VonGuard

Oracle cannot possibly be expecting to meet its bets here. My own empirical one-person observation is that my friend worked there in the group that went around the world standing up their new cloud datacenters, and he was there from basically 2019 to earlier this year. They laid him and half his team off earlier this year. Absolutely nonsensical if they're really building out cloud data centers. Because that's exactly what his job was for the previous 5 years....

Can anyone make that make sense? The team was like 15 people and is now 7. Not exactly a large enough team to build out billions of dollars worth of data centers... Maybe they're just going to contract that all out, but this guy and his team were a very smooth, very well greased machine for standing this stuff up quickly and reliably.

Obvious troll. Calling Orwell a rich kid who got his feelings hurt is obscene. I challenge anyone who says that to work as a plongeur for even one week. Or to live on only toast and tea, bumming around the work houses in the UK. He never begged for money from anyone, he only worked during this time, and his book on the topic is remarkable. It's a must read for anyone who's ever worked in the food service industry.

His work house experiences informed 1984. The original poster in this comment thread is just trolling beyond belief, and also, seems to have no grasp of the topics at hand what so ever.

I personally agree that pre-buying is silly in today's world of digital distribution. But I will point out that most pre-sales now come with a digital item or two or five that's exclusive to pre-orders. Additionally, if you pre-order, you can sometimes download the game a day or so ahead of time, and then have it "unlock" when it's released, allowing you to play at minute 1. I'd wager GTA VI is well over 100 GBs, so this is actually a reasonable benefit, especially considering the potential for CDN crashes at launch time.

The author is coming from the games industry. As an arts based industry, AI is EXTREMELY divisive. The author really will lose friends over even so much as touching AI in certain ways, because the artists that built the games industry were already badly abused, and now, they're being squeezed out entirely. For business developers, AI is somewhat less existentially terrifying, as it can be seen to be really empowering to an experienced user.

In the games industry, AI usage immediately eliminates a human job. Why pay a pixel artist if AI can generate 100's of unique little people pixels in seconds, and output them in the right format? Hollywood is going through the same thing: the companies that are building AI for Hollywood have to do so in the bushes, hiding. You don't see them advertising or flashing cash. That's because no one involved in using their wares wants anyone to know they're using them, lest they alienate the highly-talented people they still need to fill the gap between concept AI and full theatrical release AI.

In the software world, we are worried about AI. In the creative industries, they are absolutely pants on fire, screaming at the sky, burning down the village terrified of AI.

I am a board member of this org, and I wanted to post the link for donation in here. GOAT is dedicated to open sourcing and open copyrighting materials, schematics, and standards for accessibility hardware. Remember the guy with the robotic legs, and the manufacturer turned them off remotely? That kinda stuff simply cannot be allowed to happen.

GOAT is a fantastic organization, and when Andrei, who wrote this blog, asked for help with his wheelchair, GOAT found the parts he needed, put someone on a plane to his country, and installed the equipment. Andrei was able to go the park for the first time in years, as a result.

Please consider giving to GOAT. It's so rare for a nonprofit to be this scrappy and life changing for people. It's awesome. https://www.openassistivetech.org/contribute/

Calling the Economist anything resembling "leftist" is emblematic of the psychosis in the system. The Economist is what the Wall Street Journal was before Murdoch bought it: Focused on encouraging long term thinking, gains, and wisdom, while reporting on the short term trends. The Economist is the absolute embodiment of the old man and the kid joke from the Sopranos:

The investor: "Hey dad, let's run down this hill and fuck that cow!"

The Economist: "Be patient, son. Let's walk down this hill and fuck 'em all."

Legislation and court rulings have shown that shareholders get everything they want, ever. They want Southwest to stop checking 2 free bags? It happens. Etc. Ad Nauseum.

Somehow, we need legislation that says companies are beholden first to their employees, then to their customers, THEN to shareholders. I don't know how to do that. Co-ops are the only real answer maybe?

The poster you're asking this to is probably talking about plug-ins. Plex, very long ago, supported plug-ins, but it no longer does. Plug-ins were usually for adding in support for other media scrapers (porn and anime), or even other media types, like audiobooks.

Additionally, Plex tends to revise their UI and inner workings in a way that favors everything but the core media sharing platform. They add TV stations, they mix in their streaming ad-supported channels with your search results, and push them before the friends and family stuff, making it tough to help other navigate to shared libraries.

I think, overall, Plex is a good shepherd for their product, but everyone knows the enshitificaiton process is inevitable. It's just a question of how long the timeline between "Plex is usable" and "Plex is sold to private equity and is now utter shit." I've been pleasantly surprised with the length, so far. But having an escape hatch is always a good idea, and Jellyfin seems to be nearing a parity.

