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.

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/

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."

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?

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.

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!?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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