dbg31415

I don't get why they bother changing the aspect ratio in the first place. What audience is saying, "I want a weird one-off version of the show in HD, please"?

Most of these shows were shot for 4:3. Directors framed for 4:3, lit for 4:3, blocked scenes for 4:3, and even built their special effects around 4:3. Stretching that work into widescreen feels a bit like deciding to colorize Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It solves a problem no one actually has.

Viewers are already used to black bars, and we watch lower-resolution content constantly. Vertical phone clips shot by amateurs on TikTok, grainy GIFs, and IMAX footage down-scaled to fit our phone (and connection). Content that wasn't designed to fill the entire screen isn't the issue.

From what I've seen, most of these old shows end up on free or bargain streaming services packed with ads. I watched an episode of Highway to Heaven with my dad where they sped up the dialogue and trimmed pauses, squeezed the credits into a tiny picture-in-picture box, and still lopped off another minute so the episode ended mid-sentence. All of that was just to make room for extra commercial slots the original show was never designed to accommodate. Disgusting, really... though I suppose you get what you pay for.

Sticking with the original 4:3 and simply adding pillarbox bars is cleaner, simpler, and far more respectful -- and ultimately more enjoyable for the audience.

Relevant :

* "That Was A Mistake": Steven Spielberg Admits He Regrets Removing Guns From E.T. // https://screenrant.com/et-guns-removed-steven-spielberg-regr...

* 5 Worst Changes Star Wars Made From The Original Cuts // https://screenrant.com/worst-changes-star-wars-special-editi...

* 'Casablanca' gets colorized, but don't play it again, Ted | Interviews | Roger Ebert // https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/casablanca-gets-colori...

Where are salaries? Where are administration overhead? Where are insurance company profits and dividends coming from?

This whole thing loses all credibility by not listing those things.

Thanks!

Good explanation.

I just liked that I could re-boot my MacBook Pro into "Game Mode" back when there was an Intel chip. I liked that about Bootcamp.

I played Marathon back in the day. Ha. It was a great game, and actually had a really good plot... most video games at the time didn't (especially not other FPSs).

Escape Velocity was another great Mac game from the past. And while Maelstrom wasn't really original, it was well-executed. I don't think there was any sort of PC version of either of those.

Spectre (the first FPS I remember playing), Bolo (the first multi-player network game I remember playing), Lemmings, Myst, Dark Castle, Load Runner... all amazing classic games that were Mac-first if not Mac-only. (=

Edit: Bolo may not have been Mac-first... but that's where I played it. Ha.

Partnerships could mean more than just fab capacity -- maybe even incentives to build an instruction translation layer so software built for Intel chips could run natively on Apple Silicon. Something like Rosetta, but at the hardware level.

Getting a lot of down-votes for this... why are people so down on the idea? Was Boot Camp really that unpopular? I always enjoyed it -- especially for gaming. Sure, laptops weren't ideal, but even then the same games ran noticeably better on Windows than on macOS.

Any screen is just an advertising delivery system.

Relevant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g

Please tell me this means we can have Bootcamp back?

macOS, but mostly for the hardware. The operating system matters less to me than having a good screen and a machine that isn’t made of crappy plastic. After nearly 20 years years on a MacBook Pro, it’s hard to go back to anything that feels cheap. =P

Better to show up on Slashdot, instead of Fucked Company.

I get that he just wants to build something alone in his basement -- without product managers, sales guys, or customers with SLAs breathing down his neck. But he's doing an enormous amount of work specifically to avoid charging money for something that's already providing real value. That's the part that feels odd to me.

If you've got "200 users" who rely on your tool so deeply that a migration glitch would seriously hurt their business, you're past the point where this is a casual side project. That's the point where you should at least have some path for people to pay you.

In my head there are three phases of an open-source project:

* Toy – "I scratched my own itch and threw it on GitHub."

* Product – "People actually rely on this. Now I owe them migrations, docs, and not breaking stuff."