Podman.....

Can confirm. Friend laid off on team of 15, that team is now down to 7. They built datacenters, too. US based. That's, sorta concerning since I thought their entire future bag was making datacenters......

Interesting perspective, here, from someone who has observed a tiny bit of unknown streaming history.

So, way back in the day, 2005, Turner Broadcast corp. launched this weird-ass thing, known as GameTap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameTap . It was a subscription-based service that offered on-demand retro videogames. While it started as a way to play MAME Pac-Man and Metal Slug legally from a legit service, it grew into a competitor in the online games market arena in a time when Steam was still nascent.

The whole thing was created by this amazing fellow named Blake Lewin. Blake was really sharp, and having built this on-demand, streaming emulation service, he even went on to add at-the-time-modern games. Now, this stuff literally just installed the game on your HD and let you play, so it wasn't quite Stadia or Luma, but it was absolutely ahead of its time, and it was really slick.

I was a journalist then, and while games journalists get pampered, Turner moving into games was on another level. They launched this thing at the Armani Store on Market St. in SF, and when you walked in, they asked you to pick some sun-glasses from the case to take with you when you left.

GameTap was great and even gathered a following, but from the moment it launched, I knew what it really was: Turner's scientific experiment to build the infrastructure to later allow it to stream its enormous library of content. Movies, cartooons, TV shows, etc.

I was having lunch with Blake, a few years into GameTap, and I asked him point blank how the video streaming prototypes were coming (pure guess, no evidence). He was baffled and wanted to know how I knew they were working on that. Said it had been going great!

But in the end, the service never launched, AFAIK. Maybe some remnant is still there somewhere, but it just shows, you can be years ahead in your planning and development, and still end up alone at the end dance. It's a shame. Turner has so many great things in their library, why is it not possible for me to just pay someone for access to all the old movies in the TCM vault!?

Imagine that, the United States is attempting to pervert truth into utter and complete lies. It's almost as if this is the only brand the United States has left.

At this point in my life if I see something with United States looks good compared to the rest of the world I just immediately assume it is a lie. Because the United States is nothing but lies and greed anymore. We cannot even claim innovation as a central motivator anymore.

2007, my employer is a magazine. I demand a blog. They decide to write one from scratch in .NET because we are a software magazine. 2010, said CMS is retired for Hubspot. Or maybe that happened later. Either way, to make me happy to have Hubspot is a feat. Also a great business angle for Hubspot: write your own shitty CMS? Welcome! And again, either way, 2017, bankruptcy. All money spent on CMS from inception to retirement could have been abated by a WordPress subscription. Definitely way above 6 figures lost. Coulda kept us alive for a few more years, anyway.

Not a Hacker News take I would have expected 10 years ago. Today, though. I agree.

Every nerd should read or see Arcadia. It is, perhaps, the finest work of modern theater. And it's heavy on math. The lead is based on Ada Lovelace.

I think this is popping up in Hacker News because the concept of decompilers has become a bit more acceptable recently. (strokes beard)Time was, decompilation was said to be Impossible (as my wise friend syke said: most things people say are impossible are just tedious). Then, it just became "something you could only do in a targeted, single-application fashion.)

Somewhere in there, Alan Kaye laughed and handed everyone dynamic code.

These days, with AI in tow, decompilation is becoming the sort of thing that could be in the toolchain, replacing IDA and such. Why debug and examine when you can literally decompile?!

So, maybe, that idea being considered to be newly on the table, someone felt the need to post a counter-point, proving once again that everything old is new again.

Hats off for decomiling Java apps that mostly predate generics and annotations... both of which were added in 5.

Furthering the original question: the myth says Plumbbob launched a manhole cover into orbit, but the truth is slightly less than that, and it wasn't really a manhole cover.

Still, this is what happens when you use a nuclear bonb as a detonating charge at the bottom of a tube...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob

Spritely is the solution. Been baking for a few years now. Just pushed an update last week, in fact: https://spritely.institute/

And look! I am downvoted again!

How does this work? They harvest your DNS! They inject surveys into your YouTube packets. They tabulate just how much traffic goes to which specific games on Twitch. How? The provider is the endpoint, not you.

It's not the whole picture, but it's enough to sell to marketers.

This is what happens EVERY time I say this! Look again! It happened, I have 1 upvote... It's almost as if the VPN companies don't want you to believe this is true!

Story time! I have been cashed out of three startups. $600 total, across them all. It's the people in the Valley who've struck out over and over who know the truth, not the successes.

