I still remember playing Quake 2 to death in software then finally getting a 3dfx card (I want to say it was a Banshee?), loading up the game and my mind being blown by how much more immersive it was.
Great times, the 3dfx name will always raise a smile for me.
Core memory unlocked. I remember being in my dark bedroom with he glow of the CRT playing Quake 2 grapple CTF for hours and hours. Eventually I got a Voodoo 3 in all it's 16-bit color glory.
It's wild how hazy those memories are becoming. Getting old is weird.
Same. I spent an insane amount of my time practicing grappling in Quake2 Weapons Factory (and eventually WFA). I remember getting the Voodoo3 3000 seeing how amazing everything looked, and then immediately turning it all back off to get the highest FPS possible. Considering this was all over dial-up it's funny to think back on it now.
Maybe I’ll be skewered for saying this. It $22 a month for combined Disney and Hulu isn’t bad value for my family (we have small kids so Disney is more worth it for us).
What really surprises me is how little value I get from Netflix by comparison. It used to be the streamer but when I think of the prestige dramas I’ve enjoyed recently I’d place Apple TV and Hulu above Netflix. Their catalog is getting overrun with cheap reality TV.
On the other hand, we're back to cable pricing except everything is on demand and there's no need to match any channel timetable when you want to watch a show. So it's not all bad.
In a way I feel today's environment is less conducive to pirating than it used to be. So many fewer people have any kind of "always on" computer these days, they're using phones and tablets instead. Not to mention locked down App Stores, etc.
On the other other side, a lot of content is unavailable in more permanent forms, so if you want to watch something again, you're entirely at the mercy of the content provider. e.g. The Norsemen on Netflix. If I ever want to watch that in the future, I need to subscribe to Netflix and hope they still have it in their catalog. I can't find a blu-ray or dvd.
They already started slow rolling episodes that are already done, no doubt they'll create periodic view windows for things that you'll miss, then make that same content "extra charge" outside those windows, to try and extract extra payments or make you wait until after the next billing date to watch something.
We've had DVRs since 1999 so scheduling hasn't been an issue for a long time. And the commercials with a real TV DVR are skippable, unlike with streaming.
Solving the linear scheduling problem is welcome. Allowing each MSO/Content maker to profit is also welcome. Creating islands of content exclusive to that platform and then raise prices after record breaking profits and mergers to create a monopoly? Not welcome.
Cable companies purposefully enacted legislation more than a decade ago to prevent innovation until they could provide these streaming platforms for their oligarchs. Cable companies then sell to them and now are board members of the new platform.
In slovenia, one of the media houses demanded from telcos (iptv providers) to disable skipping ads when timehshifting shows (for the first 3 days), so even if you're watching a show that was on yesterday, you can skip forwards/backwards all over the show, but you can't skip over the ads (currently you can skip forwards over the ads only "a lot" (like 10 minutes), then slowly skip backwards until you reach the end of the ads, but it's a pain).
So yeah... cameras tracking your eyes (that you're not turning away or going to pee during ads) are next, and then the "drink the verification cam".
I had a WP7 Lumia phone and had a similar experience. It was light years ahead of what Apple and (particularly) Android had at the time.
But it wasn’t Snapchat that killed them. Less than a year after getting my WP7 device I was told it was end of the line and never getting and upgrade to 8. The maps app was straight up bad. When faced with the decision of paying again for a WP8 device or switching, I switched.
I'm being somewhat hyperbolic, but there was a developer who made absolutely FANTASTIC Instagram and Snapchat 3rd party apps for Windows Phone back when Snapchat was the must-have GenZ communication app. The CEO of Snapchat killed the project, naturally. If I recall it was genuinely out of malice, as the CEO is a well known Apple fan to the point of supposedly originating the "Android cameras suck" meme by not properly hooking Android camera APIs on the Android version of snapchat resulting in extremely poor photo quality even on flagship devices (IIRC until recently it would simply screenshot the viewfinder instead of requesting a photo be taken).
Lacking some of the most popular apps of the zeitgeist at the time made the whole platform effectively a nonstarter.
> Their efforts to answer a question — including devising ways to access a federal government website blocking their access — was laid out on a German coding website OpenAI had previously confirmed was hijacked by its unreleased AI models in June.
I agree that security was probably awful but the agents did circumvent a block on their access. The definition of “hacking” is fuzzy but this is more nefarious than simple web crawling.
