to11mtm

> But yes - my impression was always that the Doom games mostly focused on having cool levels, with plot as an afterthought.

My understanding is that yes, and that was part of Tom Hall parting ways; based on the alpha versions and the 'Doom Bible' it was intended to be a more story driven experience, closer to Marathon.

That said, The engine could support such at least with some enhancements. Strife is still one of my favorite games if that era thanks to the 'living world' feel, even if it has some nasty ways to get in a hostile overall world state or dead end.

Well, for whatever it's worth, I think the closest manufacturing facility for those would be in Iowa. They had a plant in California but it closed in 2015.

AKA, the decade where everyone bought way too much into the 'Just do JIT supply chain for the manufacturing location to warehouse tail and pretend we are Amazon' bullshit.

I put it that way because it is short-sighted to not consider that transportation costs will always increase over time (i.e. fuel prices, wages of drivers) and shipping a final product over that long of a distance (i.e. at least half of the country, and instead of shipping grain to process it is finished boxes which is less efficient for volume) and yet they made that choice.

Where it got nasty is that when the average consumer base decided it was fine to pay dealer markups on cars because of the parts issues that industry saw from their JIT shortsights, everyone saw dollar signs instead of a problem to fix.

Gets just a little tricky on one aspect;

Lots of oil sites, oil refinery plants, (heck, even landfills) just 'flare' excess Natural gas today.

Biggest reason for that, is, they don't have the infrastructure to store that excess safely (at least around here, a lot of the landfill trucks are NG powered as a way to lower their fuel costs and lower flaring, but storing too much NG in one place makes for a fun terrorism target.) Natural gas is actually -way- worse for global warming than CO2, thus the flaring process.

Not saying that's a good thing. It would be better if companies saw the growing energy demand and figured out how to economically put power generation in place, back when such projects would have been cheaper to build. Alas the cost/benefit for that has usually been on the wrong side, to the detriment of us all.

GlassDoor has been gross about this for years.

Not sure if still the case but normally you have to not only 'sign in' but also feed them information (e.x. salary at a position, write a review, etc.) in order to be able to view much of anything.

They also do not give a shit about obvious 'juicing' (i.e. when it is obvious that upper management and/or HR is adding reviews where the 'con' reads like one of those softball warning phrases in a job description.)

So, one of the more surprising things that was claimed to me (But I haven't verified myself,) is Oracle doesn't charge for IOPS on OCI the way AWS would for an Oracle instance.

I'm sure there's other devils hiding in details, but that alone would make it a very tempting target for orgs that want to move off-prem to chase the 'move to cloud' 'KPI' 'Synergy' but still have a bunch of trash queries/etc running under the covers, with the additional benefit of you are safer when the sales/legal folks from licensing visit your offices for renewals and the like.

> Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?

Cantrill tried to, as diplomatically as possible, warn everyone.

Nobody listened.

I think it did play out fairly as far as actual 'scientific method' goes.

I think as far as the 'debacle', there was definitely a lot of hype (at least as far as HN goes) around it, the level of buzz felt similar to what one would see today around a new AI model release.

I'll posit that the 'crypto/blockchain-whatever' caused some curiosity in the market (both before and during COVID), COVID messed up everyone's plans for the recovery (recoveries take a long time without stuff like WW2 that cause other economical imbalances) and other political factors played in.

Not saying you're wrong about anything you're saying, to be clear.

Even songs we don't like have a lot of 'poetry' in their notes...

Well, it's still complicated because of the global economy.

- Most of the AI Companies are HQed in the US, and that's the 'hot thing' for the market overall

- Google and Apple have enough presence (i.e. some may be doing tax things but...) in the US and at least one of them has gotten 'too big to properly antitrust'.

- If we look deep enough, even some of the fanciest ASML tech is a result of IP sharing from US companies that are almost certainly government backed (i.e. ASML might be the ones working with other companies to help make it useful/scalable, but the tech is invented here.)

Ironically, something I would have listed at the top 10-15 years ago but is now last on the list...

- For the last (well, now) 80 years the US has been able to project an outward image of overall economic stability and relative growth; The closest it came to a crisis in the past was when the Bretton-Woods system collapsed and France came over and collected their gold.

On the flip side, there is the 'guard'.

