My opinion is that "the big sellout" happened when apple introduced the iphone and the apple app store.

and it basically came down to a couple nuances in their policies...

#1 apps have unfettered network access

#2 apple would never approve security apps like a firewall (because #1)

and when a big player sets an example, it normalizes the situation for everyone else.

I think it was seen (or sold) as "advertising will fund everything" just like television, radio and print advertising did in the past.

Except the old advertising was one-way. Advertising today means ubiquitous surveillance and dossier building on every person on the planet.

It's been ~ 17 years of this iphone BS, and now behavior is creeping into every app, device and platform. Look at microsoft breaking new ground in appalling behavior with each software update.

Thank goodness for linux, open software, open hardware and people coming up with great hacks all the time.

Google is far more likely to fit your profile. It’s where ads (adwords and adsense) started to transform the web. First just a few cute banners at the top. And these days some sites just plaster the whole page with them.

Even still it’s hard to pick any singular company that started to make tech suck, they all followed or initiated trends that made things worse from a consumer standpoint.

And every ad-based business has the same underlying strategy: steal from the finite amount of attention you have and use it to extract your wealth.

but apple made it a free-for-all on the device that you arguably own.

for example, you can block google in your browser. web browsing still has choices and is still somewhat democratic. But you can't block google in an app on your phone.

While the past 30 years have absolutely put the "personal" into "personal computer", I'd rather have a personal assistant than a personal overseer.

Modern technology lost this. Everything now comes with a hidden, or not so hidden, tether to various companies. Unlike the PC of the 90s, ModernDevices today are limited. And the limits are artificial and set by the device and OS manufacturers, not set by physics or your own personal skill with the device. Now you constantly have these manufacturers looking over what you're doing, to ensure it's OK with them, and to ensure it's still making them money. And as soon as what you want to do with your ModernDevice conflicts with what all these various companies want you to do with them, they get to ultimately decide, not you. The companies are more and more deciding when the device can be turned on and off, what can and cannot run on it and when. These devices exist for the benefit of their manufacturers.

Companies' paternalistic attitude of "What should we allow users to do?" is what soured new technology for me.

This may just mean that early adopters are now signaliing that they are getting bored with software/tech and the rest of the market may soon follow that opinion.

In the past we adopted new startups such as JustinTV, YouTube, and Instagram because they gave us something we didn't have front and center. Live streaming, video, and stylized photos. Now every social network offers all kinds of media and in different engagement foemats, and the algorithms keep us entertained enough. There's not a whole lot of reasons to adopt something new, unless it's even more addictive.

Maybe the reign of the incumbent social networks will last much, much longer than we initially expected.

Personally, I prefer 720p. It's easy to play on any device, the file sizes are much smaller, and the quality is fine. I don't need 4K for most content and save it for exceptional visuals like Godfrey Reggio's Trilogy or Yojimbo — one of the most visually stunning movies I've ever seen in high resolution. My preference also reduces hosting costs for platforms, at least from my account.

Social media constantly pushes high-res, addictive content, but alternatives like Fediverse exist. After adjusting to these communities, I deleted my X account and rarely use Facebook. On Fediverse, server operators encourage efficient file sizes (and types,) unlike Instagram or TikTok.

The network effect drives people to the few social networks, but I'm not convinced people actually want what they're being given. Repeating for emphasis: I'm not convinced this is what people want!

This sounds way too much - prohibitive, in fact, when cheap all-you-can-eat dubiously-legal IPTV services exist.

On the one hand, AWS quote something similar as an estimate ($12,000 for 10 hours for 10,000 viewers at 1080p) [0]. All but a rounding error of this is paid to AWS CloudFront for per-GB distribution costs and this assumes 99% of bits can be served by the CDN.

On the other hand, Amazon note that this is typically an overestimate because it's unlikely all your viewers will get the 1080p, and they can degrade service to some (QVBR) and pass you on the savings. Additionally, Twitch video content (disproportionately, video games) seems like it should be more compressible than most video. And most importantly, Twitch don't pay the retail price.

Still, it's going to come in an order of magnitude above what I thought Youtube/Twitch etc needed to pay their bills.