One of those startups was about tracking the games played on Twitch, and selling that info to Esports entities, marketing firms, etc. The company did not succeed because, honestly, it's not hard data to scrape yourself. BUT, we tried. And where did we get our data? VPN providers. Major VPN providers. We don't care about your personal data. We care about whether you watched a Twitch stream of GTA or Madden.

And for a time, yes, we could buy injected surveys. Packets, literally injected into your streams of data. This was expensive, iffy, and controversial, but it was on the rate cards.

DNS is very useful, and unencrypted. OpenDNS makes its money on this same info. Stop putting your heads in the sand. Ya'll have seriously lost the path.

Been saying it for YEARS: 95% of VPNs sell your data. It's where they make their money. It's absolutely insane the push-back I get when I say this online. I get downvoted to hell and back.

Source: I bought this data from VPN companies... Hell, you can inject ads and surveys if you want!

Quay.io

Well, sort of. I mean, yeah he deserved to be praised, but the reason half the SRI staff left to go to Xerox is that Engelbart and his people were becoming obsessed with EST training. EST is basically a cult that starves you, insults you until you cry, then builds you back up with compliments while asking you to pay up front for the next sucker in your family to take the "training." It's about as close as you can get to a cult while still being a business. Engelbart and his closest people were basically forcing SRI workers to take EST training, and they did't like it so they left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Seminars_Training

Yes.

In my day, that transfer was a privately owned blue bus called the Jitney.

Still the way it is. Clipper is a multi-agency cooperative. It sucks but the fact that it works at all is a real triumph....

Serious train nerd, here!

Sooooo much snark, and so little interest into what BART actually runs on!

Originally, BART was a master stroke of digital integration in the 70's, and it's digital voices announcing the next trains were a thing of the future: An early accessibility feature before we even knew what those were, really.

Reading:

https://www.bart.gov/about/history

https://www.bart.gov/about/projects/traincontrol#:~:text=To%...

Yeah, it'd be terrible if all our emails, DNS queries, purchase histories, messages, Facebook posts, Google searches, in store purchase, driving and GPS info were being tracked, cataloged, and sold to anyone who wants it! Why, people would never stand for such surveillance!

Anyone with half a brain complaining about hypothetical future privacy violations on some random platform just makes me spit milk out my nose. What privacy?! Privacy no longer exists, and worrying that your chat logs are gonna get sent to the authorities seems to me like worrying that the cops are gonna give you a parking ticket after your car blew up because you let the mechanic put a bomb in the engine.

You are right. If people can see where you are at all times, track your personal info across the web, monitor your DNS, or record your image from every possible angle in every single public space in your city, that would be horrible, and no one would stand for such things. Why, they'd be rioting in the streets, right?

Right?

Hacker News users now profit from extensive invasion of privacy, from Facebook to LinkedIn, to every ad network, VPN, ISP, etc... They all trade in our private info daily. 20 years ago, the battle cry was around privacy and government monitoring of all traffic and how bad that was. Now people climb over one another to give away their data for free in exchange for mind-altering social media platforms and AI driven nonsense.

I am convinced Libertarians do not exist. The current state of the US should drive them to utter insanity, and yet, they tend to be mostly silent on all of these corporate over reach issues. People who say they are Libertarian just don't want to pay parking tickets. If the real techno Libertarians existed, they'd be burning our current Valley to the ground. Anyone who cared about the 2nd amendment should be losing their minds over military deployments on US soil. Constitution huggers should be screaming bloody murder, daily. Instead, those types are super happy with their new dictator. Funny how all the performative anger goes away when it's their side that is performing the authoritarian actions. The NRA seems to LOVE this willing take over of the well armed militias by the federal government... But I digress.

Instead, the reigning philosophy here is now greed. Privacy, sovereignty, ownership, open source, all those things are forgotten in the backseat of the crypto and VC cash car.

It surprises me how little the newer generations care about ethics, morality, principles. Call them whatever you want, but it really feels like everyone screams about how righteous they are, how wrong everyone else is, and then they take the cash and stand up for nothing when the chips are down.

Remember when the big thing we were worried about was the NSA recording our phone calls? Now large corporations harvest our call info, chat texts, social media posts, and even the raw microphone input on our phones to strip every last piece of information about us and mine it for data to influence our lives, purchases, and even out thoughts. And what did we do in the last election? We put in the party that will remove even more roadblocks from this type of thing, and has deregulated crypto. Victory!

How did we get here? Where are the Cypherpunks? Where are the high ideals we used to have?

All burned alive at the altar of money.