- Any current bondholders have to choose between holding at the current rate, or selling at a discount. It becomes a 'Well do we really thing it will all fall apart before then or do we just hold?'. Because any new bonds, even at the current rate, would be carrying that risk on the open market if a sell-off occurred. IOW 'Is a bond I have now less the arbitrage cost going to be worth more than just holding it'.

What's important is what happens next. If we look at the Bretton-Woods collapse, there were a number of actions taken, many (most?) of them questionable, however it was pulling a bunch of levers at once and unpulling versus debating which lever to pull.

There is the confounding factor where parties are arguing that there is market manipulation going on, that changes the question of whether to hold onto existing bonds rather than making other options. After a certain maturity percentage one has to ask whether you hold or sell based on climate.

> If your line was noisy good luck.

I remember calling AT&T (or maybe it was SBC by then) about flat out unreliability of our internet connection and the answer was "If you can carry a voice call, we do not care".

FWIW, the problem with our lines did eventually get so bad (although, we finally had cable internet by then) that even a voice call was unusable. Turned out one of the runs (not even the drop to our house) was allowing water to get into the lines. and that was the cause.

Will add, after they fixed that problem was when they got really aggressive about marketing DSL...

Depends what you mean.

There's 'offline by default at home' and 'offline by default overall'. And it can blur.

At least as far as 'offline by default at home'

After (1) my dad retired and bought a brand new fancy PC with some of his unused leave time [0] we wound up getting a dial-up account [1] but sometime around 1998/1999 [2] we wound up just getting a secondary phone line; somehow the 'internet' was so magical to all of us kids or young adults, that it was better for our parent's budget to just pay for the extra phone line.

Still, it wasn't even 56K. Phone lines in my area of Detroit were garbage, if it did connect at 56K it was unstable as hell, 28.8 was the 'reliable' connection rate, to the point you prayed that was what it connected at.

For 'offline overall' the change can be more blurry, at least in my head. I blame work phones, my PSP's WiFi capabilities, and the HTC Dream (released 2008) as the slow shift for me.

FWIW, I did enjoy my time on WinPho, where the siloing of the OS and lack of apps, led to a quieter time where my phone was a 'phone' (and honestly, still a better one at calls, SMS, or driving navigation than than my current one) rather than be tempted by anything online.

It's weird to think about. Before I went to college, Online (thanks to that dial-up) was an escape from the prison of my home and where I lived. But now Online feels more like a tug away from enjoying life.

[0] - P2 266 MHZ 32MB Ram, 2(? might have been 4) GB HDD...

[1] - Thanks Diablo for the WorldNet trial and thanks WorldNet for having the practically unlimited usage thing [4]

[2] - My oldest Sister was Driving home from College and the engine on the car blew up while I was online. She couldn't call for help. [3]

[3] - How's that for a technology shift though, as far as taking things for granted (i.e. call waiting being seamless and not costing extra per month.)

[4] - Except for the bit where when AT&T somehow figured out we were using a 'Share-dial-up-over-LAN' a few years later, had to switch to Mindspring after dad had me do the research.

I had the experience of working at a shop where the business side would use that sort of justification for all sorts of antics.

The favorite I was not involved in, was when they spent many months (at least 3, maaaaybe more than 6?) working on a thing, with verbal promises on the other side, but then the owner of the business that kept promising to sign a contract once we got to a certain point died and at that point the whole thing got quietly killed.

Again, not my project; the ones I was involved in (different product,) at least half of which did materialize but most of them never made up the volume for the pain of the work, either on the dev side or the business side [0].

[0] - My favorite was when we did an integration with Tesla. they decided to use a VIN as the primary key for their salesforce integration. So, if a customer got an inspection on a trade-in, waited, then decided to try again... oops!

> If you are stuck in a snowbank your fuel doesn't matter. Staying warm until help arrives is the issue. Like above you are shifting goalposts.

They aren't shifting goalposts, they are being pragmatic and honest. The typical person who lives in the UP is going to be ready for the worst case scenarios (or, otherwise, just stay home.)

> It's a solved problem without demand.

There's not enough demand to make solving the problem economical for these niche cases. And enough people in the US still have to deal with these niche cases that we are where we are.

> "Five dolla? Good LAWD that's a lotta money! How 'bout I give you a nickel and you let me use your adding machine for five minutes?"

At least 3 of my coworkers would reference that on a regular basis once a haggler left the store (with or without a purchase...)