[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/solutions/latest/live-streaming-...

my source for the part you quoted - apparently this is in their dashboard? it could be a third party site. I no longer have access to a twitch account (as an aside i blame starlink and not using gmail) so i can't verify if streamers on the platform have access to those tools.

And the pricing seemed about right. You can't tell but i am napkin-ing this right now: twitch recommends 4500kbps for 1080p30 on the uplink side, which fans out to 40gbit. per second. So maybe you can get that for $5000/month; or you can get 10gbit links in four places. Receive bits, transcode, stream. how hard

wait transcode?

A certain very large media company was paying a third party $250,000 per month for transcoding, on three 24x7 streams. I'm not saying that spend was necessary, because it isn't, just that it is a pain point.

anyhow that video shows $0.132 per half-viewer-hour (or something) at 1080p - probably 60fps. Come to think of it that's suspiciously close to what i'd guess AWS would charge for transit (which you alluded to, i think) - so this is showing streamers what they would be paying if they self hosted?

It was always going to be something like that. It's unlikely Amazon/Twitch wants to reveal exactly its costs. In general, people complain that egress bandwidth seems to be a high-margin line item for AWS.

So the cloud providers tend to be the one's paying and consequently their legitimate customers pay.

That's what Peertube is for. The original video comes from a specific web site. If the viewer count goes up, the people watching it also stream it out. So a hugely popular video won't overload the source server.

This is not like Bittorrent. It's not distributed file storage, just distributed streaming. It's only a load on the viewer's system when they are watching the video. Now that there are large numbers of users with symmetrical network connections, this is a practical way to distribute video.

I put technical videos on Peertube because there are no commercial interruptions.[1] I recommend it for content which doesn't need "discovery" service - that is, users arrive from some other source than the hosting site.

[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/7usCE3v2RrWK6nuoSr4NHJ

There's a reason that's the prime demographic. At some point you see the recycled shit dressed up as something new, and realize your "new" was also repackaged poop.

You can be, we're just getting old. LLMs are very exciting! WASI (and a bit older WebAssembly) is a bold idea! Rust is a breath of fresh air and ancient tools are finally being rewritten! Edge computing may change the way we write programs! Hardware is finally ready for VR!

Now, I'm quite sceptical and pessimistic about all of the above. But I think this says more about me than about the world. Younger me would be prototyping a LLM in Rust and compiling it to webassembly to use in his VR game right now. Current me thinks similarly to you.

This just goes back to your grandparent comment: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

Also, I'm not particularly excited about my day job becoming about fixing up half-broken scripts that other people pump out with LLMs.

> WASM/WASI is a bold idea

I will admit that I have not looked into this a lot, but how is WASM substantially different from other bytecode interpreters like the JVM?

> Rust is a breath of fresh air

Finally something that I agree about.

> and ancient tools are finally being rewritten

But as someone in their 30s who has now personally witnessed several hype cycles, I am increasingly frustrated by the observation that most things billed as "progress" are either "change for the sake of change" or "reinventing technologies that existed decades ago under different names" (e.g. JVM -> WASI or FreeBSD jails -> Linux containers).

To read this and get upset is very bizarre to me. LLMs as most of the public know, is just a few years old. The things these services are doing are nothing short of sci-fi ideas 10 years ago. And were complaining it can't do our laundry?

IMO this is peak first world complaning. Give it some time.

As I read it, the complaint is that it looks like it will be automating the things we don't want automated rather than automating the things we do.

But did the world really change? Are dangerous technology and hype cycles new? Or maybe the world is the same but it is me who have changed? Will current day teenagers recollect 2020s as a golden age of tech?

I am actually excited about LLMs that are entirely mine to tinker with, run 100% on my own silicon, open up and modify, publish my changes.

You can't? Just yesterday, Waymo opened their self-driving taxi service to the general public in San Francisco. We now have self driving cars. You draw a stick figure and the computer draws the rest of the fucking owl. I have an AI that I talk to on my phone and I tell it about my life's bullshit and it guides me through it. It helps me with my writing and my programming. Robots are getting better and better. Pretty soon we'll have humanoid robot companions to help around the house. I earnestly believe that I'll live to see the singularity.