Ah, there it is. America is angling to make Taiwan irrelevant by stealing chip tech. Feels like I’ve been taking crazy pills as nobody anywhere else talks about this. Taiwan would do well to protect themselves from imperialists. There’s nobody looking out for them except themselves.

Everyone (meaning western discourse) is all giddy as if America is saving Taiwan. Soon as they taken chip making tech, Taiwan becomes irrelevant to America.

“Hello, Mr Biden? Hello, Mr Trump? It’s Taiwan”
“Tai-who? *click*”

Shit like this is why I use the most generic yankee cowboy aliases online.

People still gloat about piracy being a hydra where you cut off one head and more pop up. Except it isn’t any where close to that. Probably hasn’t been in at least 10-15 years. Piracy has been gradually chipped away at. People don’t seem to want to admit that. As if that would be siding with anti-piracy or something.

In its heyday the catalogues of content was immense in breadth and depth. Just about any obscure thing could be found. These days even popular TV shows become more difficult to come by even a short while after the episode has been released. Unless you have access to more private parts of the web then you’re left trying to source some low quality trash tier download.

Which brings me to the next point. Piracy used to be about providing the best possible quality. With popularity the quality got watered down. Opportunists came in trying to monetize it which drew the attention of authorities. Which drew the attention more opportunists which drew the attention of authorities. It snowballed.

What piracy used to be was the spirit of the original internet. It was the library not just a library but the library of humanity. People catalogued and shared because that’s what librarians do.

If I had the power I’d take away its popularity. Make it obscure again. It was better when it was ruled by snobs and autistic perfectionists.

You’re so far outside the box that everyone who disagrees is too small to be the big brain like you are.

Except not. So cut the crap. Downvotes are for said dishonesty.

Influencer is a fancy word for salesman. Instead of going door to door like grandpa did in the old days, they stream directly to your device.

Technology used to be a thing to be optimistic about. The past 10-15 years or so has been a bit of a let down with capitalism fucking everything up.

They will both agree to broad idea that “rich bad” and “middle class is struggling”. Their relative suffering is what they both agree on even though they’re different.

If the 40k person saw how the 400k person lives in real life, they would be rolling out the guillotine for the 400k dude. But without proper context online that 40k person will go to bat for the 400k person if anyone brings up the topic of lifestyle.

The further up the scale the more luxury there is. However people work with more binary thinking. So it’s easier to point at the dudes making 1000k or more. The territory of more unfathomable weath. Really there’s a lot of excess going on way before we reach the multi-millionaire to billionaire strata.

I’ve thought about this from time to time. Have we been kind of a neurotic generation? I could never tell if it was just me that was seeing things or what. The under 30s seems more indifferent. Might be because they are mostly the children of Gen-X? Are over 30s a bit uptight? How did we end up this way?

From personal experience growing up so many kids were obsessed with the rat race from way too young. That whole mindset that you must to university to get all your credentials to fit yourself into a cookie cutter. The defacto life track until the illusion started to crack.

All in all I think the over 30 generation has a really hard time with self reflection. In particular talking about the faults of our own generation. Which is paradoxical against the whole mental health awareness stuff.

I’ve seen this play out first hand with people gradually climbing up the socioeconomic ladder as they reach middle age. They forget how things were at the lower middle class compared to the upper middle or even proper upper class.

It gets hard to talk about these days with the social media bullshit muddying up discourse. Because people start seeing red at the mere idea of broaching this topic.

VR has the same problem smartphones and tablets did until the Apple revolution. Consumers don’t care about technical details which nerds get stuck on. The technology simply isn’t there at the moment.

Right now VR is and will remain for bespoke applications. It will remain so for many iterations of technological advancement until miniaturization beyond anything anyone can ever dream of right now. The technologically inclined can reason about relatively insignificant details like transistor count or whatever. Consumers don’t care. Just like they didn’t care about tablets or even touch screen devices in general even though commercial products existed long before the iPad and iPhone. Nobody gives a shit about technical details. The final product from a layman user perspective is all that matters. Jobs knew this was the ultimate goal. The rest of the tech industry continues to struggle with internalizing it.

Even if they scrimp and save to produce a pleb model. It’s still just a bespoke device. A glorified screen that might have a few neat uses. People will then put it aside and forget about it.

Bluetooth is low bitrate. The audio codecs need to use a lot of compression. Old audio equipment are analog which is better because it doesn’t have so much digital conversions to completely wreck sound.

Bluetooth is still reliant on its original SBC codec from the early 2000s or something. 20 year old tech. Due to this nobody really took BT audio adoption seriously until the past several years when the zeitgeist finally tipped. Suddenly wireless headphones were every where.

I think maybe it was when Apple got rid of headphone jack. So the rest of the industry caved. And we all just handwave away how bluetooth audio has always sucked.

For compatibility every device maker sticks to that 20 year old common denominator. There are proprietary codecs that are supposed be better quality but then you get all the joys of cross compatibility hell. If your devices aren’t inter-compatible they’ll fall back to the common denominator. The basic SBC codec. Even with better quality codec they can only do so much with limited wireless bitrate.

Fun fact. There is higher quality configuration for the SBC codec but nobody configures it in software when making their device. People say it’s indistinguishable from the highest quality proprietary codecs. But audio can subjective so eh…

Even if you were to enable the better configuration for SBC. All the devices out there in the world are built with the default configuration. No two devices sender/receiver will ever both use the better config. So it’s impossible to fix this.

It doesn’t matter anymore since all this in the process of being superseded by Bluethooth 5 audio. Which throws away all that and tries to do it all over again. It’s still reliant on low bitrate wireless protocol though. So they can use whatever algorithmic trickery so they can claim produce perceptually indistinguishable from CD quality or lossless quality or whatever.

I’m sure there will always be people that say they can tell the difference. I don’t doubt people can because it’s simply not the same audio but a disassembly into bits for wireless transmission. Then reconstituted on the other-side as near as possible to the original.

I think higher education may have played a role. Kids have to spend more time studying for longer into their life. Less time for careless days of youth when every job requires 10 years of experience. Young people have been obsessing over how to fluff their CV with credentials rather thing just living life.

I watched RocketBoom until suddenly they ran out of money. I don’t know what happened but it seemed like they were on the up and up. They even did videos with Sesame Street. If that isn’t a solid endorsement…

Then one day it was announced it was over.

It was nothing more than an off the shelf ARM SBC inside. Some third party designed and made the board. Nobody had the bootloader keys to unlock the units. It was easily bricked. No keys to recover it. They had sold it as a device for “hackers” but nobody could really hack it. The whole concept was dead on arrival.

Several years later people discovered weaknesses in Nvidias bootloader code. The Ouya is vulnerable. So they’re finally wide open hackable. But nobody cares anymore.

We are facing a very real possibility of the end of the web browser as we know it. Google owns the chromium engine. Mozilla is on ever more precarious footing. It’s become logistically impossible to build competing products except for tech giant. Even then everybody else gave up and went with chromium.

This is the same kind of framing Google used when they were considered the little guy on your side as opposed to big evil corp.

It goes to show the socioeconomic differences. The more affluent kids at my school went all out. There was expensive outfits, limos, and after parties at other venues. For others it was just mom dropping them off at the vanilla school hosted event and that’s it.

Holes and dots.

For some reason I memory holed the first distro I used. There’s only vague recollection. I think it was SUSE or something. When Ubuntu came around I tried Linux again. That’s when I started to get the hang of things.

The internet made a whole lot of things a big deal. Then convinced guys they were the victims. Then filled their heads with extremist ideologies. What a wild past 10-15 years.