* Infrastructure – "If this dies, someone's company explodes and I'm on the front page of Hacker News for the wrong reason."

This post is basically the story of moving from (1) to (2).

What I rarely see is a maintainer explicitly saying which phase they're in. Users see "kanban board, nice site, good docs" and instantly a user is going to map this to, "Jira replacement!" And the author is thrilled to be compared to a polished SaaS!

But then both will be "shocked" to realize that one person can't match an entire product team, support team, design team, etc.

I think there's a lack of honesty in a lot of open source projects. I'd love to see more READMEs say things like:

* "Hobby project. I reserve the right to disappear for a month."

* "No guarantees, no SLAs. Use at your own risk!" (or even more blunt, "If you use this in production, or for mission-critical business practices, you're a fucking moron.")

* "If you're a company depending on this, you should be sponsoring it."

Anyway, seen this countless times... And the real tension starts when the author's excitement about having users surpasses the amount of work generated by those users. As long as the author wants to avoid working on a team, with business rules, and other stakeholders... it'll never actually scale.

Worse, the difference between users and customers is that there's no barrier to entry. Users expectations drift upward -- whether they are paying or not. Users don't just want fixes -- they want roadmaps, guarantees, backwards compatibility, and custom migration help. The code is open-source, but the longer the project goes on, the more the expectations drift towards enterprise-grade.

Boundaries matter. "No, that's out of scope." "No, I won't support your forked schema." "No, I can't chase down your custom patches." Those aren't signs of being unhelpful -- they're what keep the project from collapsing under its own weight. And when you have to start saying things like this, you've past the point of needing a bigger team... which means you're also past the point of where you should have started charging money for your product.

Relevant. CEOs lie. Boldly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_ZDQKq2F08

I work right at the junction of marketing tech -- eCommerce, marketing sites, account management systems. Theoretically I should be living in compliance hell, but here's the dirty secret:

To "follow" every rule, all you really need is another layer of UX friction. Another modal. Another "consent wizard." A few toggles buried under Manage Settings → Advanced → Optional → Something You'll Never Click → Opt Me Out.

If you want to be sneaky, add a dark pattern. Make "yes" mean "no." Delay the buttons loading behind some animation, while showing other buttons from the start. (Users will always mash the first one that looks vaguely like "close" without reading anything.)

Or just bribe them, "Get 200 extra points for opting in! Only 45,000 more to redeem a free small drink!" Congratulations -- you're now "compliant.

In practice, GDPR mostly results in one more click. That's the whole impact. A seemingly smart privacy law reduced to just an annoyance tax.

(This is a big reason I run Firefox with uBlock Origin, and NextDNS on my router and phone, with Steven Black's block list. Ha. I do value my privacy, and the more ads and trackers you can block the better shot you'll have at keeping some of it. At least until you go and do something stupid like join a social network or messenger app, or start clicking accept to get 200 extra points.)

* StevenBlack/hosts: Consolidating and extending hosts files from several well-curated sources. Optionally pick extensions for porn, social media, and other categories. // https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

* NextDNS - The new firewall for the modern Internet // https://nextdns.io/

* uBlock Origin – Get this Extension for Firefox (en-US) // https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

Remember, Roblox is toxic and exploits young people.

- Roblox Isn't a Game | Psychology Today // https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/video-game-health/20...

- Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ

- Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY

Roblox is Darker Than You Think (ft. Ruben Sim) - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av03P5D11PQ&t=55s

> Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.

Something has changed in how we use headlights, and not for the better.

Historically, drivers behaved very differently. When "brights" were actually rare and reserved for dark stretches of highway, you'd dim them the moment you saw another car approaching. Often that meant switching to low beams when the other vehicle was more than a thousand feet away. Courtesy and safety were the norm.