> It is unthinkable to me that anyone believes there is such a thing as computer security
Of course they do. Not everyone has the level of technical expertise the average HN user does. Turning around to them and saying “duh of course all your personal data leaked” doesn’t feel like a helpful response. Especially when they don’t even have control over where their data lives anyway.
> Of course, if you don't agree with the ToS, Uber is also not forced to transport you. But that's fair enough.
Letting entities that hold the vast majority of the leverage and financial/legal/political power in a contract opt out of the legal system and pick an alternative with a financial incentive to side with them is perhaps "fair" to you, but a lot of people would disagree on the "enough" part.
Huh? You can only hold leverage in a contract, if the other guys agree to enter into the contract.
If the contract party A proposes gives too much advantage to party A for party B's liking, party B can make up their mind before they enter the contract.
Btw, if Uber is so powerful as you say, why do they bother with the tinkering around the margin and only force arbitration? Surely the bigger deal would be to jack up prices to thousand dollar per ride?
Disney+ case showed us that companies are using arbitration to erode basic rights, even in unrelated matters.
It’s one thing to say the legal system is expensive and slow, let’s resolve our issues by a third party, and another thing to where there’s no further action you can take and the arbitration authority is being paid by the company.
Its simply becoming a parallel legal system for a different class.
How's that being forced? (Though I would assume that in most jurisdictions you actually have to book a car and ride in it, to be bound by the more wide-ranging clauses in the ToS.)
That attitude is exactly how we got into the current situation where every company only offers unreasonably one-sided contracts so no you can't actually get a better contract by not accepting the shitty one. As a society we don't have to tolerate that and can set different rules for large corporations dealing with individuals.
> That attitude is exactly how we got into the current situation where every company only offers unreasonably one-sided contracts so no you can't actually get a better contract by not accepting the shitty one.
Sounds like a great opportunity to start a new company that offers slightly less bad contracts and take all their customers.
Small(er) businesses can be poorly run. In theory private equity takes knowledge already in practise in other locations and shares it with this new location, improving results. Downside of course is that they care a lot less about that specific location than the previous owners would have.
One specific practise I’d like to see banned is private equity buying companies with debt the company then assumes. It staggers me that it’s legal.
So form a shell buying company A and secure the debt of company A with the assets of the newly purchased company B? Congrats, you added about 5 minutes of paperwork.
I’m arguing against the practice of leveraged buyouts. You aren’t describing all of the steps of a leveraged buyout. You are just describing a buyout. Buyouts are fine. Leveraged buyouts are what I think is not. I cannot be more clear or keep explaining until you go learn the difference since you aren’t understanding what I’m saying.
That's a silly suggestion. The lenders buying that debt know what they're getting into. Those are sophisticated investors. If lenders want to limit what borrowers are allowed to do then there's nothing stopping them from imposing debt covenants on the deal. No need for the government to ban anything.
I suspect there’s a survival bias at work here. The PE purchased companies that continued to thrive are ones you probably never even knew got bought out.
Those are certainly some... examples. Not things I would hold up as a sign that PE is a good thing since all those businesses look like they are perpetually on the edge of collapse around my area. Dilapidated, mostly empty parking lots, poor service from understaffing. I think we would all be better off if those businesses died and left room for others to replace them.
Who’s preventing a competing coffee shop or burger restaurant from opening? If your area is such a prime business market, but these businesses aren’t capitalizing on it, one of your assumptions may be wrong.
The fact that they are still there in business, even if it is low and crappy business, will still hold onto some customers. And long established business has advantages that a new business can't buy. If there isn't enough traffic for two burger joints, it can become a standoff of both bleeding money until one of them fails, and the new business likely doesn't have the same credit line.
I don’t believe AI progress is a linear line that ends in “AGI”. I think the current way we create LLMs will be improved, and improved, and improved. But an LLM at its core is a predictive chain, not general intelligence.
Yeah, on both parties. No one can prove that it is or is not large-input statistical analysis. Maybe you are suggesting that the burden is more on proving it IS. Even if that’s your case, and even if you’re right, that does not mean we can safely conclude it is not. It means we don’t know, and maybe one side of the argument is more likely… maybe.
Again, hubris to have an unshakeable firm belief one way or the other. None of us are omnipotent.
Great times, the 3dfx name will always raise a smile for me.
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