saturn8601

So..does this data convey anything meaningful about her success?

The Silicon Spin intro and Cranky Geeks theme song are burned into my head.

I was in elementary school watching ZDTV after school instead of doing my homework. One of those shows that's burned into my head, I don't even know why, is Silicon Spin.

Every now and then I have visions of my childhood, dreaming about this mysterious place called Silicon Valley that I never actually managed to get to. I also recall the fond moments watching literally everything on TechTV and ZDTV even if I didn't really fully understand everything. (I mean you're not going to understand everything in elementary school).

John C. Dvorak was probably speaking of content that my age range didn't fully comprehend at the time, but I still loved it.

I was so fortunate to meet Patrick Norton back at DEFCON in 2019, and it was a dream come true. I was able to express my appreciation not only of him but also about the whole ZDTV and TechTV cast including John C. Dvorak, many of whom had gone in different directions post TechTV. They were all such a comforting part of my childhood.

I was watching TechTV on 9/11 and remember how when Bush got on tv in the evening, they had a momentary fumble in switching over to him so they just overlaid CNN or some other news channel. Growing up Muslim in that area of the country, all the TechTV shows including Silicon Spin became even more pivotal in keeping some semblance of the happiness and ease of life I had before that day (which I never really got back).

Watching these old episodes are charming given the topics:

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYW3nkMl9GQ

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcJBXgmdX44

This has been a tough few years seeing people and companies that provided me a lot of joy and happiness start to pass away. I guess its just a part of realizing you are getting old and time moves on to the next generation.

I speak to a lot of Gen-Z since they are defining the culture now and so many of them just have little to no concept of the world before iPhone and as such don't remember that era of computing and the people involved in it.

I feel that makes all the people that were around even more special to me. We all got to be a part of that slice of history (them producing and me appreciating it and growing because of it) and it was unique to us in that time period. I am thankful that he was a part of my life journey in a small way.

The first link is too broad and would send me on a goose hunt with no payoff. all the other links pulled up nothing when i searched the last name only.

I mean you are welcome to prove me wrong but in my time during which I was interested in learning more about Inde Navarette, I have discovered a poorly curated Wikipedia article with minor incorrect info (she is not studying behavioral psychology) which seems to indicate minimal 'curation' and her family history is well documented as not coming from an entertainment background or wealth. This is despite going to #1 on the IMDB Star counter and her main social media platform(IG) going from what I suspect was ~200-300K followers to 3.5M in the course of ~two months.

You argument can be made about anyone but it goes into conspiracy theory.

Has there been a reduction in rags to riches stories, I would argue yes but one positive example in 2026 could disprove your original hypothesis.

It remains to be seen if this will stick. The jury is still out:

In favor of this: US is having trouble projecting its desires onto others now. Its citizens are not in a good spot, hyper concentration of wealth and a growing distrust in the system.

Against this: China is suffering from a upcoming demographic implosion that they have no immediate solution for. This will lead to a slow in their growth, insane senior care obligations and a current youth unemployment of 25% will lead to long term limits on these peoples potential. What might seem like a rising power might actually be more of a paper tiger than the US, its just easier for them to hide it for now.

There is no "third" super power as everywhere else is much worse in some area (demographics, limited population, limited resources). I've said this before elsewhere but maybe the US just has to outlast China.

Hollywood and the startup world enables nepo kids to lie to themselves and to the public about their "selfmade" status until they receive their ancestral Lordship from the King of England, and this fake meritocracy keeps everyone in line trying their best because one day you could be a billionaire, too.

What about the exceptions? Doesn't that disprove the theory? You mentioned Hollywood. There has been a lot of malaise the last few years that many of the new "stars" are just kids of existing famous actors. Hollywood is already a extremely tiny industry(Only about 6% of the actual LA economy).

Then comes along an independent movie like Obsession, breaks so many records and launching its star actress into an overnight rising star. This is a person who has no familial history in the industry and was walking dogs for a year and a half to pay rent because no roles were landing.

The country first and foremost should serve all its citizens. Not just wealthy people and not just people of the dominant ethnic background. The xAI data centers sits right next to a poor african american community and Musk used emergency turbines that were not designed for continuous daily use. He utilized a loophole to get past those restrictions. Those turbines are burning gasses inefficiently and producing a lot of pollution that is directly harming those residents who likely don't even materially benefit from all this effort.

These people likely had nothing to do with the delay in solar installs, or decades of nuclear NIMBYism yet now because Musk cannot fall behind, they now have to suffer with no one in government caring about them.