The technology has come a long way. Early headlights in the 1880s burned oil or kerosene. Acetylene gas lamps followed, and electric lighting appeared in the early 1900s. For decades after 1940, U.S. regulations froze headlight design into a two-lamp, 7-inch sealed-beam configuration. That rule unintentionally limited improvements in beam shape and brightness. Only in the 1970s and 1980s did halogens and replaceable-bulb designs become widely permitted, which opened the door to much brighter and more varied systems.

Then came the xenon era in the late 1990s and early 2000s. High-Intensity Discharge (HID) lamps felt futuristic at the time, but they were also infamous for their glare, especially when installed into housings not designed for them. This is where "riced-out" aftermarket kits made things worse. People would drop cheap HID or later LED bulbs into reflector housings built for halogen. The result was scattered, unfocused light that looked bright from the driver's seat but created a wall of glare for everyone else. That trend never fully went away.

Today, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108 (FMVSS 108) governs headlamps. It sets minimum performance requirements and basic definitions for high and low beams, but it does not impose strict limits on maximum brightness or color temperature. The old "300 candlepower requires a dimmer switch" phrasing still floats around, but there is no tight federal cap on lumens or color warmth. States can enforce aiming requirements, but in practice they rarely do. Nobody is pulling cars over with a light meter.

Modern LEDs changed the equation again. They're efficient, crisp, and extremely "white" (actually "blue") which makes them appear even brighter to human eyes at night. Complaints about perceived glare have been climbing for years, and there's no shortage of real-world examples of it in the wild. https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/

Automakers tried to help with automatic high-beam systems, but these were designed to detect oncoming headlamps, not pedestrians. If you're walking your dogs at night, the system may not dim because it "sees" nothing to react to. Many drivers rely on auto mode and never manually intervene, so they cruise around blasting full brightness without realizing it.

My workaround is simple. I carry a high-power flashlight and give a quick shine toward cars running high beams. The auto-dimmer interprets it as another vehicle and drops to low beam. It also alerts the driver that something is off. Plenty of neighbors have told me they had no idea their headlights weren't dimming. (Teslas are by far the worst offenders.)

This is the flashlight I use:

https://www.costco.ca/infinity-x1-7000-lumen-flashlight.prod...

I want Mozilla Observatory.

They did a good job with that.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/observatory

This whole thing is sure a tangle.

Open source projects want people to use their work. Google wants bugs -- especially security ones -- found and fixed fast. Both goals make sense. The tension starts when open source developers expect payment for fixes, and corporations like Google expect fixes for free.

Paying for bug fixes sounds fair, but it risks turning incentives upside down. If security reports start paying the bills, some maintainers might quietly hope for more vulnerabilities to patch. That's a dangerous feedback loop.

On the other hand, Google funding open source directly isn't automatically better. Money always comes with strings. Funding lets Google nudge project priorities, intentionally or not -- and suddenly the "open" ecosystem starts bending toward corporate interests.

There's no neat solution. Software wants to be used. Bugs want to be found and fixed. But good faith and shared responsibility are supposed to be the glue that holds the open source world together.

Maybe the simplest fix right now is cultural, not technical: fewer arguments on Twitter, more collaboration, and more gratitude. If you rely on open source, donate to the maintainers who make your life easier. The ecosystem stays healthy when we feed it, not when we fight over it.

I was excited when I saw the headline -- I thought Apple had finally brought back a smaller iPhone, like the Mini.

But nope. It's just an ugly phone purse.

Look, it's bad enough that the much-hyped Vision Pro didn't take off (1), and the much-hyped iPhone Air didn't take off (2), and default Apple apps will soon have ads (3), and the latest MacOS is full of issues that would have been caught if they did any QA on it before release (4)... but Tim Apple is also throwing bribes at Trump every chance he gets (5)...

Time for some new leadership at Apple.

(1) https://applemagazine.com/us-vision-pro-sales-expected-to-de...

(2) https://nypost.com/2025/11/11/business/apple-pulls-plug-on-i...

(3) https://www.tuaw.com/2025/10/27/apple-maps-to-introduce-ads-...

