I am a Meat-Popsicle

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Saying the internet was better is a haze of nostalgia, a gross underappreciation of new technologies, and a smattering of truth.

    Over 38% of the stuff I flush down the toilet is gone forever, too, and that’s ok.

    The early Internet was interesting only because it was new and different. Most of the stuff out there was low-quality stuff just for funsies projects. The barrier to entry is still very low. Anyone who wants to put up a website with whatever they’re interested in requires no technical expertise and isn’t even expensive. But you don’t see a lot of that because it’s not new or exciting and few people are going to waste their time on it. On the upside, you can now throw up your own federated content system with relatively little work and have a huge community for very very little. Things are gone chiefly because they weren’t worth saving. Sure, there are exceptions like DPReview, but they even got a reprieve because they were worth keeping.

    Before the advent of filter bubbles, the internet was a creative playground where people explored different ideas, discussed varying perspectives, and collaborated with individuals from “outgroups” – those outside their social circles who may hold opposing views.

    And how did anyone find those varying perspectives? Everything was unindexed, even search engines were crap. Fark, Digg and Slashdot, link aggregators and forums are the same as they’ve always been. Are the majority of those conversations gone? Sure, but you can find another 25,000 of them on Reddit, x, Instagram, and Lemmy, and when those are gone, some other service will replace them.

    If people are moving to algo-driven social media, it’s because they perceive it as advantageous to them. I found the algo ate too much of my time and moved back to diverse and static youtube clients.





  • The entire entertainment industry is floundering. Wages lagging inflation in many sectors, people are paying significantly more to eat. They’re going to cut back on the streaming services and they’re going to cut back on going out to the movies. I’m right here at these crossroads where the only thing that makes sense is to give people a little more value for the money, instead we’re going to pull every fast trick we can to make more in advertising and gambling.




  • They’re mostly just using FFmpeg behind the scenes, which is exactly how Plex did it to start with. Plex spent a long time working on hardware acceleration, it’s hard to tell exactly what they’re doing at this point but it’s safe to say they spend a hell of a lot of time on it so I doubt they’re just using FFmpeg for hardware acceleration anymore.









  • I was working for a big company, middle upper level technical position.One of my ex co-workers went to work for Disney. He hooked me up with an interview. They flew me in, rented me a car.

    They brought me in to the interview. I sat around for about an hour and a half before they were ready. They came in and grilled me on uncommon proprietary Linux management packages. At the time I was managing a couple of 10,000 node clusters, had been running them for years. Of the four guys in the interview three of them just dismissed me. After the interview I headed out, wasn’t really mad but I was pretty disappointed the fourth guy pulled me aside and said I think they were being extremely unfair to you in there if you are really interested in trying to work your way in here reach out to me and I can advocate for you.

    After the interview I farted around LA for a couple of hours and then flew home.

    After some reflection I realized I really didn’t want to work with those other three guys. I never reached back out.

    4 months later Disney dissolved that department.