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atomheartbevo

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by atomheartbevo

  1. I would agree except that the internet and travel within Europe in the 90s and 2000s shook things up, to the point where up to a million Russians and their families fled Russia when they became concerned they were going to be drafted in 2022/2023. Obviously it was probably wise of Putin to let them go, since they would have been the troublemakers Plenty stayed behind in the large cities thinking that either their jobs or their bank accounts would keep them from being drafted, and now that security is gone - this can’t bode well for the economy (hence their jobs) and if their bank accounts are gutted, they are not bribing anybody to get out of conscription.
  2. Musk wouldn’t know what to do if he found himself with another person in one of the private sex stalls in the Bucees bathrooms. Or a public sex stall for that matter.
  3. So does Facebook. And don't forget Orkut either. Google had Google Drive/Photos, YouTube (a bigger social media platform than Facebook), Blogger (which would have been an easy platform for individual user pages) and a bunch of other services, but Google is gonna Google. Somebody wrote a book that claimed it scared Zuckerberg and he forced the company to boost a lot of areas or add new features.
  4. Only if somebody else pops up with a major platform that mom and pop can use, that has everything that FB already has. AOL didn't make the leap to broadband provider, so they fell behind their competition fast. AOL was selling internet access over dial-up, and once broadband hit the mainstream scene, a big chunk of AOL's userbase no longer had a need for AOL - AOL would be yet another expense on top of their broadband bill (for many, AOL was their internet access until broadband came along). In other words, AOL didn't evolve, while FB has evolved over time with things like Instagram, marketplace, etc. AOL wasn't profitable in a way that FB is - their profit relied on people using their service sparingly, and when they started to fall behind the competition, they went from an hourly fee to a monthly fee in the late 90s, and it killed their profit margin when people stayed logged in trying to find horny men and women in Austin and Dallas. FB doesn't face that dilemma because their revenue increases when usage increases. Finally, the AOL-Time Warner merger completely turbofucked everything. Facebook is not merging with anybody at that kind of scale. There are very few things that can send FB the way of AOL. It would have to be a competently run platform that offers much of what FB has, just as AOL was wiped out by broadband providing better connection services than AOL. When broadband came along in a big way, people were willing to forego AOL for the better internet access, and would then go find AdultFriendFinder.com or whatever to bang hot ladies and dudes in Austin and Dallas. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are the only companies that could offer a platform at that scale that could compete with FB, and Google has made runs at it, and I'm not sure Microsoft can do that for a lot of reasons (and arguably they have a platform with LinkedIn, but it's no FB).
  5. Apple is the current and future enemy of Facebook and Zuckerberg has made that clear many times and has lobbied against Apple politically and railed against them publicly. I would not be surprised if he's quietly spent a lot of money on PACs that lobby Congress to look at Apple from an anti-trust/monopoly angle, but he's sure as hell made it clear to various politicians that Apple is the devil. It started four years ago when Apple, by default, blocked Facebook from tracking Apple users' web-browsing and app-using habits, hurting FB's bottom line. Zuckerburg just outright loathes Apple, and there are two reasons for it: 1. The most important - Apple spends a lot of resources on trying to keep Facebook and other platforms from accessing user data on iPhones, iPads, and Macs, including things like trying to make Safari more and more private and keep more and more of Safari's user-data away from Facebook, other platforms, and advertisers. There are people at Apple whose literal jobs involve keeping Facebook, etc. out of user data. Apple already offers a built-in VPN of sorts to all Safari users on all Apple devices through the "Private Browsing Mode" feature. Keeping that browsing data, as well as things like contact lists, text messages, etc. away from Facebook, etc. keeps a shitload of money out of Facebook's wallet. If Google went as hard at user privacy and blocking companies like Facebook, etc. from various data/metrics of its users, Facebook, advertisers, etc. would be in a world of shit, but Google can't do that as effectively as Apple because it has its own tracking it needs to do for its advertisers. Apple forced users to decide whether to let Facebook, etc. track their data/browsing across other websites and apps. Facebook spent tens of millions of dollars on advertising against that update, claiming it would hurt not only Facebook, but small businesses that rely on gathering user data from their browsing, purchases, etc. Facebook even tried to organize small businesses to band together against Apple's privacy restrictions. A friend who worked at Apple said Facebook was nasty as hell privately in going after Apple over those changes. 2. Long term - Apple has $162 billion in cash. Apple has a solid cloud infrastructure, with a lot of apps that synchronize their data across devices, and those apps include calendar apps, store/shopping apps, mapping apps, messaging apps, video game service (including matchmaking) Safari web browser, email, music, password apps, news apps, video and photo taking and organizing apps, video streaming apps, , etc., etc. If Apple wanted to, they could announce that they were creating a social media platform to be included in iCloud, that taps into their various apps, but that is focused on user privacy and that they wouldn't follow the FB model of advertising/user tracking and selling the hell out of user data. Facebook would be in an absolute world of shit if that happened, because plenty of people would be happy with that. That terrifies Zuckerberg, and Google has made runs, both overtly, but also backdoor-ish, at creating its own centralized social media platform, but it never quite gets it together, whereas Apple not only has the resources, but has all of the infrastructure to do it and could hire the right people to make it work, and wouldn't half-ass it.