(4) https://osxdaily.com/2025/09/19/why-im-holding-off-on-upgrad...

(5) https://www.thedailybeast.com/billionaire-apple-ceo-tim-cook...

Online games are nearly impossible to preserve.

Most games are online games now.

Multi-player games depend on servers, economies, and communities that exist only as long as someone's logging in and paying the bills. When those servers go dark, the logic, data, and social fabric disappear with them. Owning the client isn't owning the game. The real thing was the networked experience -- like trying to preserve a concert by saving the recording but not the crowd.

Legal and technical barriers seal the deal. Server code is proprietary and rarely released. Reverse-engineering it breaks copyright law in most countries, so preservation sits in a gray zone. Even when fans rebuild servers, the result is closer to a reenactment than a recovery. And they seldom scale to the heights of the actual game.

Future historians will have YouTube clips and half-working emulators -- fragments of worlds that were never meant to last.

Just a reminder that there are ongoing issues where Facebook prevents Native Americans from signing up or being allowed to use their legitimate names because their legal names are judged “inauthentic.”

This has been documented for well over a decade. Facebook has publicly promised changes, but the problem persists and support responses appear weak. Almost like they don’t care at all…

https://www.vice.com/en/article/facebook-is-still-making-it-...

True (*)

They can't deny coverage for pre-existing conditions anymore, but insurers still have hundreds of other ways to avoid paying.

There's no silver lining in the U.S. healthcare system -- it's built to exhaust, confuse, and bankrupt patients. And it's only gotten worse in recent years. (Will only get worse with the addition of more AI.)

Joe Lieberman, a supposed Democrat, killed any real chance for reform we had in our generation. He then left Congress and quickly died -- his legacy is the broken healthcare system we have today, totally rigged against the very patients it's supposed to serve.

> 300 counts per minute

Roughly 10x background radiation.

So like two weeks of sunshine in a day.

Not a good day. Not fatal.

They do have an end to end encryption option.

Wonder if that helps any.

https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...

Just out of curiosity why do you want cellular in a laptop? Just seems like another monthly service bill.

I just tether to my phone. Wouldn’t that work?

This happens when you have “technical” founders who don’t really know the tech, and a bunch of engineers who then have to report to that person.

When you hire senior people, expect them to tell you what you need to do. Not the other way around. Hire people who are smarter than you.

I hope we'll get back to building things that actually matter -- solutions that help real people; products that are enjoyable to use, and are satisfying to build.

As the noise fades, and with luck, the obsession with slapping "AI" on everything will fade with it. Too many hype-driven CEOs are chasing anything but substance.

Some AI tools may survive because they're genuinely useful, but I worry that most won't be cost-effective without heavy subsidies.

Once the easy money dries up, the real engineers and builders will still be here, quietly making things that work.

Altman's plea -- "Come on guys, we just need a few trillion more!" -- and that error-riddled AI slide deck will be the meme that marks the top of the market.

I don’t understand why we need age verification in Discord. Why should people who play games have to prove they’re old enough to talk to others? It’s not like anyone ever forced anybody else to join your Discord community, it’s all opt in!

If parents don’t want their kids playing certain games, or if a community is more adult in nature, then don’t buy those games for them. If they don’t want their kids exposed to bad influences, they can move the computer into a shared space or—better yet—just engage with their kids on a human level. That’s called parenting.

Politicians shouldn’t be meddling in this kind of personal interaction. It didn’t work when Nancy Reagan or Tipper Gore tried to police music, and it’s not working now. Modern authoritarians are just running the same tired playbook.

Age verification doesn’t make kids safer. It adds bureaucracy, harvests private data, and pretends to solve a problem that only families can actually fix. The result is more surveillance, less trust, and the illusion of protection.

Yeah, it sucks. Roll it back, Apple. Roll it back.

It’s strange that we don’t require police officers, soldiers, or anyone paid by the government to provide a DNA sample before serving. We already fingerprint, drug test, and run background checks. A DNA record would make it easier to solve crimes, clear the innocent, and hold people accountable—especially those who carry weapons or authority on the public’s behalf. If we trust them with that kind of power, we should also expect that level of transparency.

