The user base isn’t homogenous

I like that Claude can jailbreak consoles and decomp and port games quickly. These are projects that are cool, have utility, are obnoxiously difficult and or tedious, and exclusively unpaid. Is it better if some super coder does it all? Probably, but the unpaid bit means progress is painfully slow and limited to people doing passion projects. But is it also cool I can play a bunch of retro games natively on basically any platform and then jailbreak a ps5 to run Linux and steam? Yes

there is myst 3, 4, and 5 with 5 being a definitive end to the series

If you liked myst and riven you’d probably like them as well. The series was pretty strong if you’re into the whole “narrative over gameplay” thing. At the time they were also widely regarded for the graphical quality but that obviously didn’t hold up

If you liked those point and click adventure games the journeyman project trilogy from presto studios in the same era is also great, though there was supposed to be a 4th installment that was cancelled. The Lucasarts and sierra games from a bit earlier in that genre (the dig, sam and max hit the road, Indiana jones and the fate of Atlantis, day of the tentacle, police quest, kings quest, monkey island, etc) are also great

Getting all of these games to run on a modern pc is a bit of a headache though. Some are on gog and some have support in scummvm but not all. The renaissance of point and click adventure was like 1995-2000 and the genre really died around then. Great games, although they can be extremely frustrating and obtuse at times

The adage of “never buy first generation Apple hardware” has existed since at least the ipod days

This should shock no one and if anything the shocking thing is transparency (though that is likely a ploy as I guarantee based on these articles plenty of people will go view it to correct the record, giving Amazon a great source of refinement for ad tracking)

Literally every major website (and basically every website that run JavaScript for that matter) tracks and profiles you. Your tv does the same, as does your phone and almost all the apps on it, etc. and the profiling they don’t show you definitely exists: race, political affiliation/leaning, income estimates, address, educational level, health issues, etc

That was beyond two souls, a much older game but a somewhat similar situation. Page’s model goes through a shower scene and with a modded console you could run cheats that let you change the camera angle

Nah this has precedent. When horizon came out there were people that figured out if you went into photo mode and adjusted the angle juuuuust right the camera would clip through aloys clothes layer and you could see her boobs

The wild part was that the character model had fully modeled nipples. Like they bothered to model that when the clothing in that game is all heavy coats and shit that are like 4” thick. You would think they would’ve gone with the Barbie style

They patched it out once people kept posting pictures of her boobs online

tft lcds got in this too because they’re so dirt cheap and capacitive touch interfaces are cheap as fuck to manufacture. Even if the parts costs are a tiny bit higher relative to physical buttons and interfaces the money saved on assembly makes up for it (and in some cases the parts actually are cheaper

Plus in a kitchen or bathroom setting this is much easier to make water and dust resistant, which is an actual benefit tbf, but at the expense of ergonomics and accessibility

You can literally go on Amazon right now and search LCD toaster. There’s the $4-500 ultra bougie American designed (not made lol) smart one but then there are a ton of Chinese designed ones that are like $50-60 because it’s a $20 toaster with a (when bought at scale) $0.95 lcd strapped on

Marketing is dumb, this is why I left ui/ux/hci work. You can create an ergonomic and intuitive system that is evidence based and the ad men will be like “but can we pander to the lowest common denominator by ruining it with some useless feature that’s objectively worse to use?” And then they just dropped the pretense and said fuck ux, embrace dark patterns

I could bitch about this for days

We’re kind of describing the same people I think

See that’s utility and depending on the sensors you choose that can definitely be local only

But skimming the page for a Samsung smart fridge none of this is in the features. It’s that it can play music, you can put notes and pictures and shit, there’s an “ai camera” that can tell you what you need to buy (though something tells me that struggles if your fridge isn’t set up like a stock image and is actually loaded with like food and condiments and shit like a normal person)

A Bluetooth speaker can do the music part likely with much better sound quality, a smart speaker can handle the typical kitchen tasks like setting timers (which can be done purely in HA, you don’t need Alexa or whatever), a dry erase board and magnets can cover notes and pictures, and the reminders app on your phone can probably do a much more accurate job of keeping a shopping list. Then you can buy a fridge that doesn’t have a 32” proprietary lcd that is a major point of failure, and you can literally save thousands of dollars (quick search shows these fridges are 3500-4k, which is insane for a fridge, even a fancy huge one).