  6. Prodigy (and AOL) were so innocent when you look back at them - they were just walled gardens meant to sell you a service, and they made their money from the service fees and advertisers who were doing the equivalent of a weekly grocery mailer back in the old days, before everything was micro-targeted to you in ways that would blow the minds of most Americans these days. FB, etc. give you ads based on a single web page you looked at last week, or a single purchase, but they also collate those website visits and purchases with visits and purchases you have made over the years and send you ads based on that data as well.
  7. Well 1.4 million rubles makes you a millionaire in Russia, which means that with $13,500 you can probably have 2-3 girlfriends, a Lada, and a decent house (I'm kidding, a thousandaire can easily have their pick of Russian widows). I am insanely curious about whether this really gets shit happening, because this is being done in view of the public and has to be freaking out a lot of the St. Pete's/Moscow/etc. crowd who actually have more than $13,500. Most of them blindly went along knowing that the "the war is going according to plan" talk was all bullshit because they were mostly unaffected outside of higher prices, but this should absolutely ramp up their paranoia that A) they are about to lose a big chunk of their life savings if it happens and B) if the Russian government no longer gives a fuck about keeping them content and mostly unaffected, then how long before they are drafted for the front?
  8. If you are a big fan of IndyCar Racing II, somebody has put a lot of effort into a wrapper that upscales it to modern resolutions. Only $10 for the wrapper. Here's hoping they make enough to work on some of the expansion tracks.
  9. @SimonBolivar I’m not trying to spoil you, so don’t play this video. My kid has been listening to soundtracks, and was playing this on YouTube, and now I’m keeping an eye out on the Alamo Drafthouse website, because if TMP pops back up for a screening, We are going (me just for the theme). Just as John Williams’ score is The Superman Theme, I think Jerry Goldsmith’s TMP theme should be The Star Trek Theme. Although James Horner’s Wrath of Khan was a strong contender.
  10. No. And I don’t mean Zuck fighting him, I mean seeing FB and Insta going full-tilt after Musk’s platforms. If Musk picked up TikTok, I could see Meta deciding that maybe Threads should be more useful and adding the (deliberately) missing features.
  11. I pride myself on having participated in a lot of various online communities going back to the BBS days, but I completely skipped AOL in its heyday, because I didn’t want to pay for it when I already had internet access. I kind of regret it.
  12. Liam Fucking Neeson.
  13. Anybody else playing Arma Reforger. Played it a a friends this weekend. It’s fun as hell, like I haven’t had that much fun since Battlefield 1942, at least vehicular-wise.
  14. Fuck, Austin may have a nice little 36-hour period below freezing.
  15. Yeah, a friend does the CRPG reviews for a gaming site, and said they catch shit from the incels in comments/social media when they write about it, and the main thing apparently pissing these people off is that it has pronouns in the character creation tool. Which Baldur’s Gate 3 had. But apparently none of these people played BG3. Or a tabletop RPG. When I talked to him a few weeks ago, he had played a preview build a few weeks before that. He said it was “competently made” (which is high praise from him) if you are a Pillars of Eternity fan, but it felt like at times they just checked off a bunch of boxes on a list of RPG elements. I’ll wait until it’s on sale (heavily discounted) because I haven’t even finished POE II.
