I understand getting bored of it, but it's only been "overused" because it's the same pattern everywhere since the beginning of this decade.
In the last few years, a lot of companies went down the anti-consumer road: shrinkflation, lower quality/reliable parts, and just like Perplexity, forced ads in paid subscriptions for Netflix/Prime Video/etc. So I think it very much applies in this case.
See it like stealing from a museum: very easy to break in (weak password -> breaking a window), hard to get out of here with all the paintings unnoticed - and that, on a daily basis.
The amount of effort and different techniques they've put in to remain undetected for months (years?) while infecting a lot of actors is pretty impressive.
> "In short: Stallman made some technically-correct-but-utterly-tactless comments on a private mailing list, mostly in defense of his late friend and colleague Marvin Minsky."
Be careful - the study clearly states that what's important to keep a good vision is exposure to (supposedly natural?) bright light. There's no real link between too much screen-time and a decline of it as the article states.
Yet, most of the time, we're using usernames to hide our identity because we don't want to have our real life connected directly with internet strangers.
A sterile virtual environment ran by a company that makes money on me giving them my personal info?
Not sure I'd want that.
Plus, the fact that this is going to be a VR clone of Second Life without the anonymity and most probably without all the rated M stuff makes me rather sad. A big missed opportunity.
You clearly bother yourself WAY too much with what other people are thinking.
Believe me, you'd be better off pursuing what you truly love instead of trying to fit into what you think is 'normality'.
Except that Bill Gates was one of the precursors of modern computing.
Einstein? Modern physics. Picasso? Cubism.
That's why these three will be remembered for a long time.
History books will probably talk just a bit about his wealth, maybe about his humanitarian actions, but he'll definitely be remembered as the person who made personal computing a thing.
"Arab Andy" cared more about the donation than his own life. He clearly let the bomb sound happen on purpose for the sake of fame. He didn't even bother muting it or at least muffling it.
Weakly moaning "It's TTS!" (Text-to-speech) as an excuse to the officer that arrested him not so long later is enough of a proof that this guy was disconnected from reality and just doing that for the money.
It doesn't matter where you're coming from, you just don't play a bomb countdown - especially not in a room crowded full of people. You're scaring people on purpose, and that's called terrorism. He deserves that prison sentence.
How is this related?
It doesn't matter which engine is used in general, the only problem here is Sony.
It isn't technical.
Fortnite proved it when it 'mistakenly' allowed PS4 players to play with Xbox One players due to a 'configuration issue'.
I've been working on that video platform as a hobby - a twitch clone, or more accurately a clone of Mixer (formerly beam.pro). I've abandoned it, even though it probably still works at a low scale.
I was still a student at the time (2 years ago), that definitely was a big issue for me so I tried to build my own CDN.
There are many things that pushed me to abandon the idea: pricing, lack of time, lack of knowledge about DevOps and/or lack of tools.
I've learned a lot since then.
I had a few problems with managing the total available bandwidth as well as the monthly data cap (1TB on the cheapest DigitalOcean droplet), this could be resolved if you already have the servers running, managed and updated, but it won't resolve the scaling problem unless you possess a datacenter.
It would be pretty simple to setup a CDN with that solved:
- Have your ingest servers make the files available somehow (scalable/shared filesystem? NoSQL? or just a webservice?)
- Make your viewers ping your cache servers (Varnish), and if the file isn't cached, then fetch it from the ingest server.
- Put a layer 4 load-balancer (also known as Direct Server Return) in front of those cache servers, and adjust the weight of each cache server since the network throughput will probably not be the same for all of the servers.
- Automatize all of this so the cache servers know about the new ingest servers, same thing for the load-balancer about the new cache servers. Done!
Once all of this is set up, this is just a matter of starting new servers and doing maintenance on the other ones while keeping everything available. After that, you can focus on the second point: using the ads the finance your service and keep it running.
"I wanted to build a video platform, not a CDN! And now, I have build an advertising platform?" - I must have told myself that a thousand times back then!
This is pretty nice, the tool choices were pretty limited. (nginx-rtmp, red5, and another one that I can't remember.)
It still doesn't fix the main problem for me: content delivery and its price.
For a 60 minute-long 720p@30fps (~2500 kbps) stream with 1000 viewers, you have to push a total of 1TB of data.
Using Amazon CloudFront, it would cost you $0.085*1000GB = 85$. For one stream. Of one hour. Of mid-tier quality.
You would need three dedicated servers to push that data (You need ~3GBPS to replace that CDN) and it would cost 85$ per MONTH. Not per stream.
I know, building a CDN isn't simple, but when I tried to build my own platform, it wasn't about building something about video streaming. It was about creating my own CDN to lower the costs. I don't think I'm alone with that problem.
In the last few years, a lot of companies went down the anti-consumer road: shrinkflation, lower quality/reliable parts, and just like Perplexity, forced ads in paid subscriptions for Netflix/Prime Video/etc. So I think it very much applies in this case.