Beefalo

I wonder if it works like IRC. The “plague” this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you’re kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.

Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there’s never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.

Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there’s always going to be a server, even if it’s not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it’s “free” but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There’s always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn’t really need it.

The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user’s machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven’t used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn’t changed, then it also doesn’t support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.

Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they’re pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn’t viable. I don’t know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.

But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It’s not a web app, it doesn’t live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there’s no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.

Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there’s that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else’s unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.

We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that’s what Matrix is.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it’s normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the “business casual” version of Discord. This doesn’t seem to be true, but that’s how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.

I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack’s name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you’re fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.

Sharks have flooded Shark Infested Waters with shark asshole stink but this time the asshole stink is AI generated and Taylor Swift has a billion dollars for lawyers.

They’re expecting you to have a mount for your wall, already installed, even, from the last TV. So the legs are an afterthought, they’re cheap, easy to remove and you’ll probably toss them, they know. So they’re enough to use for store display, no more.

They definitely think Bill Gates is Jewish.

He’s not. No Jewish ancestry and his current practice is a sort of casual Catholic thing, but he also thinks Dawkins is cool, so about what you’d expect. That’s from a quick Wiki check, but still.

Because if he’s on their poster…

Transport Fever 2, because I can ride da choo choos

It’s super chill and relaxing, you just have to ignore the rest of your empire falling into ruin

Yahoo Finance managed to make itself real damn useful, and that’s one of the most lucrative ad markets, if not THE most lucrative.

When I woke my Yahoo Mail account from its ancient slumber, everything was in Spanish for some reason, and I expect that reason is that they expanded outside the US and have a large user base in South America, where Yahoo probably doesn’t look as dead. “Free email” goes even farther when your country doesn’t get to have the world’s reserve currency. So Yahoo just defaulted to Spanish for accounts until I had to tell it I’m a gringo.

Americans really do have a hard time remembering the rest of the globe exists, but our companies don’t, so a lot of companies that seem “dead” are just really active outside the US.

So yeah, somebody is still using Yahoo News. Quite a lot of somebodies, actually. Even Americans. Especially Americans. They hooked us with real nice stock market quotes and such. That’s how you reel a Yankee back in, make it easy to see that revenue trend at a glance.

I think the thing that’s really stopping me from using that is that every time I get curious and go poking around to see what the fuss is, I run into some sort of paywall situation, or maybe it’s just a long queue that you need to join to get access, something like that. All I know is that you can’t just casually fire it up and take it for a spin.

Either I’m finding the wrong thing, or the people who already swear by it paid some fee or got an early access code ages ago. It also doesn’t know when it’s lying, and already got a lawyer in trouble for trying to let ChatGPT do his job, apparently it slapped together a brief, an argument before the court, that referenced a bunch of case law that didn’t actually exist.

No matter what, it’s not so casually accessible as people make it out to be, I don’t know what’s up with that.