Thank you, 100 times this. There was literally nothing fun about it.
I remember desperately trying to put drivers in high memory, because Wing Commander 2 needed more memory if I was to get the precious images of the joystick moving. Slowly removing items, one by one from my autoexec.bat file, desperately hoping it was going to work, but then the creeping realisation that I would have to unload my soundcard drivers if I wanted a chance.
Or the time our bios randomly wiped its memory and my dad was convinced I had destroyed the harddrive. Thankfully I was told by a family friend that I would only have to turn on the BIOS and set it to # 31 (because somehow hard disk sizes, sectors, et cetra were all standardized) in order to access our precious 95 megabyte hard disk.
Ah, yes, and I also remember what a relief it was when the newer generation of games (starting with Doom IIRC) used "DOS extenders" to switch the CPU into protected mode and be able to use 16 MB or more without any fiddling...
Another anecdote from around that time (or a bit later): some friends were alarmed that their PC was not booting Windows as usual. Turns out they had forgotten a bootable CD in the CD-ROM drive, which was showing some cryptic text mode menu on startup. Easy fix: remove CD, restart, works...
SimCity CD-ROM edition was the greatest. It needed sound card drivers, mouse drivers, CD-ROM drivers and MSCDEX, and it required 605kB of free conventional memory.
Oh, and only some hard drives were standard like that. For others, you needed to set sectors, tracks and landing zone manually. Happy fun times if your CMOS battery ran out.
Yeah, likewise. Claude has been going downhill recently for me, while Codex works great. I nearly cancelled my ChatGPT membership until they started providing codex, and now I'm considering if I want to use Pro again.
It's weird though because ChatGPT itself is not particularly better than it was before. Bringing down costs per token probably means they can do more reasoning before coding than Codex does.
This is nice but I have zero idea how I can surface interesting or useful videos. The search function on PeerTube doesn't give me anything useful for my topics of interest.
As a result, I wind up wasting hours and I simply do not have that time.
I'm basically saying, you can't rely on on-platform discovery. You'll have to find the links to good stuff on peertube somewhere else than peertube - anywhere else. It could even be here.
Or to take it from the other perspective, if you make videos on Peertube you need to give people some way different than doomscrolling/built in search to find your stuff.
Yeah this is a good point. I have been thinking about doing some video creation and I really don't want to be locked into YouTube's platform. I want people to find my video content in some other way because I do not want YouTube to be dominating how my content is shown or becomes visible because then, they are in control of my creative process, not me. So I will stick to posting links on my website and surfacing my content by posting on sites like this. Maybe someday I will find any more automatic way of doing this at some point. I wonder if that is allowed on HN?
fair point! depends on the search space, though. can't do much channel surfing on 2 channels, one of which broadcasts in russian on fridays. (actually turns out you can; you catch cable from the neighbors' leaky wiring and discover lil kim.)
i don't think you can do much doomscrolling on peertube, either. but then, that's probably a non-goal for their project. instead i think i'll go look if there's a 3rd party frontend for that now, blessings :-)
Everyone refers to FB and IG as the representatives of social media. FB is a ghost town, and IG is a major advertising online. (I also have said nice things about using FB while in Japan, all of which stand for the time in which I said them; I don't let my children use either.)
What I really find annoying is that Reddit never comes up in these discussions. Just because people tend to agree with the bias doesn't change the fact that it has no doubt left people radicalised. I was watching an Ezra Klein interview with some pollsters after the election, and it even shocked me the level of difference between what polling showed as of importance to most Americans, and what Reddit portrayed as being the common American opinion.
It's a cancer, just like Twitter, but no one ever mentions it. Not even Trump, who you would think would want to squash this safe space.
(I am indulging a bit in conspiracies, but the Elgins Air Force Base conspiracy seems more and more likely given how this site goes unnamed in the US, despite being so busy and so weird)
I've done surveys in cities about what social media people use and came to the same conclusion. However, I was completely wrong.
Facebook is so alive and well it's hard to believe. Besides that they skillfully connected two ecosystems together and there is much more people having FB than IG. Stories show up in messenger and quietly lead back to facebook just as links to fb videos people send to each other frequently.
It's just that people simply lie in their actual usage patterns because it's really uncool.
Primary people's identity online is still their Facebook profile.
FB is not a ghost town, you think that it is because no "thought leader" of the stuff you are interested in (tech, finance, business, stock market etc.) has their major presence or main channel of distribution of content on FB as they are mostly on YT and Twitter.
reddit largely went the same way as FB for me and it's continuing full steam, but for now i can at least stick to topics i want to lurk about. never saw the need for twitter or tiktok (former i can't express myself adequately and the entire place felt like hot takes. tiktok i suppose is like the next level IG but i'm happy being the older guy getting the "trickle down" content to ig heh).
everything is so polarized and vitriolic now to gain views. i used to love online discussion and debate. i find it a fruitless endeavor the majority of the time now. mainly just to give my 2 cents as some kind of self-carthasis lol. HN is probably the only place i bother to expend actual energy writing a comment.
I've had this same issue happen repeatedly. It's not a big deal because it is just for small personal stuff, but I often need to tell it that it is doing the same thing and that I had asked for changes.
I am dating myself and making myself unemployable in SV but this was not a normal thing when I was younger. It seems to have become far more common post Bush II; the Supreme Court and hanging chads had a much bigger effect than you'd think.
(Incidentally, I also remember the "Your side lost, hippies" trolls, the "Peak oil" comments, and the apocalyptic "George Bush is going to impose martial law and cancel the election, they are building concentration camps" comments. Such a wild time for internet discussion, many of these were recycled later on.)
I grant that it wasn't too common before Bush vs. Gore. But it did happen. There was in fact a great deal of electoral fraud in the U.S. in the past, too.
