Same, but what I lucked into as a result of that was that pops bought a computer for the house back in the early 90's in a curious attempt at learning what was happening with desktop publishing (to keep up with what was going on in the wider industry), and computers never really clicked with him, but they did with me.

I think there's often definite overlap in what's happening now with what's coming next, and I can only wish that my son will benefit from some kind of comparable serendipity in the same way that I did.

Somebody gave me Slackware Linux [1] floppies in 1994 and schooled young me on worlds beyond MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 For Workgroups; I had accidentally discovered MS-DOS Editor [2] by being frustrated one day and typing edit into the command line (while muttering "HOW DO I EDIT A FILE?", barely understanding what a file was in the first place), so I was shown that JOE was like edit but also way better. The UI and keybindings ended up burned into muscle memory, so I just kept using it, and still do -- and there's basically no point in ever replacing it now or starting to use emacs/vi/etc instead lol

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Own_Editor

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_Editor

Doc Martens, however, are a good example of a brand/business where LTV might literally be 1, 2, maybe 5 purchases if your feet have stopped growing and you buy their Made in England boots (higher quality, but a price point that isn't LVMH territory) and want different colors -- or maybe a lot more if you buy the shitty ones (vegan leather, plastic-coated leathers) and they fall apart after 9 months and you replace them.

Regardless, a higher quality pair bought in 1994 and beat to hell and back still are very wearable in 2026, while at the same time there are junk options available too if you're so inclined for whatever reason.

I don't personally understand businesses that treat their products as disposable if the product itself isn't intended to literally be disposable by design. I get "make as much money as possible before the spigot shuts off", "endless growth is the goal", etc, but it also seems like it would create all kinds of headaches and byproducts that make operating a brand or business hell on earth (staffing otherwise-unnecessary customer service, dealing with frequent returns and liquidations, constant rebrand/brand management to deal with or paper over negative public perceptions, endless battle with knockoff competitors because your product has no differentiation in quality or value, on and on).

Temu/Shein/etc on the other hand have a distinct advantage in that they're marketplaces and aggregators of invisible brands; they shield "ghost kitchen" product producers from any kind of liability, blowback, negative attention. They're giants in a foreign land that operate with different rules, goals and incentives.

I don't really have a salient point, just thinking out loud. Ultimately, the article is probably correct in that the default, mainstream firehose of digital detritus will settle somewhere near "ultra-processed content", and that will be just fine for the average consumer. Not much we can really do about it with society and economies structured the way they are today. The knock-on effects of this on culture would be borderline impossible to unwind though, which is sad.

An electronic Siren's Song if you will.

Even back to the mid-90's I've always approached projects like this -- soup to nuts, all the way from idea to conception to creative ideation to implementation to digital life!

I also used to assume everybody did lol, until I worked long enough professionally to watch the landscape subdivide like a fractal into what we have now.

There's a LOT of bad shit to be said about AI coding, but I also have this feeling that something about it all is rekindling that ancient one-man-band approach that can actually work if you're able to play all the instruments. Really interested to see what comes of it once the breathless hype dies down a little bit.

For what it's worth, I did read your post twice before I replied, just to see if I didn't get it on the first pass. What I took from it, and maybe I'm thick as molasses, was that humans defacto love to argue due to biological imperative, we stratify social value based on the success of arguments, and ultimately promote argument as a contact sport that you can dominate in for personal gain and personal validation. Dominate instead of mediate, which I've found through life experience to come most often from people who are deeply insecure with themselves.

When I came back to the thread, I noticed that the submission title had been updated to Most arguments are about ego, not ideas and saw your replies to my post + siblings, and felt like that new title encapsulated your responses perfectly. You and I simply disagree on the purpose and value of argument.

Persuasive people rarely argue. Persuasive people do not need to be unequivocally right. The most persuasive people do get what they want in the end, but you often don't even realize you've been persuaded.

Argumentative people leverage power if they have it, and data, and sometimes "win", but rarely succeed in persuasion.

And that's just my opinion! Feel free to disagree, I've no interest in an argument LOL

I disagree, and offer the world of 2026 as anecdotal evidence lol. Most of what you wrote implies that every person participates in arguments honestly, with full faith, and are both cognitively capable of, and actively willing to, receive, evaluate and ultimately accept the argument as a zero-sum "winner". In reality, illogical appeals to emotion tend to win the day.