Its a real life hell, they cannot physically resist or cause any trouble or else the government will come and kill them where they stand, they cannot afford to move away because who would buy their houses (and why should they abandon their life's community for something they had no part in?) so they sit and suffer day after day with declining health for their family. Framed like this, Musk is like a locust who has come to devour whatever good there was and then move onto the next prey.

We'll find out in about 100 days!

Well just to clarify as I am not sure if you understood what I am saying but when I said wiggle room I was referring to the different standards of enforcement applied by different countries. This is why I gave personal anecdotes. Im sure all EU countries have days where enforcement is strict and other days where enforcement is more lax. The problems implementing the digital system are a problem but it is a separate issue from the intended design goals of the system. Namely now you have a minimum layer of immigration enforcement across the union given that it is a unified digitized system. It is still more fair and straightforward than the US system and I commend them for setting a minimum standard that I hope others can aspire to. I am unsure about the privacy implications. It is a tough subject to think about. It was nice not having to have any stress going through immigration a year ago. But that is my bias as a young person feeling anxious of first traveling to Europe and being excited for seeing the countries and meeting the unique people for the first time.

10 years ago I walked right past the French immigration officer by accident because I didn't know where I was going. He yelled at me to get back in line, quickly stamped my passport and then shooed my along. EU has become a lot more like the US. I'd probably been detained if I had done that in the US. Last year visiting Switzerland they had these machines that auto adjust a camera to your height and there was no way you were going past the barriers by accident so you are getting your photo taken.

Things have changed in the last 10 years. I recalled from 2016, while some countries like Sweden were super strict about entry/departure (lady manually counted number of days on passport) others had been so lax it was comical: France would take one quick glance at you and stamp the passport, Ireland would at least test if you could answer a simple question with the stamp already pre positioned on the passport upon answering said question.

I presume this electronic system finally accounts for all of these differences and provides a minimum standard for exit/entry. Now it being digitized there is no wiggle room on exit/entry. Frankly with how lousy US exit/entry seems for foreigners, I don't mind the EU wanting to maintain strict standards for visitors to their borders as well. I wouldn't even mind them being extra rough on us Americans. Its totally understandable. Preferably take all the US diplomat passports to a back room as well while they are at it.

Did you use any AI to help you build this? If so, thats cool but if not, you are even cooler.

This is the dream. Imagine cutting out the fat with open hardware, experienced devs (assisted with AI) can rapidly learn and build systems and cut the overall cost of keeping a service running.

This translates into savings for customers and could mean the difference between wage stagnated customers being able to enjoy that service or not. It can also mean the difference between a service being able to survive in a lower density area vs closing.

That bloat from a vendor is eventually passed down to the customers. And to be frank, so many vendors do the bare minimum and get worse over time.

I observe when people buy out an old place like an arcade, house or some other venue, rip out all the old to replace with substandard "modern" design that might be modern taste but just of poor quality(real wood, screen printing, high quality professional displays vs particle board, cheap LCDs, etc.). All of that poor quality is some vendors additional padded margin.

So many "reformed" businesses are just some joker's passive income investment portfolio because they have to put all the money they have to use somewhere and they wont spend a single ounce of energy more than they have to. That means buying substandard junk from a vendor at whatever the vendor charges, passing the cost to customers and they have to just take it.

Luckily with this declining K-Shaped economy more people are just deciding not to participate. Maybe that will put some fear into people who operate business like this.

Will this be the very best bowling system ever invented? Maybe not but the cost savings might make it much more valuable because it allows more to enjoy the service.

An average system thats low cost is better than an average system that you got to pay out the nose for. And the openness makes it possible that it could eventually become so much better than any vendor could possibly deliver.

Maybe im totally wrong about this and the existing players in the 'bowling machine' space are stellar...but I have my doubts given what I've seen elsewhere.

Work Culture is famously bad? Look I get 996. The Youth seem like they are either next level burned out or on a treadmill that never ends(due to the 25% youth unemployment, the deflation happening and the extreme overabundance of educated professionals). Both are not good. But the original comment listed stellar companies and products that wipe the floor with American made junk. You don't get that without some extensive hard work. Stealing only takes to so far, you gotta do a lot more on top of that.

China is always at the edge of some massive collapse any day now.

Yeah but my comment "This is a country that has overexpanded in infrastructure which will come home to roost sooner" is just common sense. What happened in the developed world will eventually catch up China. Every bit of 'matter' in an empire has a cost: the cost to push back entropy. Their strategy of just rushing to overbuild without thoughtful planning makes everything look wildly impressive today but tomorrow is different and this story has played out in every single country in existence before. Everything has to be maintained and that long tail is something every country deals with. What make you think China is some special animal?