> 10 hours of driving over a 3 day period

Since you're trying to be pedantic about trying to calculate the drive time for the distance, I'll note that (short of the unexpected WTF re-trip) it would have been less than 10 hours; I-75 speed limit is 75 in most of the UP, and the other main corridor roads have a speed limit of 65, because it is so sparsely populated.

For better or worse, the Upper Peninsula is this thing that your typical car-owning family who lives in the state can actually do an inexpensive but beautiful trip around.

It's a region that is only about 42,500 Square Kilometers but only has a population of about 300K. Thus the infrastructure gaps.

On the plus side, that means it's still a pretty drive at least. :)

Where this gets painful, is that I was working on my own OSS project today, and this is what happened;

1. Opus 5.5 noted some concerns.

2. I asked it to write tests to safely test the concerns and write up a remediation plan

3. Opus 5.5 flagged and reset the conversation to Opus 4.8, murdering my usage quota and (possibly?) doing a sub-optimal set of tests.

NGL, it would have been at least polite for it to either:

1. Sanity check if I was the only/main committer on the repo (I'm the only committer, it's my side project) and then decide whether it was 'responsible' to help me fix it. (after all, I'm wanting to correct the problem, not exploit it!)

2. Warn me before just YOLOing the context to another model leading me to have to do a grace reset.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my general understanding is that if they had a long enough 120V extension cord (and I will admit, they might have in this case) I would have only gotten 5 miles an hour or so of charging at best.

So, either:

A- I have to go find a charging station, and pray to god that during a peak tourist weekend there is an open spot, so plan the wait into every day and hope my plan in the day schedule and pray it doesn't get disrupted by the other tourist traffic.

or

B- I would get maybe 60-ish miles of range added each night leaving the thing plugged in when we are at the AirBnb.

I want to be clear about this, I'd be fine with an EV if the charging infrastructure made sense, as it stands today however the ideal state for me and my wife would require a plugin hybrid and an EV or a Plugin Hybrid and a Hybrid.

Using a 3rd party trademark enforcement company is an excellent way to minimize PR fallout for a company wanting to silence transparency around (or criticism of) a company.

Let's be real here; Would Doppel give any fucks about trying to do a trademark request if Flock wasn't paying them money?

I look forward to trying to understand your reasoning.

> It is possible to guarentee diversity, you just need to get specific detail and have good contractual protections.

Yeah, FWIW the non-redundant DAS links we designed when I was in that industry, it was typically a case of the client telling us 'That is too expensive, we accept the risk'.

The Detroit-chicago thing, I don't know the story on that, it was something that fiber provider had already built.

I'd have to look into Beehiiv and Ghost, not familiar with those.

Substack has shifted a bit too much towards 'subscribe-ish' type popups in the last 2ish years for me to trust it as an option; independent niche publishers ideally don't want to risk someone getting confused or driven away by a paywall threat.

> Go on…

>> they were doing a -lot- of DVD writing

I'll then add that when I helped them with their first 4 burner build, they were so happy that they gifted me with a subtitled copy of Battle Royale before such existed on the open market (they somehow clocked me as a closeted weeb I guess...)

The reason I know about the raid, is they came in one Saturday in a frantic state, asking to build a new basic-as-hell rig to 'get back up and running' after the fact. Showed me the local news article, and yep in the seized goods if you zoomed in you could about make out our shop's case badge. They did have to go with Lite-Ons for that temporary build due to stocking, but did also have me re-order the better drives after the fact.

Have to add, he was a very honest customer with us. By that I mean, he was not one of the 'hagglers' we had to deal with[0], and we got the better drives in quickly, he came in and paid for them, but he did not abuse our return policy and return the Lite-On drives even though he could have [1].

Also wasn't a super frequent customer, but he was overall chill enough that he did have the note in our system of "This guy is cool, hook him up!" even the first time I got to work with him [2]

[0] - Ever have someone try to haggle a used K5 or Pentium chip that was priced at 5$ in 2002? I have.

[1] - One of our other customers that ran an independent computer repair shop, had a habit of buying products from us to complete a repair while ordering the same part from Newegg, and then returning the part Newegg delivered to them once they got it delivered. We only discovered it due to RMA discrepancies. That customer was 50% of the reason we started tracking Serial numbers for certain items, the other 50% being people who abused our return policy to deal with defective creative labs products.

