sylver_dragon

The value of pi depends on who you ask

Got about half way through the article before it became obvious that it’s just “DOOM, DOOOM, DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!” in prose form.

Gaming is changing, which is different from never. I mean, I could bemoan the death of 2d puzzlers ala King’s Quest because Sierra is no more, but there are still similar games being made by smaller studios. We may hit a slump, and the main actors may change, but gaming isn’t going anywhere. AAA titles will continue to mostly be money chasing shovelware, indie titles will continue to be where the real development and experimentation happens. But making games, especially PC games, has become so accessible that even the death of a major studio will amount to nothing more than some IP changing hands. And there is still a lot of money to be made in games, so companies will keep chasing that.

Magazines have been predicting the death of PC gaming for decades now. And yet, PC gaming is still incredibly vibrant. The current RAM shortage is just a hiccup. We’ve had RAM shortages before. If the demand for RAM stays at the current level manufacturers will respond by bringing new fabs online. More likely the AI bubble will pop and we’ll be flooded in used RAM and GPUs. The economy will cycle, hiring will pick back up and markets will move on to the "Next Big Thing"^TM

But ya, a headline of “Markets in down cycle, RAM supply currently constrained by high demand” doesn’t motivate clicks.

Because someone is a serial adapter.

That’s funny, while I still buy Samsung TVs, I hate their phones. So much of what their phones can do is usually locked to only working in Samsung’s apps and those are universally dog shit. The phones themselves are also often privacy and user control nightmares.

Granted, there isn’t a lot of good choices for phones these days. I’m still running an old LG phone and have been looking outside Android as my next possible solution. But, I also haven’t had a reason to upgrade.

Ah yes, let’s use contractors. Anyone else remember when USIS was just faking background checks? I’ve been a Federal contractor, and while there are some great, hard working people doing government work as contractors, the companies behind those contractors are almost universally doing everything they can to skirt the line between “completing the contract” and “outright fraud”. They certainly have no interest in doing what is best for the organization, people or tax payers. It’s all money grubbing assholes looking to leech off the tax payer.

We need to realize that 90% of everything done in the wake of 9/11 were bad ideas. With DHS itself being a monumental fuck-up. We did need better inter-department communications. But, by creating one agency to rule them all, we put too much budget in one bucket and failed to let specialists in each area focus on their area of specialization.

Ya, the defense economics of a $50k Shahead drone being taken out by a $4 milion Patriot missile do not work in the defenders’ favor. If Iran can keep that up long enough, those conventional weapons will start slipping through. Still, this was a known factor with Trump and Bibi’s war and I don’t think a bunch of civilians getting killed in drone attacks was a significant deterrent (QED, that war is going forward). While I believe that could result in the US/Israel making some propaganda declaration of victory and quietly ending the war, I don’t think it would ever be a deterrent in the future. That’s why I would expect Iran to want nukes. If they want to ensure that the US and Israel don’t just randomly drop bombs on Iran when a US leader needs a distraction, they need a credible threat of Israeli cities disappearing in a mushroom cloud. That’s something that couldn’t just be ignored.

Between Trumps first and second terms, he has demonstrated the issue with any long term deal Iran might make with the US. Under Obama, Iran had agreed to international inspections and a general framework that would have ensured that they followed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (of which they are a signatory). Trump rolled up in 2017 and tossed that out the window. And now Trump has decided to further destroy any credibility the US had left by dropping bombs. I doubt there is any world left where the Iranian Government trusts the US Government. I’d expect them to go more the North Korea route, isolate themselves further and make a sprint for nuclear weapons. They will have to content themselves with being part of the BRICS system. But a nuclear umbrella, with a high likelihood of nuking Tel Aviv, seems the only way to ensure the US/Israel aren’t randomly lobbing bombs at them.

Tempting. though I might have to go with FauxPilot.

Well, you see. If Trump gets enough US soldiers killed, or as he called them, suckers and losers, there will be less demand for products and prices will go down. Checkmate, economists!

Microslop needs to ask Copilot about the Streisand Effect. As someone not chronically on social media, I hadn’t heard about this term yet. Now, it’s one of my favorites.