Meanwhile the US goods trade deficit is literally worse than ever, the deficit is $2 trillion dollars and the debt is consuming more and more of federal income just to maintain. The US equities market is a giant inflated balloon and no one even pretends to rationalize it anymore. Leadership in the US is now banana-republic level corrupt, in the open and shamelessly. Yeah, this is not the time to be throwing rocks.

Now you are conflating two different ideas: infrastructure vs investment. Lets address them separately. Yes the US equities market is overinflated. Meanwhile no one even wants the Chinese currency. Not even the Chinese. Obviously China can live with this because they have the large market and manufacturing prowess to fall back on but long term the fact that no one trusts them enough to invest in their country will hamper the growth. It goes back to my original idea: Maybe the US does not need to shine, it just needs to outlast China to buy time to slowly fix itself over another century. China winning the race is not a foregone conclusion.

I mean...not only is China becoming a pretty desirable country for many of the world's residents, they could...have more children. If China decided to turn the corner and get back to maintenance levels, I 100% believe they could do it almost overnight.

What are you smoking? China is not welcoming to immigrants. China has very strict scrutiny of applications for Chinese citizenship. Unless you are married to a Chinese citizen, are a senior scientist, or make significant contributions to China, you can at most obtain a Chinese permanent residence permit, not citizenship. Looking at the most recent numbers of permanent resident it is less than 10,000 total people...in a country the size of China it might as well be a rounding error.

The time to have more children was 18 years ago. Not sure if you know but it takes 18 years to go from birth to adult. The point of having people is so they participate in the economy, they become the workers, the consumers, and the defense. A country is nothing but a bunch of people. No people: no actual country.

The crisis is locked in now: look at the population pyramid: https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/ The "peak" of their population was 2021, since then their population has consistently declined: old people dying off and not being replaced by young people or immigrants. By the 2100 unless they figure out how to grow humans in a factory they will have lost ~800 MILLION people!

Now look at the US: https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...

As close to perfect growth as possible. No over representation of any group. The US has had this blessing in that they could cheat and attract enough people as immigrants to make up for any decline in native births. It gets even better! Not only do they get people at their prime age they didn't even have to spend the resources to raise the person for the first 18 years of their life, some other sucker country did all the work and the benefit goes to the US. They only let in as much as they need and it forms a perfect pyramid. Stable growth and stable population sizes. You can argue that maybe Trump has started to derail this but again...you cannot compare China to the US at all.

I guess I didn't explain it clearly enough. For the US to stop mattering some other big guy will have to start mattering. I just don't see any country really taking on that mantle anytime soon. Maybe we are in a global decline and the only goal for the two big gorillas in the world is to outlast the other and only after that worry about what comes next.

The UK empire is considered by many to have ended in 1947 with the independence of India. Others say it was finally finished in 1997 with Hong Kong. Either way the UK is still around and while things aren't rosy, they still trudge along and will continue to do so.

Meanwhile the US's "supposed upcoming ending" puts them in a better position than the UK was in many different categories. It still has massive resources, amazing talent and a citizenry with an "ambitious" can do attitude vs the "tall poppy syndrome" of the UK. Its difficult to argue that there is an exact end date thats occurring now. To say its all over and that there isn't a second story coming seems premature.

Re China: This is a country that has overexpanded in infrastructure which will come home to roost sooner or later, has a terrible demographic structural collapse looming with no realistic way to correct(unlike the US which has options to correct), has overinvested in so many industries that they are experiencing massive (25%) youth unemployment with deflation occurring. They have serious problems coming in the next few decades.

I hope they replace their awful voice to text on their keyboard. I can't stand that terrible bit of software.

Do you have an alternative path to take that can replace that block of text?

They still do, you just choose not to explore your options. Therefore you still have that freedom. Go to Firefox and get your adblocker back.

Not sure if you are talking about extremist actions or just rhetoric but if so, the numbers aren't there. Violence isn't the answer as the government has gotten better at stomping down any resistance with each passing generation. Some say Kent State killed the resistance mentality among boomers. Their kids started with that watered down mentality and a more emboldened government went further to erode it further. I don't really know about this for sure but it seems this is the case. I hope to see how it all plays out in the coming decades though.

This is a fundamental problem in politics in my opinion. Everybody has different values and points of view so they may see the same thing completely differently. Its what makes humans great but also frustrating. geohots example will work for some, others will be convinced of the opposite opinion, and others will just let is pass them by and not understand the implications. The same could be applied to your examples to a different degree.

