YT can’t really serve more ads

They say to hold their beer and watch this…

A bit more of a direct comparison would be IRC to, say, Matrix. Last year I see an article announcing Matrix user count and it was more than all the internet users combined in 1997. This is a near-nothing number in modern internet scale, not even 4% of Facebook userbase, but I’d say that Matrix is about as close as I can conceive of “IRC-like” mindset applied with more modern principles in play. Yes you have billions in more popular social networking and communication networks, but there remains many millions of people’s worth of “internet” that resembles the 90s in some structural ways, which is how many people we had on the internet total in the 90s.

One huge difference is of course that no longer does a wider populace see those folks as potential pathfinders for others to join, but their own little weird niche not playing the same way as everyone else, with no advantage that they can understand in play.

Yeah, and the ol’ “slashdot effect” is hardly a concern anymore because things have gotten so much more capable as slashdot didn’t grow.

I’m sitting at a laptop with 8-way 2.3 ghz, 32GB of RAM, a way faster NVME storage than any datacenter array would deliver in that era with a gigabit internet connection from my house. Way outclassing any hosting demands from the 90s for the most severe “slashdotting” that slashdot ever could inflict back then.

To deal with ‘modern internet scale’, you have to resort to more resources, but to keep up with the ‘like 90s subset’, little old rasberry pis can even keep pace.

To a large degree, the same internet that used to be, still is.

Keep in mind that in the era they are nostalgic for, the internet involved roughly 4% of the world’s population. As big in the public conciousness was, it was a relatively small thing.

For example, most people see Lemmy as pretty small and much slower content coming at you than reddit. However Lemmy is still way bigger than what a mid 90s experience with the internet would be. I can still connect to play BBS Door games and there’s barely anyone there, but there were barely any people there back then either. The “old” internet is still there, it’s just small compared to the vast majority of the internet that came about later.

Some things are gone, but replaced. For example Geocities now has neocities, which is niche by today’s standards, but wouldn’t be shocked if neocities technically is bigger than geocities ever was in absolute terms.

Some things are gone and won’t come back. The late 2000s saw a really nice and stable all-you-can-watch streaming experience from Netflix, and their success brought about maddening licensing deals where material randomly appears, moves, and disappears and where a lot of material demands more to “rent” than buying an actual Blu Ray disc of it would cost (have gone back to buying discs as of late because it’s cheaper than streaming).

He wasn’t instructed to do so, it was a statement that while they wanted to work together and address his concerns if possible, ultimately if he only offers up a “dont do it at all”, they are within their rights unless he moves away from open source.

From what I’ve heard Intel on top of doing more of the work ready to go, they also tend to pay for more development expense associated with products based on their stuff.

With AMD, less work is done for you and you are kind of on your own. This is why partners tend to be more enthusiastic about Intel offerings.

Note that to some extent, this might have been a necessary step in the relative popularity of computing.

Folks remembering how flexible and open ended things were in the 90s were a tiny sliver of the population. At the time about 1% of the world were participating in the internet, now the majority of the population participates on the internet.

I would have loved for the industry to keep up the trends of the 90s (AOL/Prodigy lost out to a federated internet, centralized computing yielded to personal computing) instead of going backwards (enduser devices becoming tethered to internet hosted software, relatively few internet domains and home hosted sites being considered suspicious rather than normal), but this might have just been what it took for the wider population to be able to cope.

Gen X and older witnessed a young generation born into kind of working, but kind of janky technology. They saw kids figure out obscure VCR programming interfaces that let the kids record something they wanted, but only by navigating very obtuse interface rendered exclusively with 7 segment displays with a few extra static indicators. A teenager playing that new DOS game, but first they had to struggle with getting the conventional memory, upper memory, EMS/XMS and just the right set of TSRs running, involving mucking about with menu driven config.sys/autoexec.bat tailored for their use cases. Consumer electronics and computers of the time demanded a steep learning curve, but they could still do magic, leading to the trope in the 80s and 90s media of tech wonder kids doing awesome stuff way better than the adults. Even if you have a super advanced submarine and very smart people, you needed your teenager computer kid to outclass everyone.