The market for these is people who have too much money (or are willing to take on credit debt) but also can’t be bothered to spend the 1-2 hours it takes to read up on how to do what you’ve done. Samsung, Apple, Google, Amazon, etc prey on these people

The top of the line one can make spherical ice though, which is admittedly super cool

I just don’t see the utility. I can be pretty pro “smart” stuff, especially if I can run it without an internet connection, but what’s the point for a fridge?

Like an oven I get, though I don’t have one. It’s laziness but there is some utility in being able to preheat the oven without getting up, or double check the oven was turned off. Although newer ovens tend to have rapid preheating that really can be quick (unlike my 1996 oven that takes 15-20+ minutes)

But a fridge? What are you going to do? Ensure it’s running? Except when something like this happens lmao. The only real thing it could add is an advertisement and data collection vector, which is the opposite of utility. I’ve also seen smart toasters. Not toaster ovens, but like pop in two slices of bread and push the plunger. Why? You have to come to the device to load it. Do you leave bread overnight getting stale and save the 30 seconds and greatly raise the risk of cold toast? Ridiculous

You can run Linux and steam on ps5 but jailbreaks are as of now limited to older firmwares. The ps5 is aggressive about making updates mandatory so you either need a console someone purposely did not update in anticipation of a jailbreak break years later or one that’s been sitting around not being used for a somewhat long time

I promise you your definition of worthless is far different than an investors

The stock market is overwhelmingly owned by about 10% of Americans who tend to be on the very wealthy side and the “mindless capitalism drones who simply want number to grow” side. They just see user growth and applaud. They love this change and all the changes Reddit has made over the past few years because it means harder to scrape for free and more likely to convert casual browsers to users

What is potentially killing Reddit (and twitter, Facebook, etc) is that advertisers are starting to lose patience with bot activity, which is the overwhelming amount of content on social media. The misleading statistic that those companies throw out is that bots make up a (relatively) small amount of accounts, which is arguably true, but sidesteps that those bots post like crazy. Thus the “power user” effect, where 5-20% of the user base makes up like 90+% of content. Advertisers are getting wise to the fact that an overwhelming number of social media interactions are just nothing (and no one they can sell to) and they’re starting to demand better analytics as well as run their own

This is where Reddit is potentially screwed; meta has dozens of other things to fall back on besides ad revenue. Twitter has Elon propping it up. But this is still pretty wishful thinking, the reality is that Reddits valuation will likely be propped up by institutional investors for years, maybe decades, on the hope of something that never comes (see: Tesla). The quality of the site is essentially irrelevant

Reddit sucks but this is asinine. The stock is down ~35% this year but still up almost 250% since ipo.

Discord is privately owned still but you bring up another key point: the players you’re up against are so powerful, with so much wealth and the most comprehensive legal representation, that even if you manage to have some success they will either buy you or destroy you. Meta has a presence on the fediverse, even

The numbers are staggering. A game is incomparable. Facebook has over 3 billion users and instagram has another 2.5. Even a game like Fortnite “only” has a bit over 600 million users, and the vast majority of games see nowhere near that

You can bootstrap an audience in the millions, maybe, with a lot of luck, but getting to meta numbers takes significant capital to sustain your advertising. More importantly even with that it will still take ages. Facebook took almost a decade to get to a billion. Reddit took 18 years

Both platforms (and twitter, etc) are obviously infested with bots but what’s interesting is that from some research it appears the percentage of user accounts that are bots are far lower than many guess. I’ve seen people guess like 50+%. Per Facebook it’s more like 4-5%, and while Reddit doesn’t disclose based on content removal the numbers are similar (possibly slightly lower). This is definitely underreported though as it’s in their best interest to inflate user counts. Independent research pegs it closer to 20%. But the really interesting part is what validates the people guessing 50+%, which is user activity. Neither network comments on this but independent research pegs bots as responsible for like 50-70% of user activity.