Funny enough, I’ve been experimenting with Copilot at work and it does have some genuine uses for looking up information quickly. Especially when trying to troubleshoot Microslop products. Between the disaster called “Windows 11”, the cluster-fuck which is New Outlook and the complete shitshow which falls under the umbrella of “Defender”, it’s obvious that they have stopped investing in QA and testing. At least Copilot can help me find the right document to quickly tell me that I can’t do something I used to be able to do in the old version of Outlook. Or, that Defender is incapable of doing things which even Symantec Antivirus had gotten right in the early 2000’s.

It will be a Paramount Discovery of new ways to make movies and TV suck.

It’s certainly one of those hard trade-offs to make. One of the methods for reducing crime is increasing the perceived likelihood of getting caught. Cameras can do that, if there is regular follow-though by government authorities to investigate, arrest and prosecute crimes. Though, there is probably more value in reducing poverty and corruption, which is known to reduce crime. And which has the added benefit of not creating a surveillance network when corruption does creep into government. Of course, that is expensive and might just help the poors, and that is antithetical to authoritarians of every stripe.

Cheeto Mussolini showing off his insecurities.

The best way to protect a dataset from falling into the “wrong hands” (for however the “wrong hands” is defined for that dataset) is to not keep that dataset in the first place. While I get that tracking the movement of citizens can make solving some crimes easier, the risks to privacy and of authoritarian abuse are far too great to accept.

Right, but have you considered that no one actually cares about Greece?

Most of those US services (YouTube, Twitter, etc.) arose to fill a niche which was opened by expanding access and bandwidth. Take YouTube as an example, the idea of sharing a video on a dial-up connection was simply silly. Just downloading the contents of a 1.44MB floppy on a 14.4kbps modem took forever. Even when we got to a 56kbps modem, pictures could still be slow and GIFs were painful to download. It wasn’t until home DSL or cable connections became common that sharing a video was even close to reasonable. In that environment, we saw the start of media sharing services rushing to fill a previously unknown “need”. The most well known was Napster for music sharing, but we also saw the start of bittorrent clients. While not exactly legal, early music sharing and torrent sites showed that people wanted to be able to download media. And with sites like MySpace or GeoCities cropping up, it was apparent that people wanted to also create and share media. YouTube simply married up those two desires at a time where the technology could reasonably support it. And they have massively capitalized on the first mover advantage. With them also having Google money to scale the service, they now sit in a fairly privileged position in their niche.

I bring this up to say that, were US based services snapped out of existence, new services would arise to fill the gap. If you look at somewhere like China, where access to US services is highly regulated, they aren’t simply doing without, they are creating their own alternatives. TikTok is a good example, while it lacks the longer form videos of YouTube, it did provide media sharing in China. Were YouTube to be blocked at the Great Firewall, TikTok is in a good position to expand into the longer form videos. China also already has WeChat which fills much of the Twitter and FaceBook nice. Russia has VKontakte for those spaces as well. Basically, any place which isn’t well served by US based media giants has their own solutions to fill those gaps.

Western Europe (using EU as shorthand, though yes I know the EU isn’t all of Western Europe) has the issue of being closely linked with the US economically and culturally. US based services can operate in most EU countries with little friction. Sure, they have to figure out GDPR and Data Privacy issues, but that’s not a major barrier, despite US companies’ whining. So, given the size, first mover advantage and money behind the US based solutions, there hasn’t been space for reasonable EU based replacements. Why use some second rate EU based system, when the US system works so well, and the EU and US are such good allies and closely linked?

Of course, that last bit is changing (which is part of why you’re asking the question, no doubt). With the US Government going quickly off the rails, and US tech giants doing their damnedest to enshitify everything, the deep cultural links between the US and EU are starting to slip. There might now be space for EU based services to try to step in and replace services like YouTube or Twitter. And that’s the answer to your question. If those services go away, they will be replaced by something else. In time, they are probably bound to be replaced anyway. At one time everyone though MySpace was here to stay, these days I suspect some folks had to google it to figure out what the hell I was going on about. It may be a long time to come, but I’d bet on YouTube eventually being replaced. I have no idea what will replace it, but nothing lasts forever.

Ya, sadly there is still a lot of useful content in the technical subreddits. So I find myself ending up there via search engines on a fairly regular basis. But, I specifically use the Redirector plugin for Firefox to auto-magically force the use of old Reddit. If I hit the site on my work computer, I’m quickly reminded about why I quit the site.