By now, we’ve made high res touch screens that can be embedded in everything for cheap, and embedded systems that would be the envy of a pretty high end desktop from the year 2000, which was capable of running more friendly operating environments. The rather open ended internet has largely baked in how the participants get to play. The most common devices lock down what the user can do, because the user can’t be trusted not to break themselves with malware.

The end result is that we may have the same proportion of people with the deep technical skills, but a lot of people are now unimpressed. In the mid 90s, less than 1 percent of the population had direct internet experience, and by 2008, 25% had that experience. So even if you still have 1% of really tech savvy people, there’s over 24x as many non savvy people that don’t need to marvel at those savvy people because they are getting about what they want out of it.

There’s a smell of it being some pet project of a big architect.

Windows 10 had a feature called ‘Timeline’. It wasn’t particlarly wanted by many people and it cluttered up an otherwise somewhat useful task overview. It was canned.

This seems to be that guy saying “Hey, I know you canned Timeline on me and called it a failure, but that’s just because we didn’t AI it up, and now we can and everyone is going to want it!”

I’d say it’s more people who are repeatedly told they are smart can be very stupid.

Many of then might even be “smart”, but the important part is having unwarranted confidence.

Complicating things is that society rewards confidence way more than it rewards competence. If I’m honest about a lack of competence in a certain area but someone else lies during the interview, good chance they are going to get the job over me.

The reality is that everyone can be very very stupid, and so long as each and every one of us is willing to accept and recognize our weakness we aren’t as likely to be assholes.

Our three weapons are…

I get and appreciate devil’s advocate sort of approach. I sometimes do that. But I do so by trying to find additional context and concrete information. I don’t think it’s as useful to go to some lengths to invent hypotheticals not in evidence. Here we have the full link in context with Twitter list of reasons of why they could mark it unsafe. Reading through that list and that link, there’s not a whole lot of room for a surprisingly understandable non obvious reason to put above the more straightforward explanation.

McDonald’s tried to get AI to take over order taking. And gave up.

Yeah, it’s not going to be coming for programmer jobs anytime soon. Well, except maybe a certain class of folks that are mostly warming seats that at most get asked to prep a file for compatibility with a new Java version, mostly there to feed management ego about ‘number of developers’ and serve as a bragging point to clients.

Nah, if it doesn’t pan out then all these folks will pretend they never said this, but in 24 months programming will be obsoleted by <insert fresh buzz here>

It’s not a matter of knowledge, it’s a matter of what they want.

One may desire to be advantaged/superior to some others, and particularly nice and easy if race or gender is a convenient shorthand for knowing who is ‘in’ and ‘out’, as long as you are in the ‘in’ group of course.

So life is just plain easier if women are just supposed to sit there and please them. If the ‘natural order’ justifies that convenience, then one may be attracted to that thought. To the extent fairness and equality makes their life harder, they are inclined to be upset at that obstackle. It’s convenient if the legal and labor world gives their race preferential treatment, and other groups are left desperate enough to do whatever they need done but don’t want to do, and scared enough of the government to not get “uppity”.

Sometimes overt evil, sometimes more subconscious manifesting as being very receptive to narratives that correlate with those feelings.

The real problem is that Nothing brings… nothing to the table. Oh look, another startup making another Android phone in a sea of companies making Android phones, with yet another skin.

At least with Photoshop (as bad as the model is), at least they are actually running the software and storing and backing up the associated data for it.

With the car, it’s all local to the car without BMW having to incur any expense for that functionality to keep going.

Sorry, your bicycle’s gear selector is locked into a single gear until you pay your subscription for the other gears.

I used to just watch YouTube at default, taking the ads as they felt like.

Now, no thanks. If I have to watch as many ads for as long as they mandate, I’ll just watch other things.

I have this comforter I bought at a consignment sale for 15 dollars years ago. Every day I revel in how much I like it.