ColdStream

Social media is a race to the bottom. Who can make the most addictive platform possible while also preventing others from getting too much of a foot hold.

Also, the scale of the media they must process means 'the algorithm' is a feature not a bug. It was always going to devolve into echo chambers.

It is funny seeing writers from the 1950's through to the 2000's all figure out the horrors this would unleash even if they didn't have a clue on the specifics of the technology.

I agree it will be seen as a failure but I suspect it is only once it has a point of absolute devastation that it cannot be ignored any more. I don't know what that will look like or when but it will be horrible.

Cigarettes is a good analogy. It is both addictive but broadly doesn't really help out the individual consuming them.

I with them on that. The internet is basically just infrastructure for email and some media like a podcast, otherwise the only reason I am here is because... well, I'm forced to be on a computer most of the week and not all of it is 'productive'. But after work, weekends, holidays I do not touch it.

When Metal Gear Solid 4 released on Ps3, they used uncompressed audio. I think part of it was just to show off how much storage Blu Ray had.

The game Titanfall on PC has the audio in it twice, compressed and decompressed. The decompressed was for machines with dual core or less so that there was enough overhead to keep the game running.

Bravo! here is to the next 25 years!

Haiku is the underdog that just keeps on moving forwards. Every release it gets just a little more complete.

There is a vital lesson in Haiku OS. If you benchmark anything on it, it isn't the fastest thing around. Compiling code is about 40% slower than Linux for instance (which is still impressive). But the user experience is absolutely divine. It is the benchmark for responsive UI and it should be a mark of shame on Apple, Microsoft and many Linux desktops that they are being out done by such a small team.

I had completely forgotten about the upload/download indicators in web browsers. Haven't seen them in decades.

Very nice.

I love that for the next few years they were commonly called Winchester drives due to IBM's original naming in the early 70's.

I find it so funny that there are new games that are are smaller than Wing Commander 3 despite the 32 year gap. To be fair, they obviously pack their data very differently.

Run a family business, but probably best you don't. Every family business I have worked for was basically walking into an intellectual MMA match of endless bickering amongst them. Apart time can be a good thing in moderation.

Same, been about 10 years now and it is the definition of 'It just works'.

I do like that they are up front with how the data is handled and what that can mean for privacy. They are just working within the system but being transparent with it.

Hmmm, that is an interesting pickle. Some are probably fairly easy to swap over but it is so dependent on each service.

Alas, short term convenience can lead to long term troubles.

Alas, you are already on the alternative. Hacker news feels like one of the last hold outs of the old internet.

I mean there is still some decent stuff but it is so rare nowadays. The value has been dropping for years.

Australia here. I have been playing around with this on various machines.

It seems to be using some cookie system that is bypassing this for the moment. Older machines I have still can use it without issue. But a fresh browser on the same connection will be prompted for the login.

Regardless, it is clear what direction this is going in. Age verification is also being tested in some places.

As usual, very cool to see how they present the data. But personally, the future projections feel a little too optimistic. I don't blame them, they are just going with the trends as they seen them now, but a lot of population expectations of ever a few decades back now look comical in terms of their peaks.

But as always, I am but one random internet dork who doesn't have the same information they have, so that is how you should see my take.

As soon as you said Goose, I knew exactly what this was going to be.

When MMX first came out and there were games that supported it, many reviewers were convinced that it improved 3D performance. As far as I could tell, it wasn't really used for 3D and that the only enhancement was to the audio system. But the placebo effect of "If has MMX thus its better" did stick around for a long while.

An aside, but when SSE came a long that was a real big leap in 3D performance, just as GPU's started to gain some independence. So in about 2010, I tried to fire up Turok 2 just to see how fast it would run on a then modern CPU/GPU setup. It couldn't crack 200fps, however games only a year or two later would fly way past that. Turok 2 came out just before SSE and thus basically ran in purely x86/x87 space, thus the performance gap.

Those companies will be quick to copy the tech, inference cost would plummet and there is a greater chance that these companies could make it to solvency. At least in the short term. Long term it might not be so great as consume hardware catches up.

While it is true they haven't lost anything, it does signal to shareholders, potential share holders and current VC's the direction of things.

Pretty much, I have said it for a while now, Softbank and Oracle are the ones I would be worried about. Both of them have put their companies wealth behind this, if it goes down so will they.

Others have played it fairly smart in terms of insulating potential issues.

"If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires" Epicurus

It was the very first lesson we had in economics in high school. The difference between a need and a want. Nowadays most people have a lot of wants far beyond any needs.

Yeah BMI is sort of a 'good enough' technique but also has some very obvious areas that it can miss. If you fall outside the typical fat to muscle ratio is a good example.

It has hit so cheap that here in Victoria that as of 1st October there will be 3 hours of free electricity in the middle of the day. Capped at 24KW a day but that is still impressive. As such, we can load up the washer/dryer and just schedule them for an 11am start.

I was about to say, by today's standards this site is actually fairly usable. That is depressing.

I do fear for all these youtube alternative app developers. If I was building them, no way am I handing over my personal ID to Google. They would leverage that almost immediately.

It really depends on your needs I guess. Not to undermine them in any fashion but If you just need some generic features and get something out quick, a pre-built engine can take a lot of the head ache out of it. I'm thinking stuff like last years 'Skate Story', built by one guy over a few years and it looks great, all done in Unity. If they were building their own engine it probably would still be another few years back and probably for not much gain.

But then things like Fez as you mentioned, back in 2012 when it came out, it would have been a real struggle to put together with off the shelf engines. I could see it being much easier now but still a product of its time.

One studio I am endlessly impressed with is Enhance games. Tetris Effect (UE4),Rez Infinite (UE4), Humanity (Unity) and Lumines Arise (Unity). When you fire them up, you would be really hard pressed to know what engine they are running as they have made the end results so unique that the base engines traits are almost completely gone. That is a real talent.

But if you have some unique tech that just needs to see the light of day or a work p=flow that just doesn't fit what everyone else is providing, go with your own engine. There will never be a one size fits all.

It is funny how we have two storm fronts here. Google trying to lock down apps to only Google approved developers, and legal decisions to open up alternative app stores that would potentially use apps that are not Google approved.

One wonders which side will win this one? All I know is, I still want my F-Droid with apps that Google doesn't have power over.

There was the sub era of Flash based nonsense. Somewhere in the 2002-2005 period.

As they say, now it is five social media platforms posting copies of each others content.