Well now that’s in my head

YT can’t really serve more ads

They say to hold their beer and watch this…

A bit more of a direct comparison would be IRC to, say, Matrix. Last year I see an article announcing Matrix user count and it was more than all the internet users combined in 1997. This is a near-nothing number in modern internet scale, not even 4% of Facebook userbase, but I’d say that Matrix is about as close as I can conceive of “IRC-like” mindset applied with more modern principles in play. Yes you have billions in more popular social networking and communication networks, but there remains many millions of people’s worth of “internet” that resembles the 90s in some structural ways, which is how many people we had on the internet total in the 90s.

One huge difference is of course that no longer does a wider populace see those folks as potential pathfinders for others to join, but their own little weird niche not playing the same way as everyone else, with no advantage that they can understand in play.

I would say internet “in kind”, not necesarily verbatim the content from back then. I think if someone inventoried the subset of the internet that was “like the good old days” more or less that it would probably match in scale 1997 internet or so, or be larger. Styles may change and content, but the general spirit and approaches persist, just as a now minority in a much bigger sea of crap that came to join it.

Yeah, and the ol’ “slashdot effect” is hardly a concern anymore because things have gotten so much more capable as slashdot didn’t grow.

I’m sitting at a laptop with 8-way 2.3 ghz, 32GB of RAM, a way faster NVME storage than any datacenter array would deliver in that era with a gigabit internet connection from my house. Way outclassing any hosting demands from the 90s for the most severe “slashdotting” that slashdot ever could inflict back then.

To deal with ‘modern internet scale’, you have to resort to more resources, but to keep up with the ‘like 90s subset’, little old rasberry pis can even keep pace.

To a large degree, the same internet that used to be, still is.

Keep in mind that in the era they are nostalgic for, the internet involved roughly 4% of the world’s population. As big in the public conciousness was, it was a relatively small thing.

For example, most people see Lemmy as pretty small and much slower content coming at you than reddit. However Lemmy is still way bigger than what a mid 90s experience with the internet would be. I can still connect to play BBS Door games and there’s barely anyone there, but there were barely any people there back then either. The “old” internet is still there, it’s just small compared to the vast majority of the internet that came about later.

Some things are gone, but replaced. For example Geocities now has neocities, which is niche by today’s standards, but wouldn’t be shocked if neocities technically is bigger than geocities ever was in absolute terms.

Some things are gone and won’t come back. The late 2000s saw a really nice and stable all-you-can-watch streaming experience from Netflix, and their success brought about maddening licensing deals where material randomly appears, moves, and disappears and where a lot of material demands more to “rent” than buying an actual Blu Ray disc of it would cost (have gone back to buying discs as of late because it’s cheaper than streaming).

From what I’ve heard Intel on top of doing more of the work ready to go, they also tend to pay for more development expense associated with products based on their stuff.

With AMD, less work is done for you and you are kind of on your own. This is why partners tend to be more enthusiastic about Intel offerings.

I read her policy page. To the extent you might call some things good “ideas”, she generally doesn’t present an actual plan to get there, so they are just wishes rather than plans.

But there are some plans, but they are generally flawed. One common thread is a declaration of doing something not within the authority of the presidency, declaring policies that are state level, legislature, or even foreign governments.

Sometimes the concrete plans just logically don’t make fundamental sense. As an example, she simultaneously wants to disband the UN security council, but also have the UN security council hold Israel accountable, which is contradictory.

She also just has flat out terrible ideas. Disband NATO, let Russia just win their invasion of Ukraine in the interest of “peace”.

Then there are the ideas that sound good, but are too naive. Climate reparations to poor countries sound good, but history shows that approach ends poorly (inadvertently undermining local economy at best, to funding brutal warlords). Aid can’t just be a check, and it’s a tricky situation to navigate.

Note that to some extent, this might have been a necessary step in the relative popularity of computing.

Folks remembering how flexible and open ended things were in the 90s were a tiny sliver of the population. At the time about 1% of the world were participating in the internet, now the majority of the population participates on the internet.

I would have loved for the industry to keep up the trends of the 90s (AOL/Prodigy lost out to a federated internet, centralized computing yielded to personal computing) instead of going backwards (enduser devices becoming tethered to internet hosted software, relatively few internet domains and home hosted sites being considered suspicious rather than normal), but this might have just been what it took for the wider population to be able to cope.

Gen X and older witnessed a young generation born into kind of working, but kind of janky technology. They saw kids figure out obscure VCR programming interfaces that let the kids record something they wanted, but only by navigating very obtuse interface rendered exclusively with 7 segment displays with a few extra static indicators. A teenager playing that new DOS game, but first they had to struggle with getting the conventional memory, upper memory, EMS/XMS and just the right set of TSRs running, involving mucking about with menu driven config.sys/autoexec.bat tailored for their use cases. Consumer electronics and computers of the time demanded a steep learning curve, but they could still do magic, leading to the trope in the 80s and 90s media of tech wonder kids doing awesome stuff way better than the adults. Even if you have a super advanced submarine and very smart people, you needed your teenager computer kid to outclass everyone.

By now, we’ve made high res touch screens that can be embedded in everything for cheap, and embedded systems that would be the envy of a pretty high end desktop from the year 2000, which was capable of running more friendly operating environments. The rather open ended internet has largely baked in how the participants get to play. The most common devices lock down what the user can do, because the user can’t be trusted not to break themselves with malware.

The end result is that we may have the same proportion of people with the deep technical skills, but a lot of people are now unimpressed. In the mid 90s, less than 1 percent of the population had direct internet experience, and by 2008, 25% had that experience. So even if you still have 1% of really tech savvy people, there’s over 24x as many non savvy people that don’t need to marvel at those savvy people because they are getting about what they want out of it.

There’s a smell of it being some pet project of a big architect.

Windows 10 had a feature called ‘Timeline’. It wasn’t particlarly wanted by many people and it cluttered up an otherwise somewhat useful task overview. It was canned.

This seems to be that guy saying “Hey, I know you canned Timeline on me and called it a failure, but that’s just because we didn’t AI it up, and now we can and everyone is going to want it!”

Their objectives went south around windows 8.

They screwed up execution before, certainly, and in never was a huge fan, but they were at least trying to make what they sincerely thought was a intrinsically good desktop experience until 8.

Windows 8 was when they had the fear of Android and iOS and the Microsoft phone os was failing on its own, so the mission for Windows 8 was to throw the desktop user experience under the bus for the sake of trying to bolster the phone platform, and maybe make PCs that were tablet like. Also seeing Apple and Google succeed with Internet account based access to the devices was a motivation to get people into an online ecosystem that would have the way to indefinite monthly payments and an app store where they could take a cut off all the application vendors’ revenue.

It’s not a matter of whether it’s a common meaning among their associates. The problem is that it’s a common meaning used by anti semitic groups.

Of course the problem cuts both ways, hateful anti semitic folks hiding behind criticism of Zionists, and Neyanyahu supporters dismissing any and all criticism as broadly anti semitic.

There’s an assumption that these companies actually value competency.

For many companies, once they established the brand value, competency becomes an expensive superfluous thing. From that point forward it’s about high margin while churning so the customers don’t immediately catch on that the good folks are gone. Especially once they’ve converted a critical mass of customers to renting their product, then the money keeps rolling in and the product can pretty much plateau.

In companies serving businesses, it can take a long long while before the right people at the customers catch on enough to care. When the product sucks for the users and they gripe to leadership, well a few rounds of golf with the vendor and that can is kicked down the line. The employees need to suck it up because this is the premier solution in the industry…