Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

What company won't wipe and reimage it before redeployment?

Hell, I usually wipe my own work PCs before surrendering them after an upgrade, to make sure it's done properly.

It was the prank that kept on giving.

Such a subtle huge flex.

The otherworldliness of the video seems to come more from the smoothness of the motion and the uncommon perspective. Because many of the scenes are captured with drones instead of helicopters or airplanes they have a literal bird's perspective in terms of velocity and altitude.

It's not "true" burn-in (like CRTs or OLED) as it goes away after a bit but it's fairly easy to trigger with the current trend of very white/light grey designs in macOS, the easiest way to notice it is move from a whitish area to a mid grey one (Daring Fireball is a great example of that problematic grey).

I also have been unlucky on that draw on my 2015 iMac. I barely noticed it at first but newer macOS versions have made it very noticeable sadly. One more reason to run Aerial ;)

Most people lived in 3 or 4 IIRC story rowhouses. The richest were at the bottom nearest the latrine, and had their own kitchen and servants to work the kitchen. The middle class were in the middle, with some kitchen facilities they operated themselves. The poorest were at the top with no way to cook and relied on street carts.

I was kinda shocked to read this description and how similar it was to a modern city. But since all that is wood, it's all gone. We only know even this because Rome was such a powerful and rich culture that there was a lot of writing, and a comparatively lot got saved for centuries. (Although the vast majority has still been lost, just from estimating based on works cited by ancient works that we don't have copies of)

Writing wasn't cheap, and preserving and transmitting writing isn't cheap. Writing about obvious everyday stuff everyone knows in such an environment has a much smaller chance of making it through the many historical hoops it needed to make its way to us.

Many other more prehistorical places could well have had significant buildup that we would recognize as modern in all but industrialization, but except when someone went to the trouble to build with stone instead of the more common random natural materials like wood.... all gone.

Who knows what went on that we just will never know about because it didn't get written down enough or the culture that wrote it wasn't powerful enough or long lived enough to preserve enough of those writings?

(IANA historian and might be a bit or a lot off. Biggest sources are "Rome: A history in seven sackings" and "Against the grain" Not trying to make strong claims here, just a general sense of wonder at how big the gap between what we assume about the past and what actually was could be. As a layman just dipping my toe into learning more about early history / prehistory, it's shocking and fascinating)

Though too be fair, I think the low power mode wasn't signaled by a black image but instead turning off the sync signals or something like that. (I hope you get the idea that I don't know how it worked here)

The point is that you could not give it no signal without it being off. LEDs can do this. The closest to black from a CRT I saw was from Sony's Professional Studio reference monitors that were $32K for a 32" screen. When Sony brought out their OLED reference monitors, they did a side-by-side comparisson of their best CRT, an LCD and the new OLED. All 3 were receiving the same signal, and when the demo started black, the CRT was clearly "on" but the OLED looked "off" with the LCD in between. Just about the time I'm thinking to myself that the CRT brightness was turned up, they switched to reference bars and all were calibrated correctly.

Arguing that CRTs could display true black is arguing against history.

Every article I read back then was written by a real person about something they cared about. Now it feels like every search result is just 100 pages of AI generated, generic content used to drive clicks to the site. And what content is actually written by a real person, it's in service to their brand and it's tuned for engagement and sharing on social media.

A lot of software back then was open and didn't hide too many of the details. Today, all the technical bits are hidden away and user experiences are carefully controlled and tuned for engagement. Think IRC vs Slack or FB messenger. On irc, you can whois, dcc, technical bits everywhere in the UI.

In the 90s, there was a question whether or not you should include ads and banners on your site. Later, it seemed like the ads went away but actually they took over. So much of the internet experience now is about monetization. Even malware is about making money. You gotta jump into the new tech to get that feeling of wonder and possibly.

Every article needs to be about something that's world changing (positive or negative) and they need enough articles to put in between all the ads they sold. If there isn't enough world changing stuff in a given month, or the writers got started on the wrong things, they've got to hype up what they've got.