So if you can get a network going with power users you can make it feel much more alive with possibly only 30% of the user base. But that’s where the staggering numbers come in. For Facebook that’s still 900 million people, almost 3x the entire population of america

Optimization will actually get much worse because software will be designed to run “in the cloud” on servers that have much more resources than the average budget pc or smartphone that 90% of users use for computing. You will own nothing etc etc

Coreelec on ugoos am6b+ is the best option if you want the broadest support for formats possible (though notably missing av1)

Htpc with streaming content or stuff like Dolby vision is a licensing nightmare. Some stuff works, some doesn’t, Linux support is trash, etc

The frustrating part is that getting around it sucks. I’m told Kagi has better support for this but from what I’ve read it relies on users downranking the domains, which is a fools errand given the flood of these sites. I’ve also seen people that maintain blocklists for this that work with things like adguard and uBlock but then you still get pages of slop, but all the links just 404 now

My conspiracy is that this is allowed and not dealt with to push people to use LLMs directly, which are quickly becoming the most effective way to search for information online (with the caveat that you either need to have the knowledge to identify errors or be willing to double check the information given for flaws. Also taking like 4-7x the energy to process queries)

I don’t even care about an ai overview at the top. Give me a search engine that ranks down the sea of blogs that launched a year ago and have 5,000+ articles that are just ai generated bullshit designed to capture as many search queries as possible

Ecosia, ddg, google, brave, etc are all laden with this shit and it clogs up the searches. “How do I do x” and an endless stream of “achieving x is possible. Here’s a bulleted list of the next 12 paragraphs, then a bunch of summarized info from Reddit posts that only answers your question in the most basic obvious way and has no accounting for any kind of edge case or even just non traditional but acceptable use case. And even if you just wanted the basic answer its useless because the LLM fluffed the sentence long answer with 12 pages of meandering nonsense”

china is expanding energy tremendously to the point that the USA simply cannot compete. Even if data centers all get built tomorrow they will soon bottleneck because energy demands can’t be met in a timely manner. The median time to get a new power plant online is 5 years. Meanwhile china is investing heavily not only in expansion of their grid, but expansion into renewable energy. They’ve added 8x the power to their grid that the us did just in 2023 and if anything their pace has risen since then. Their renewable grid is 3x the size of the entire us grid

In terms of raw performance US firms were months ahead and that gap is shrinking. Dola-seed is ranked second behind opus by us firms with a gap of under 3% in benchmark performance

This performance gap closing and energy superiority is why ultimately DeepSeek v4 pro outperforms opus 4.6. Opus is the clear winner, but not by a very appreciable amount, and ranges from 11-26x more expensive. Chinas hardware isn’t more efficient but their energy superiority puts them way ahead; their cloudmatrix uses well over 100% more energy than nvidia g200 but their energy costs are sometimes as little as 1/8th American costs per kWh

The race to superiority here is ultimately does America substantially update and expand their grid before Chinas domestic chip manufacturing bridges the hardware gap that has been created by things like export controls? My money is on China here; Huawei, SMIC, etc have an engineering problem that is rapidly being addressed with gigantic state sponsorship (and frankly the major bottleneck is EUV lithography, which they are actively pursuing, though this is an issue that even with tens of billions will take many years to catch up to the west). While those barriers are real the American barriers are an extremely complex regulatory system (which is ultimately why trump is being directed to gut everything in terms of environmental and worker protections), funding (the oligarchs want this but not enough to part with their money, they want us to fund it), and unlike China the US drastically changes trajectory every 4-8 years.