Out of curiosity, why are they doing toilet paper roll style paper? Wouldn’t it be easier to spread adoption by using just standard printer paper?

“Over 30? We don’t think you can be trained to use AI.”

Feels like another form of age discrimination in tech. Anyone who had a good idea how to do things costs too much money, and it’s better to hire people who blindly trust the AI to do the work. If you can’t spot hallucinations or bad code, do they exist? =P

Hey Mate,

I think any contractor who relies heavily on sub-contractors is a little shady by default. At that point they aren't paying for a good job, just for someone to "put tiles on the bathroom wall." If anything slows that person down, they don't get paid. So the sub-contractor has no incentive to call out flaws, or termite damage, or any order of operations issues that might stop them from finishing that day. Sub-contractors just want to get in, get done, and get paid.

It's better to find a contractor who does the work themselves, or at least one you trust as a partner to inspect the work of their crews. But here's the catch here... time is money. Someone has to absorb the cost of delays. Those days don't just get refunded. That's why the relationship is so important. You need to make it clear you're willing to pay for things to be done right. If that message doesn't reach every person who walks onto the job, corners will get cut.

But to even recognize when corners are being cut, you need some basic knowledge of building techniques. Knowing the "right way" to do a job makes all the difference.

When the big freeze hit Austin a few years ago, a lot of pipes burst around town. Some of my neighbors had flooding too, but their stories sound nothing like mine. Most of them just say, "Hey, I got a remodeled bathroom!" or "Hey, I got new floors out of it." I don't think every contractor is shady. But I did get a shady contractor. Another way to spot them... anyone willing to do "insurance prices" is usually looking for ways to cut every corner. Insurance is really a scam that forces you to use the worst contractors for the job... it's unfortunate.

The contractor wasn't just shady with me -- they were shady with the insurance company too. Honestly, I'd call it attempted fraud. At first I didn't catch on. For example, they told me, "Your laundry room doesn't have a drain. We can add one to bring it up to code, and the insurance company will pay for it." That sounds good to a homeowner to hear the insurance company will pay for it, but it should have been a giant red flag. If they're looking to pad the bills that they send a supposed partner, you can be sure they'll play games with you too.

Another example: they said I needed a brand-new subfloor to fix a few "soft spots" and creaks in a 20-year-old second-story floor. The upcharge was about $8,000. What they should have done was tighten the existing boards in the bad spots and spread self-leveling compound across the whole thing. Instead, they just dropped new plywood on top of the old plywood. Later, another contractor told me this wasn't even a fix. The floor still had the same soft spots and creaks. (Seriously WTF!) And then the top step was the wrong height; it's more dangerous than I would have imagined -- everyone tripped on it. Fixing it after the fact was expensive.

Live and learn!

For the record, the standard process is straightforward: rip up the old floor, tighten the subfloor down (because after 20 years it will have shifted), apply self-leveling compound, wait a day for it to dry, then lay the new floor. That's it. But I suspect they tried to add another layer of plywood because there's no "wait a day" step there; if they do it the wrong way, they don't have to have a crew come back out. But there shouldn't have been an upcharge or anything special needed. The contractor just took advantage of the fact that I'd asked about the soft spots, knew I didn't know the right fix, and made up something expensive.

Anyway, I don't share this story to scare anyone away from homeownership. Owning a house can be great. The real lesson is: educate yourself. Learn how homes are built and repaired. Watch a few "inspection gone wrong" videos on YouTube. Try small projects -- replace trim, hang a door, tile a bathroom, or even just build a birdhouse. Once you know the basics, you'll be able to tell when a contractor is cutting corners or upselling you on nonsense.

(So many good videos that show you how to do this work yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvo-n2AYZnA )

Knowledge is your best defense against shady folks and Mickey Mouse workmanship.