When I worked at Salesforce Japan, I went to conferences in the US. I always honestly said it was for business when entering the country. I spent nearly the whole time at the office, and answered emails from customers and clients.
No one asked about visas. I didn't think that was an issue since I really was there for a week for a business conference, but maybe it was? After all, technically it was a "Tourist" visa.
In the end though, SFDC keeps almost all of its technical talent in the US. If the government really got annoying, they probably would have stuck to the local talent and forgotten about the rest of us.
I think one of the more interesting stories about this that is being missed is the comments being left under videos related to this.
I legitimately don't know if they are bots (because the comments are all too similar) or if they are the just sneering Redditors en masse. I can certainly imagine both scenarios, although I'm going to guess it is more likely to be bots.
It isn't the sentiment, but rather the omnipresence of the most extreme version of the sentiment, that makes it seem artificial. It's not as if states like Iowa voting for a conservative figure is a surprise. (They voted against FDR during WW2)
I've never heard a liberal American IRL express more than mild distaste for farmers and their subsidies. I've certainly not seen enough IRL vitrol for people to engage in page after page of Reddit / Herman Cain award style comments on news comment sections on Youtube.
I can imagine the farmer handout being seen as offensive when conservative activists opposed bailing out student loans, but other countries do very similar things (Canada certainly does). It's just not political to give money to farmers, even when they are millionaires. Additional consolidation of farms will just lead to more egg price hikes when bird flu spreads to mega flocks on mega farms.
The other reason this doesn't seem real is that normally you'd have an angle behind this other than "Ha, you guys are fucked". Instead it just seems to be comments geared at arousing maximum anger, which seems like something I would do if I wanted acceleration vs. change.
I've also seen similar comments before, like the "Ha ha you didn't vote for Kamala and Gaza is in flames because of you".
It might be people terminally online, but it strikes me as being inorganic, not real.
So many people voted for Trump, like farmers, when it was so obviously against their own interests that many people are enjoying the schadenfreude when these people realize that Trump is also hurting them, not just the people they wanted him to hurt. It is like telling someone not to touch the stove because it is hot and they do it anyway.
I used to say the same, but now I have to use Slack + Gmail + Meet + Google Calendar + Drive + whatever else Google has.
All of this has integrations into each other. Somehow a slack bot can show me calendar entries. Why I would even need such a broken UI/experience is unclear to me. I can't see when people usually work. Meet chats disappear once the meeting is over.
At Teams/Outlook you have a million other issues, but all things considered, I preferred it.
It's from the modern "rewrite it in Electron every 6 months" arm of Microsoft, not the "With a clever manipulation of the registers, we can eke out another 4 bytes of saved memory" arm of Microsoft. The former has been winning for years, but the latter also exists inside the company. See Raymond Chen for a classic example of the deep technical skill inside MS
No wonder they just tossed Skype in the trash. This explains so much.
> SPOL is even worse a tirefire than, say, even Lotus Notes.
To be fair, Lotus Notes is what we had back in the mid 90's. There really wasn't much else like it. But comparing that today... (checks notes) ...oh. It's still a thing?!
So, neither Lotus Notes (now "HCL Notes" apparently?) or SharePoint have any excuse being as bad as they are. There are a dozen other far more capable examples of this kind of technology. I'm routinely amazed at how bad MS' user experience continues to be, even with all the money and engineers at their disposal.
> The last time was Windows 2000. Now, that was some quality software.
It was good, but IIS had some faults, can't remember what, they wanted to replace it quickly with 2003. There isn't much wrong with Windows XP, objectively speaking.
I was under the impression GitHub built and maintained that, but perhaps that’s changed… If not I wouldn’t consider it a Microsoft built product like windows etc (yes I’m aware ms owns gh)
But it didn’t win by default, it beat out the other alternatives, sublime and a GitHub editor (prior to acquisition).
VS Code (Monaco at the time) was developed by a small team largely in secret to keep it safe from other MS departments so it’s really not like other MS software. It has been safe from meddling for a while there is a chance it’ll be a victim of its own success.
The editor itself, Monaco, is nice enough and I’ve built some browser based ides, with it. Clientele consisting of primarily data scientists seemed to enjoy it
Yeah, honestly my whole karma score is built from pithy comments about Teams.
Thankfully it no longer crashes Chrome all the time, but everything else is meh. I still can't tag people in Japanese. The security settings are a trap for poor quality system admins and checkbox checkers. The meetings crash, the screen sharing only allows one way (so no easy pair programming), etc..
I much prefer working with slack and google meet like I did at my last job.
> Given that Teams doesn't work in anything other than Chrome
That's news to me; I use Teams on Firefox every work day and I see no issues (other than it being one of the very few sites which need third-party cookies to work, but recently Firefox has made it easier to add an exception for a single site like Teams).
For the sake of argument, why should I be more afraid of phoning home to China (a country I will probably never go to) than phoning home to the US or Canada?
If I'm making an inappropriate joke to my wife while we drive, I'd prefer the former than the later.
(Obviously, much like you I assume, I'd rather have no internet connection)
I remember desperately trying to put drivers in high memory, because Wing Commander 2 needed more memory if I was to get the precious images of the joystick moving. Slowly removing items, one by one from my autoexec.bat file, desperately hoping it was going to work, but then the creeping realisation that I would have to unload my soundcard drivers if I wanted a chance.
Or the time our bios randomly wiped its memory and my dad was convinced I had destroyed the harddrive. Thankfully I was told by a family friend that I would only have to turn on the BIOS and set it to # 31 (because somehow hard disk sizes, sectors, et cetra were all standardized) in order to access our precious 95 megabyte hard disk.
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