[2] - Life pro tip, do not assign the note of "Customer Stole from us Call police" to yourself as a shitpost, when you go to a store 2 years after you left and the floor staff has rotated it gets a bit weird till they double check with management.

I'll give you a scenario.

It's not necessarily 'normal', but it did happen to me last year.

Vacation in St Ignace Michigan. Stayed at an AirBnB rental.

No proper EV charger on-site at the rental, admittedly maybe the owner had an extension cord or something. Still, Then we'd be charging at a fairly low rate of mileage gain.

One day trip was 100 miles each way for optimum route. (Only charging stations known are near the AirBnB)

Another day trip was 76 miles each way for optimum route. (Only charging stations known are near the AirBnB)

The shortest day trip was 50-ish miles each way, but a whole thing happened where my wife left her phone at the restaurant so it was a total of 200 miles driven that day. (There are charging stations at both points for this one, but none in between.)

BTW, when I say 'optimum route' for the first two, I mean that for at least one of those the trip wound up being longer because of road construction.

I know one could say 'Well plan out charging in the morning'. But at the end of the day that just messes with the rest of the itinerary for a vacation where one could instead be exploring what you actually went on a trip for.

More or less agree with this;

I've done a few road trips (2023, 2024, 2025) where It was 10 or more hours of driving without even factoring stops in.

Fuel-ups can be as fast as 5 minutes, if you have a co-pilot to run in and grab whatever else you need from inside while you travel. Might have one or two longer breaks in there for a proper lunch.

> Human endurance is more about the end-to-end time.

Yep. You also optimize for the drive itself; i.e. metering your overall methods and timing of hydration etc to avoid needing extra bathroom stops, making sure any food eaten can either be eaten quickly, or safely eaten while driving on a long boring highway (i.e. Tacos bad, simple burgers or sandwiches good.)

For an 800-ish mile drive in one day, longer stops make a huge difference from being able to make it all the way through with reasonable daylight.

> Breaks barely help at all.

Yep, too long of a break winds up having a negative effect where you get too relaxed.

Heck, in 2020 I did a shorter drive to a different region, but instead of a Ford Maverick that got 35-40MPG and 400+ miles to a tank, I was in my WRX which got maybe 330-ish miles per tank, and the extra stops definitely had me much more drained by the end of the trip.

(Although, it's also worth noting that the Maverick is a lot more 'comfy' than my WRX from a posture standpoint, which may have been a factor.)

I'm actually impressed that GM managed to get the base model price down, If I recall they originally launched closer to 75K.

Although, I don't think the base model will do 492 miles, I'm guessing it's more like 250-300.

I'm still not sure whether GM just completely mis-managed the thing (which GM is known to do) or not. I say that because it is full-size-ish, but that creates the problem of it being a heavier unibody, and when we talk about EVs, 'weight of base vehicle and the batteries to move it' can become a Delta-V-ish problem.

As a sort of example, I'll point to the Cybertruck; it's honestly probably even more 'brick-ish' aerodynamically than the Silverado EV, but it weighs 1000 pounds less (or so) and thus gets 20-60 miles more range than the Silverado EV base despite the battery being not much larger as far as capacity.

Possibly also worth noting though, that Delta-V-ish problem means the Silverado EV in some configurations has a curb weight high enough it can't go on some residential streets.

IDK. GM got kinda-smart with how they handled EVification of their CUVs (i.e. start with midsize, move down, be aggressive on pricing) but the Silverado EV still strikes me as classic GM WTFery

Being blunt, I don't think Elon is the only factor in that.

That protectionism is just as much in place for the sake of GM, Ford, and Stellantis, and their suppliers. In 2008 it was estimated that if the big three (Well, back then it was Chrysler instead of Stellantis) went under without a bailout [0], that up to 3 million jobs across the country were at risk. Michigan alone would have possibly lost over 8% of it's jobs.

We do see similar-ish protectionism in other countries as well, FWIW. Part of Toyota and Honda's lack of aggressive shifting to EVs is that a 'full shift' would remove millions of jobs from the workforce. Toyota has even published what could be considered propaganda in their home country about it [1].

It's an elephant in the room. European automakers are all struggling with it too, with various degrees of failure.

