesce if you just invoke the right language.
Do they never consider that an entity powerful enough to do all that could also just ignore their demands? Like, even if the conspiracy is true, why would its perpetrators just give up because some random person told them to?
Between my wife and me, we have Netflix, Prime, Disney+, Curiosity, DropOut, and Nebula for videos. I also have one paid Twitch subscription. We could probably stand to cancel one or two.
For music, I have Spotify and my wife has YouTube Music. We have different preferences in sorting and recommendations, and at this point either of us migrating to the other's preferred service would be more work than it's probably worth.
My first attempt to cancel my SiriusXM subscription saw the agent tell me that it was "impossible" because I had "just renewed." It was true that I had recently renewed, but only because I had forgotten to cancel it in time. Since that was my mistake I was willing to just let it go and just use the service another year. But in order to stop that from happening again, I wanted to cancel early, which they didn't let me do.
My second attempt three months later saw the agent protest again, saying that I should call back when it was closer to renewal. This time I put my foot down and got them to cancel my renewal.
Or so I thought.
I finally had to call them again eight months later after I started getting emails hyping up my impending renewal. It seems that instead of outright canceling, they had instead put a note on my file to cancel at a later date - a note I'm presuming they were going to ignore.
Maybe their system really did make it impossible for front-line agents to cancel to far out from the renewal date. That would explain the agents' behaviour, and if true it makes SiriusXM look even worse
Definitely the worst experience I've ever had trying to cancel a subscription.
My story is a bit different than others. I am not a Trekkie, and most of what I know about the franchise is from cultural osmosis and from catching the odd rerun of TNG in the 90s.
I have, however, been a junior officer in a ship, and much of Lower Deck's content struck a chord because I've been there. I've been assigned the banal tasks, I've argued with other crew members on an opposite watch, and I've had to fight for the attention of the senior officers.
Disclaimer: I am not encouraging you to join the navy just to enjoy LD. That would be silly.
Having learned French as a second language, I can say that the gendered noun thing wasn't the most difficult aspect, but it was the most consistently annoying. There are signifiers that makes the gender of some nouns very obvious, but then there are just as many others where it feels arbitrary or even contradictory to the established trends.
I don't think I could say, honestly. My last (and first) dumb phone was a hand-me-down from my mother c2009, and I rarely used it. It spent most of its remaining life in a drawer with its battery removed, only coming out when I was going places where other forms of communication would be scarce. I think I made maybe a dozen calls (and one seriously garbled text message) before grudgingly getting a smart device in 2011.
And yes, my Boomer mother had gone through multiple cell phones before her Millennial son got his first.
... there is only passion.
That is quite possibly the most Air Canada thing ever.
I'm in the same camp. I was generally fine when it was an occasional skippable pre-roll ad before some videos. But the last time I watched a video without a blocker, there were two unskippable ads at the start plus two more each at the 7 and 14 minute mark of a 20 minute video.
This hour has 22 minutes indeed.
When I was growing up, my two sisters and I decided what to watch on TV pretty much by pure, brutal democracy. They formed a bloc against me and I always got outvoted, so it was Little House on the Prairie (and The Waltons) every day after school.
When I was learning French I was told penser and croire were interchangeable in this context.