  16. Drop some into the Kremlin next month on the anniversary… This has got to be both exhausting Russian air defenses, but also forcing them to redeploy what they have left. And if they move them around, their chances of being spotted go up.
  17. My kid is showing an interest in band/orchestra, and has been listening to some soundtracks, and he played the Star Trek: The Motion Picture theme on YouTube, and damn, I forgot how good Jerry Goldsmith was. Next time TMP or Wrath of Khan show up at the Alamo Drafthouse, we are going. There was one helluva string of soundtracks in the late 70s . 1977: Star Wars opening theme 1978: Superman The Movie opening theme 1979: Star Trek The Motion Picture opening theme
  18. We just need to stick to Surly where we can talk about the restraining order between Hall and Oates, or Jessica Simpson being on the market again, or the new Naked Gun movie coming out this summer, etc.
  19. Yeah, FB is just another communications and organization tool for me. For my parents, it’s…well, a social media platform. Of course, I came up from BBSes to Usenet, and was using GeoCities and MySpace and FB when they were just starting out, while my parents started out with CompuServe or AOL. And their usage of the internet before or during the 90s was pretty limited to things like email (work) and the groups and sites that were in the walled gardens of AOL, etc.. I and others like me were used to bouncing between platforms as new stuff arrived, and we are used to platforms and sites failing, so I don’t find myself as attached to platforms or websites. When Leon bought Twitter, I started looking elsewhere, regardless of what I had done on Twitter. I was able to archive my Twitter stuff. I tried Threads, but I’m done with them keeping it crippled on purpose to drive you to Instagram. So it was easy to pop over to Mastodon and BlueSky. My parents and their friends found things they liked with the walled gardens like AOL, and then later on FB was everything they wanted ramped up to 11, and for them it and Amazon are the internet. I think discussion is still going strong on places like Surly, Reddit, etc.. I heard over the years how email was going to die and be replaced by something else, yet more people are sending more emails than ever before. Same with forums. It’s possible they aren’t as popular as say 20 years ago, but I look at Discourse, Slack, Reddit, even places like Quora, and the speciality or geo-focused sites like Surly, and they are very active. Hell, Reddit replaced Usenet completely. Yep, FB is just another tool to me and I’m surprised it has lasted as long as it did, but I would not be surprised if somebody else came along within 5 years to…not necessarily replace it, but provide an alternative. Reddit showed how to replace sites like Digg. FB showed how to replace MySpace, Geocities, AOL, etc. and there was obliviously a big gap between AOL and FB, but FB seems to have really sucked in the AOL fans.
  20. He has the data and knows how the various age groups are using it, so probably smart to try and diversify in some way. It needed a lot more time though - the audience for Second Life is still pretty limited. A lot of people want high-end VR, they don’t want Lawnmower Man. I’ve been a part of a bunch of groups that have migrated around the web, from Usenet to various op websites to Yahoo Groups to, these days, FB or groups.io and it’s not that hard if you can get the most active folks on the same page and everybody realizes what need to happen. Hell, we saw it right here with our community.
  21. I think there’s some truth to that. It came up in a discussion between my cousins and I over the holidays. My parents and aunts and uncles are boomers and are active on FB, and I mean talking to one another, posting memes, just shooting the shit, etc.. My wife and I and siblings and cousins of the same generation (gen-Xers, the forgotten generation) are on FB as well, but it seems like most of us are using it either to post pics/news for our parents/relatives, or because of specific groups we follow (hobby/professional/high school/college/etc.) and for most of us, our usage feels pretty targeted - like we pop on and send a private message or check updates in a group and then pop off. There is a very clear difference in how we are using it versus our boomer parents. And then you look at my nieces/nephews/younger cousins who are in their 20s/teens, and their FB usage is extremely minimal, and it seems like half the time they are posting their Instagram stuff,
  22. Wait, are you following other women in addition to Susanna Hoffs, Dana Delany, and Sela Ward?
  23. I like that it’ll be up to 70 on Friday and then drop down to 20 within three days.
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