If there is one irony I will point out, it's that if they had all been more aggressive about hybrid technology for at least the last 15 years, they could have at least kicked the can down the road. Which honestly may have helped; part of the problem is that when things like engine or transmission plants are built, the amortization of the costs between the factory itself, training workers, expected retooling etc is measured and planned in the 10-30ish year range. The complacency means they have a bunch of assets that would be unpaletable write-offs.

Cause, Let's face it; every carmaker could have at least been doing even basic hybrids for most of their non-truck models for over a decade, which aren't perfect but would have raised the bar for MPG and improved the economies of scale faster [2].

[0] - For whatever it's worth, Ford at the time did not need a bailout, but did ask for a line of credit that it never had to use in case the others totally collapsed, because if that had happened it would have been a huge impact to their suppliers.

[1] - https://electrek.co/2021/11/11/how-toyota-sneakily-spreads-a...

[2] - I'll point to the Ford Maverick, which initially launched at ~22K and got 35-40MPG in base configuration despite being a very large compact truck. IMO if the automakers got serious about the tech in 2010, we could have seen something at that price point at least 5 years sooner.

2002 was about when the whole market got disrupted by Lite-on, ironically. I was working in retail at the time and recall how their models just kept dropping from the 100-150ish range down to 50-75$ (and just kept going lower.)

What was even crazier was how fast DVD burners saw commoditization. The first Pioneer DVD Burner in 2001 launched at something like 1000$, and by 2004 lite-on was selling models for under 75$.

And, for most people, the Lite-On models were fine. I did have one customer that switched back to either Pioneer or Plextor (I can't remember which) because they were doing a -lot- of DVD writing (we're talking 4 burners running at once, that was a fun build to spec out!) and the Lite-On drives kept failing under the extreme use. Lite-On did have a good warranty process, however the downtime cost him enough that one day that he flat out asked what he should buy that was better. The drives we wound up going with were more than double the cost of the Lite-Ons, but he never had to warranty those [0].

[0] - Although, they did get seized in a raid apparently <_<

FWIW I view Japan as still a player, just more specialized (although yes, TSMC is often still involved.)

Specifically, imaging sensors. Canon still makes their own sensors in Japan, and Sony makes all sorts of sensors that are used both by competitors in the camera space as well as Phones, (e.x. Apple after over a decade is only now starting to diversify with Samsung US Fabbed sensors,) Dashcams and Security Cams(Even a lot of the Chinese built ones, if you see STARVIS it's a Sony sensor)

That said, Imaging sensors do hit a curious level of 'needing bleeding edge but is not necessarily as complex as a cpu'. i.e. you're striving for precision and quality but the part itself is a lot more 'repetitive' across the silicon area compared to a CPU.

FWIW, The Gaming Historian youtube channel did a good cover of it [0]

> Meanwhile the Tetris film was awful. The Tetris rights negotiations were all about the various sides wrestling for power and the Soviets trying to play them against each other. The film basically goes "nah that's too boring for our target audience" and tries to make it into a Cold War spy thriller, but the hamfisted modifications to the events that transpired make the plot nonsensical (especially for general audiences that would be unfamiliar with what actually happened).

It was definitely a bit much in places, but it was a fun dramatization. Having been very familiar with the background, they at least did a good job of keeping it interesting enough where even a non-gamer would stay interested through the film as far as theming/story/etc.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8

Because the problem is more complicated than that.

I'll give the example case from my real life.

My wife and one of my best friends want to start a blog. My wife has some wordpress experience from her last job.

There isn't a big expectation for revenue, this is a hobby project.

At least when I did my 'shopping', a managed wordpress instance as far as cost, was somewhere between 'as cheap as just doing self-maintained custom solution hosted' and 'a little bit more but the extra 3-10$ a month versus my time to actually maintain it' stopped me dead in my tracks of Vibe coding an alternative.

IOW, the 'long tail' of wordpress, is the ecosystem of managed providers that exist where the user (at least as long as they are careful about plugins?) doesn't have to worry about updating the core bits, the provider takes care of that for them and can do it at a volume that makes it palatable.

If anything the breach of fiduciary duty for those severance packages would not be Matt alone, if the board was the one voting for it.

> Matt is willing to self-destruct himself and the company if it would effect sufficient self-glorification for him.

I've worked for at least one boss with control issues and/or delusions of grandeur, and I will say that, well, if he's at the top, it's his choice for better or worse.