Politicians try to use different examples for the audience they are speaking to.

Might be premature to say that...Elon is essentially betting all of Tesla on the fact that a robot can change a bike tire soon, if he is wrong he might have to come up with some new BS to keep surviving, but maybe he is partially right and a robot ends up being able to change some bike tires sometimes.

Are you referring to the numerous Chinese UV printers?

The head gets perma-clogged with solids within minutes of disuse in open air. So starting a print job is a race: Get everything set up, uncap the cartridge at the last moment, and then put that cap back on ASAP when the job is over

Decades ago I helped manage a local's school IT systems and we had these Epson C84 printers that used a very photo grade ink. The printheads would clog after a year of teachers printing like 1 document in that year. During that time it seemed like regular purging of ink regardless of print or not was what kept the printheads going. Strategies used by third party repair firms included submerging the head in a cleaner to dissolve the ink on the outside, connecting pipes with the same fluid to the inputs of the top to the printhead and then finally pulling pressure to try and dislodge the material through the head. Due to the non removable design of the Epson print heads, my attempts at trying this would destroy many printheads. I'd like to think this would be a solved problem in 2026. In your case why not run a purge liquid the printhead after each print? The printhead could then be primed with fresh ink each time.

Maybe they should have purchased a design from Canon or someone that isn't really in this market anymore. It seems like not only are they locked into a specific older technology generation (which could be ok idk) but they also risk HP just discontinuing that cartridge. It seems like the printers for this cartridge were released around late 2017 so they could deprecate earlier than they normally do. Seems like they provide 10-20 years typically. At the same time , maybe this is just meant for a small user base of nerds and maybe HP wont care.

I don't really think DVDs are "simpler to operate" except for the fact that you only need cheaper equipment

Think of it from the point of view from senior citizens. They likely already have the equipment for DVD and are used to it. That alone is "simpler to operate". Yes Bluray could often have simpler menus but that existing inertia is something that is important as well because I dont think most senior citizens are actively seeking out newer tech if they dont need to.

Why DVD and not Blu-ray? The reason I said boomers buy DVD is because there are still a lot of senior citizens that are not internet savvy that like to rent out movies from their libraries, the dvds are simpler to operate, are more reliable from deep scratches, and a lot of boomers have simple equipment. Most of them don't care about perceived quality. This market is big enough that ironically DVDs may actually outlive Blu-Ray. Its the format that wont die. In fact I bet part of the reason Blu-Ray is being kept alive is due to studios already putting in the work to produce DVDs.

I spoke to my local librarian who cited this as the reason they haven't bothered with 4K blueray despite it being 10+ year old technology at this point.

Netflix isn't serving 100Mbps though.

Technically blueray has a 'update mechanism' that newer films will require players to update to.

AVGN complained about it here: https://youtu.be/tetXKdi9U3c?t=400

That will last only as long as boomers are still around watching movies.

I am very annoyed by this with the recent surprise smash hit of the movie 'Obsession'. This is a new director made popular by his devoted fan base and they just announced the blueray. One director commentary, a tiny 'featurette' and then just the film.

I remember back in the heyday of physical media(2010s) directors like Edgar Wright took curation of physical media extremely seriously: Multiple commentaries by not only the director but with the cast, production crew, sound designers etc. Deleted scenes, multiple featurettes and even picture slideshows.

I wonder how much the design of Blueray menus is hampered by the tech choices used in the format. DVDs were video files that repeated with tiny overlays that the player would just draw. Bluray seem to be entire Java applications of which most studios develop one generic version and reuse for every release.

The PC burners/readers are disappearing. We had like ASUS, LG and Pioneer manufacturing. Pioneer had thrown in the towel last year (they were heads above the best in quality). I think ASUS might be gone as well. LG's drives are super hit or miss and I wouldn't be surprised if they give it up eventually.

This is probably due to the fact that they relied on Intel SGX security which has been busted wide open and itself been discontinued by Intel so instead of redesigning the security model, just depreciate the entire format on PC.

I don't think there is that much of a market left for set top players either.

Of all the companies you'd think are committed to the format, it would be Sony right?

Well they currently list one model of set top player on their website and it is the same design since at least the pandemic(when I bought my player). The SKu has changed since then but after looking at the differences, the only design update they have done in those ~6 years is upgraded menu software and removing built-in smart or networking features.

8K hasn't taken off as far as I know but eventually it might and right now there is no transition path to that for physical media.

Very interesting...maybe this is another great filter preventing a species from becoming multi planetary or expanding beyond a type 0 civilization?