I recently figured that Spain went on a war for 700 years, just to carry on in the Arauco war for another 300 years, thus, literally being at war for 1000 years.
I can tell you right now, from an M5 with 16 GB of RAM, I'd be hard pressed to squeeze a bit of ram for a game of sodoku if I'm already running an Android emulator plus a few IDEs and 10 tabs in Chrome... Being able to produce something of note, especially in the gaming space, with 16 GB of ram IS a feat in and of itself
haha! WHAT!? So, we had agents that came with a default setting to request for specific permission to perform an action, then we said "screw it!", we need speed and everybody started coding and releasing agents out in the wild to do whatever they want unchecked... and now we have a product that brings back the safeguards... A few years ago we have abstraction after abstraction coming in the way of blocking actual development (js ecosystem bloat), and now we have layer upon layer for coding with AI...
I think forums were, and are still largely the solution to the social issue, as you very well describe them... That's why there are still a few out there that thrive in their niches.
The problem is that way back when, circa 2005, all these places were kind nerd, and at that point in time being a nerd was still not something to be proud of, so for most people "the internet" was MSN and Fotolog, and today's internet for most of this cohort is still just an evolution of that stuff (Whatsapp and Facebook), and the newer generation didnt even get to know what the forum-scene was...
So anything people produce today, is either a replacement for nerd forums, which does not need replacement, or the social media that as crappy as it is, just works... The only new social media that is thriving is copies of other platforms that have become too much of an echo chamber to bare, so now we need another echo chamber but one for the other 50%.
I think that's why we see so many riffs on social media, people trying to make a breakthrough on things like, decentralized, more secure, less moderated, more moderated, crypto, paid, X-only, etc
And the reality is that nobody that is hooked, or cares about social media gives a shit about any of that, they want the feed, the masses want what they already have, and everybody else is just looking to be the next vBulletin watercooler reinvention.
I just always had an interest into it. Cant explain much past that... I spend summers in a farm as a child and I guess I was always fascinated by the ritual of butchering animals, not the killing part particularly, the elegant splitting and portioning of an animal for storage and consumption.
Of course, then I just grew up and you just get on with things...
Cows are heavy. Really heavy. And then after you've got things more or less sorted, you still need to know how to cut it in pieces, this is a lot of manual labor... It's painful slow if you dont know exactly where to cut, and you can spoil the meat if you dont know what you're doing... You need tools and you need to know how to use them... It's just a whole different world. Lets not even go on to actually killing the animal and cleaning it, or all that dance, which I have witnessed and its something else... bah! maybe in another life.
I think, to be honest, even with more training, I was already too old... A hindquarter is heavy as hell, I think I kind permanently busted my back just shuffling it around, nevermind cutting a shin bone...
Not long ago I had a dream about becoming a butcher, and so then I bought half a cow with a friend and after a week trying to cut it out in pieces I realised maybe I was too old to make the move... so im still a programmer.
It's really not the same, isn't it?... the threading model that was popularized by Discourse is really not appealing at all, it's very impersonal, it almost feels like ti calls for shallow communications where people show up, dump a thread and two comments and never returns...
Isnt this what people have been doing for years now with their phone filters? misrepresenting their physical appearance in order to sell the idea that they are something they're not