Totally agree.
Broadcast TV shows where designed with advertising in mind because it was the only way to monetize it at the time (except for tax-funded of course).
When cable TV started, one of their selling points was that it didn't have ads, at least on the "cable-native" channels.
But after a while, they started putting ads everywhere, and that of course lead to the shitty experience that made a lot of people "cut the wire" when streaming services started.

I'm wondering what's the next thing that will replace streaming, and eventually repeat the cycle.

The art of the deal: Remove your own leverage and then try to use it to negotiate.

AFAIK the sync is end to end encrypted

Can't confirm it, but I remember reading that it also has a "duress" PIN that you can use if being forced to unlock, that erases the entire phone.

Keepass is exactly that. Basically all the client side parts, and the database is a single encrypted file that you can sync however you want.

Exactly. LLMs don't understand semantically what the data means, it's just how often some words appear close to others.

Of course this is oversimplified, but that's the main idea.

The ones that monitor torrent to sue people are lawyer firms, not the government.

My bank's app has way less functionality than the web version, but it's used as a second factor to auth some operations, so I have to use both.

That was my first thought. Since when boycotting (aka not choosing) something is illegal?

I was hired to implement a CRM for an insurance company to replace their current system.

Of course no documentation or functional requirements where provided, so part of the task was to reverse engineer the current CRM.

After a couple of hours trying to find some type of backend code on the server, I discovered the bizarre truth: every bit of business logic was implemented in Stored Procedures and Triggers on a MSSQL database. There were no frontend code either on the server, users have some ActiveX controls installed locally that accessed the DB.

It's not only salaries:

about half of Signal’s overall operating budget goes towards recruiting, compensating, and retaining the people who build and care for Signal. When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.