This also kind of refuses to acknowledge that a lot of people simply don't feel the need to be right; some people move in silence, others just don't care for the friction, or need the accolades. Still others don't enjoy the company of self-righteous, unbending, argumentative people, or have wildly different perspectives on a topic due to life experiences that are unfathomable to the rest.

I believe that multiple things can often be right simultaneously, and it's exactly that kind of positive sum philosophy that drives the most argumentative and need-to-be-right people completely insane haha. Different strokes for different folks man.

I'd love to see it though, because email really is long in the tooth at this point.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=442NF5cZhyc

I also had no idea RAM and GPU costs would explode they way they did, just happened to do it the right time. I might try to grab a ~$300 3080 on Ebay and sell the 1080ti, but otherwise it's been a great upgrade -- it sucks electricity like Coca Cola, but otherwise performs fantastic as a workstation, and I'm just gonna drive it til the wheels fall off.

Sports (in some aspects) needs facilities, gear, arenas, other people to participate with. Building things usually requires materials (unless you're bushcrafting) that requires a fully-functioning supply chain. Video games and shows and films (at the quality level we expect them to be) require herculean efforts from thousands of people each, and massive investments, to go from concept to completion. Travel in and of itself is predicated on the ideas that the hospitality industry exists, infrastructure for flight, rail, bus, car all exist (and are operational), that the very people that are the fabric and heartbeat of the culture you're traveling to experience exist, and are operating restaurants, businesses, etc.

Every leisure activity that we think of occupying our time with instead of a job requires the collective efforts of the rest of society to even exist, and kind of implies that your ability to lead a life of leisure is an anomaly. Some things can arguably be replaced with AI and robots, but the texture and tactility that we crave from most of these activities would be gone. Traveling to Scotland to get a plate of haggis and hang out in a pub just wouldn't be the same if your driverless taxi took you to the unmanned airport full of kiosks and humanoid sentries, to be loaded half-conscious into a metal tube and flown across the planet, ultimately driven to the ends of the Earth and dropped off at a 600 year old crumbling building where you're met by R2-D2 wearing a kilt and a tam o'shanter, talking like Groundskeeper Willie LOL

[0] https://github.com/SnakeO/claude-co-commands

[0] https://www.wired.com/1996/11/compuserve-fails-to-wow-consum...

In the mid 90's, CompuServe sponsored a Boy Scouts Explorer Post at their headquarters -- they gave us free accounts and then once a month for an hour or 2, a couple dozen kids ranging from probably 12 to 18 would show up, the adults would be so fucking cool and gracious and welcoming, showing us around the building (server rooms! conference rooms! etc). Each meetup, there would be like an adult-driven presentation about some piece of technology, then one or more of the teens would get to take over the projector and talk about something they're into (writing music in FastTracker, coding, hacking, whatever). One time they gave us a whole computer-version-of-D.A.R.E. "be careful what you're doing online re:hacking/carding/etc" presentation because one of the older kids was getting in and out of trouble with the law (and they were trying to help keep him out of the slammer). Really non-judgmental, just cool older nerds mentoring the next generation. They also did stuff like set up this giant demonstration booth at the fair with a bunch of computers to demo the HOT NEW ONLINE EXPERIENCE WorldsAway [0] lol, and had all of us man the booth and walk the general public through it. The whole thing was just really cool, very 90's, very honest.

Fast forward to early-mid-2010's: every single meetup in adult-life tech world was a thinly-veiled advertisement for either the company sponsoring the space, or the company sponsoring the presentation. Nothing felt organic, everybody had an agenda (evidenced by "speakers" arriving 2 minutes before their scheduled time slot, giving a powerpoint presentation on either their employer's current product or their personal library / A List Apart article / whatever they're promoting for clout, then leaving immediately afterwards). Outside of the organizers doing it for personal visibility and gain, I never understood the point of attending. It wasn't a party. It wasn't a seminar. They focused on the stage and the individual, not the collective. It was never an environment to actually network, or actually learn something novel and exciting, or fish for a job, or (even in the most reductive implementation) an environment to just fuck around and goof off and connect with likeminded strangers through a shared experience LOL - each one was promoted as all of the above though!

Anyways, I personally quit bothering with any kind of meetup years before COVID. I'd prefer the "skate park" equivalent, where its a static, asynchronous place that people show up when they feel like it, do their thing, and let the universe sort out the rest, but there are so many ways to do that stuff online (it's the internet, after all), that it feels like it would be a pretty hard sell to get people to show up in person anymore without offering something truly organic and special.

[0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/424450/this-old-tech-remembe...