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I'm rather fond of QMMP, because being built with normal Qt5 and a very vanilla stock theme, it integrates nicely into my "You're going to look like Motif come hell or high water" desktop theming philosophy.

I also find that I never got into playlists, so something that can easily be coaxed to just swallow 100Gb of content and let me occasionally search for a specific track is my speed.


I suspect it had a similar reputation as things like Fortran-- the principal use case defined it to such an extent that it prevents a breakout moment. An entire generation assumed "Ada is that weird bulletproof thing defense contractors and nobody else uses."

Languages like Rust have benefited from hobbyist showcases-- evangelists building familiar tools and demonstrating "it's more reliable and more understandable" but nobody was doing it for Ada.


For a "first dive" into a programming paradigm, I could see the appeal of something more "PC" shaped than "MCU shaped", just because it offers recognizable, easy ways to deal with primitive debugging.

If you have a memory-mapped frame buffer, you can write a single byte to it if you need a status checkpoint or tracking a variable. If you have a keyboard, you can probably read its buffer or use it for triggers.

Maybe modern debugging environments and tools make it easier, but I tend to think of my university assembly language class which featured original Intel SDK-86 boards with LEDs and hex keypads to interact with.


The idea of chat interfaces always seemed to be to disguise available functionality.

It's a CLI without the integrity. When you bought a 386, it came with a big book that said "MS-DOS 4.01" and enumerated the 75 commands you can type at the C:\> prompt and actually make something useful happen.

When you argue with ChatGPT, its whole business is to not tell you what those 75 commands are. Maybe your prompt fits its core competency and you'll get exactly what you wanted. Maybe it's hammering what you said into a shape it can parse and producing marginal garbage. Maybe it's going to hallucinate from nothing. But it's going to hide that behind a bunch of cute language and hopefully you'll just keep pulling the gacha and blaming yourself if it's not right.


I'd argue there is a lot of cost-scale issue.

Blair Witch was achievable not just because it was low-tech but because the premise can be done cheaply.

If I want to make (for example), a globe-trotting spy film, locations and travel are expensive. If there's going to be car crashes, props are expensive. If I do it on a hobbyist budget, it will look the part.

To be honest, I expected to rise of the "all CGI" film more than the AI-gen film. You still have full artistic control rather than wrestling the gacha on specifics, but now you can afford to level Paris and rebuild it in the next scene, and you don't have to worry about the lead actor gaining 10kg before the sequel.


A flood of content has actively devalued media even before AI.

In the era of "the cinema has fewer screens than an AI character has fingers", "big media" -- movies and TV -- were cultural touchstones. Everyone knows Luke Skywalker, the Brady Bunch, or the Jaws theme as baseline references, even if they've never seen the corresponding media.

Now, even before the AI boom, we've got so many choices that we're all in independent fandoms with less and less "common currency". If I made a joke at work about dressing up as a human-sized NEC PC-9801[0], what are the odds any of my co-workers will get it?

AI would accelerate that process. You'll have a thousand niche movies a week all sliding through the local cineplex. There might be fifteen people who ever pay to see "Dragon Locomotive Mechanic Samurai Warrior XVI: Return Of Admiral Becky", and will anyone want to talk with you about it after you leave the cinema?

[0] plug for 16-Bit Sensation


Trade wars would make sense if it were two well-armed manufacturing powers, but the US showed up at a knife fight with a tuba.

The problem isn't that people are saying "I'll buy the $2.50 Chinese widget over the $4.00 American one", which you might be able to steer by taxing the import highly enough.

It's that there is nobody domestic manufacturing the $4.00 widget in the first place. Nobody's going to wait three years for you to build the factory.


One problem was also that the 2600, hardware-wise, had run its course. Some of the other contemporary consoles were a bit better, but most of them were well below the arcade games of the day.

Yes, there are some impressive things being made with the continuing efforts of hobbyists today, but under the resources and commercial pressures of the time, the 2600 wasn't going to produce a stream of new and exciting hits.

There's a demake of Super Mario for the 2600, but it's clearly blockier and clunkier than the day-1 NES launch title, and it took decades of hobbyist effort to get even there.

I wonder if Atari didn't really know how to deal with the idea of an upgrade. Most home goods don't require a sudden upgrade to play popular new content (colour TV was intentionally compatible with black-and-white sets, and even hi-fi had a long transition period where you could get new albums in LP/tape/8-track/CD), so even if the 5200 had not been awkward, it would have been difficult to get the right mix of manufacturing, new game development, and backporting to smoothly transition.

The 7800 would probably have competed very well with the NES if they had launched at the same time-- backwards compatibility would have offered a placeholder as the 7800-native library was built out-- just give people a voucher for a stack of free bargain-bin games in the box.


What's the ISP's motivations towards preventing BYOD?

If they're desperate for the $10 per month box rental, I'm sure they could just levy a $10 per month BYOD "support fee" to make equal, but it sounds like in some places they're charging way more as a penalty.

I know some of them were very aggressive about using home routers to provide coverage for roaming Wi-Fi, but that doesn't seem as big a push as it was. I suspect this corresponds with a lot of them getting into the MVNO business lately.

Do they result in a disproportionate volume of support inquiries, or maybe ones that they can't just dispatch by trying to send a remote-reboot signal down the line? I could see addressing that by moving towards a fee-for-service-call model if you need to call the "custom configurations" hotline.


Every time I have any interaction with my bank accounts online, they seem to see it as an opportunity to try to cram paperless statements down my throat. Evidently they learned from the software industry that there's no such thing as "no", just "ask again later".

Whatever spin they put on it (ecology typically) it's about them wanting to save 70 cents a month on postage. The fact they keep trying to slip it under my radar shows a disrespect for me as a customer.

More seriously, I could see it breaking the workflow of people who traditionally used the arrival of the statement as a trigger for other things (maybe they ONLY check their statement for fraudulent transactions once a month, or send off bills when they recieve it), and having it suddenly disappear breaks their workflow.

Rather than "we've got a shinier app" or a new way to insert a chatbot between you and the services you want to perform, a disruptor bank should be going all-in in customer service. If you want statements, you'll get them. No dark patterns or "we changed this setting because you gave us the vaguest hint of consent." First contact on the customer service hotline is straight to a human being. Nothing that requires a custom app-- everything online should work on any device with a browser, and 2FA should be a standalone token provided at the bank's expense. (Aside from providing a simpler UI, it's one more hurdle in turning "stolen phone" into "account compromise")

All the large national banks are interchangeable for a consumer-- they all pay dreck interest, and their primary selling feature is "you might find a no-fee ATM while travelling." But they'd be very suited to the customer-service pivot because they already have the in-person footprint that allows for handling the "I'm in over my head and want to go down and talk with an actual person to get sorted out" scenarios.


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