Arguably, they were wrong on all these points. Unix roots (text terminal) gave the one of the strongest boosts to Macbook sales in terms of newly minted developers. Deal with Microsoft brought not only much needed liquidity, but also Office, which was "the killer app(r)" for that era. Let me add one more - people complained about PowerPC->Intel switch, and then same people complained about Intel->Arm switch (both brave and visionary decisions which has been years in the making. The naysayers may complain about everything and nothing but Apple continues to prevail - I am saying that as no Apple fanboy - viva la Amiga!
Could this be used as an alternative to Parental Controls? Appple's implementation of parental controls is so deficient that it gives me PTSD every time I need to configure it.
Author here: I think this could work great for parental controls. A really determined kid with a laptop or the willingness to factory reset their iphone could get around it. But outside of this I _think_ it's worth trying.
late 90s is a whole different thing than mid 90s.
The 97 in AC'97 is there for a reason.
Would still say that Audigy 2001 front panel was peak consumer audio experience. Good access for headphone out and ASIO support, so for anyone wnating to connect you a midi keyboard for first excursion into digital music creation everything was there for a reasonable price point.
Even firewire for your DV imports.
A digital media entry point like no others existed at the time at that price point.
All material facts are correct - but let's also remember that the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore. In 2013, the authoritarianism was not on the rise. Arab Spring gave people hope. Gezi people were not only protesting, but also enjoying their uprising, singing, dreaming. Today - all of that is gone. Most western democracies succumbed to levels of authoritarianism. Let alone the number of active wars and conflicts developed countries are perpetrators...
> but let's also remember that the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore
Yep. In 2013 the social networks all found out that they can sell censorship to governments all over the world and their users wouldn't even notice it.
Exactly that thing Twitter is doing now was one of the main contributors to the world getting worse. That they and all their other competitors have been doing since then.
Free-speech Twitter was either an accident or had a very quick change of mind. And either way, expecting centralized platforms to be of any use here is deeply misguided.
Free speech Twitter was the result of a company that had a single business: moving Tweets to people. Musk and Zuckerberg have many interests globally, and picking fights with governments doesn’t serve those interests. Don’t cheer when a billionaire with global business interests buys a (relatively) independent media property and claims he’s bringing “free speech” because (even if he wasn’t defining the term in a distorted way to benefit his interests) he literally could not do that in a meaningful way, he’s too entangled elsewhere.
Counter argument is free-speech twitter created the world of today with unchecked distribution of conspiracy theories, hate speech and fear of other. I am not arguing for censorship, but it is factually wrong that it is censorship that brought us here. The world change before Twitter.
Anyway, that doesn't matter, what matters is that the people that are still using platforms are effectively collaborating with totalitarian extremists and should be shunned.
>In 2013, the authoritarianism was not on the rise
Just because you didn't see it, doesn't mean authoritarian wasn't on the rise. By the time you see it it's already too late.
>Most western democracies succumbed to levels of authoritarianism.
Because they discovered how powerful and important social media is, so they're seeking to control it more than they did in 2013 because leaders in 2013 didn't fully understand the internet.
And because most western democracies aren't true democracies where people have a voice in all matters that affect them, but function on the basis of controlled opposition, where there's two maximum three major parties pretending to oppose each other but all of which are coopted by the big-money establishment, making your vote irrelevant as no matter who you vote for, housing will still keep being more expensive, etc. even though you voted for the opposite thing to happen.
And if you vote for a fringe party or candidate that's not part of the establishment, and that candidate ends up getting enough traction to alter the elections, then that candidate will be eliminated from elections using selective enforcement of the law: see France, Romania, Germany, etc. Democrats tried to to the same to Trump to get him out of the 2024 presidential race with his mugshot everywhere, but failed. Not that Trump is not part of the establishment though.
They may not have been leading (as in, releasing a SOTA model), but they definitely can match others - easily, as shown by llama 3/4, which proves the point - there is no moat. With enough money and resources, you can match others. Whether without SOTA models you can make a business out of it is a different question.
> but they definitely can match others - easily, as shown by llama 3/4
Are we living in the same universe? LLAMA is universally recognized as one of the worst and least successful model releases. I am almost certain you haven't ever tried a LLAMA chat, because, by the beard of Thor, it's the worst experience anyone could ever had, with any LLM.
LLAMA 4 (behemoth, whatever, whatever) is an absolute steaming pile of trash, not even close to ChatGPT 4o/4/5/, Gemini(any) and even not even close to cheaper ones like DeepSeek. And to think Meta pirated torrents to train it...
What a bunch of criminal losers and what a bunch of waste of money, time and compute. Oh, at least the Metaverse is a success...
Are you sure they survive for the time period you intend them to? When I was a teenager, I though the DVDs and BluRays I burned would be forever - 15 years later I am very unhappy to find that some of them started to crack and flay - it's a pain to keep checking them. Nothing like the guarantees a NAS + Cloud backup could provide.
sure, but NAS and cloud doesn't fail at the same time. Also NAS provide some redundancy in-house as well. Whereas BluRay is a single copy - even if you burn multiple copies, they degrade at the same rate.
Nope. Limitations feed creativity. When you have unlimited power/reesources, you end up with unlimited slop. One of the reasons why old movies were better on average - now we get so many average movies with no lasting effect. Another one, slightly orthogonal - a golden ring or rolex in a neatly designed photo shoot vs a middle eastern head of state's "throne room". When you have something in limited quantities, you get the best out of it - when it's unlimited you go crazy.
Survivorship bias, there is no indication that older movies were better on average. While I can agree that constraints breed creativity as they say, the opposite can also be true; look at software, one can also theoretically code an unlimited number of things, and from that we get people creating software and connecting devices to a never before seen level of scale and creativity.
Agreed that technology opens up possibilities. If we continue on the movie analogy, moving from practical effects to CGI opened up possibilities - however it still had limitations (realism, uncanny valley, cost, render time etc.) - which pushed people to be strike a balance. However AI generated stuff gives you unlimited possibilities - whatever you imagine, becomes the scene. I recently saw a AI-augmented tourism video of a major tourist destination - it was vomit inducing. Of course, one may argue that it's just lack of art direction - same effect could be had with more traditional methods, but I still believe cost / possibilities constraints pushed people in the right direction. Maybe it's the luddite in me talking.
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