I also work at a place where the building systems are running on Windows 2000, using RS-232 interfaces.

By leaving it off the network, things are 'safe'. Now I need to figure out a way to put data onto the network, so we can monitor remotely.

I have a decent site on Squarespace- it costs about $16 per month. Totally ad-free. $16 is a reasonable price to cover all the costs involved. Once upon a time I had a server at a colo facility which cost a lot more, so the $16/month is fine.

Having a small fee to push my content out the world makes sense.

But if this ruins Buzzfeed, because people stop clicking on their articles due to AI telling them the 'one small trick', then I am all for it.

I actually started paying for an AI service.

Not because I'm a heavy user, or that I rely on it. But because I would rather that they have a subscription model, than an ad-supported model.

I'd rather pay $20 a month for a service designed around my needs, than get a service for free that is designed around advertisers.

In the whole, "If you get a product for free, then you are the product" way of thinking, I would much rather pay for a service I use, rather than being used by people who are serving me ads for free.

On the other hand- I generated about 100 images yesterday for a presentation I was creating. I was able to get exactly what I needed, and pretty quickly. Totally worth the $20 just in one afternoon.

As a developer whose sites were forced behind Cloudflare by our security group....Cloudflare sucks. The number of communication errors I get has gone from zero prior to Cloudflare, to a couple times a month that I see problems- not counting the visitors to our sites.

We updated all of the host files for our local users to bypass Cloudflare, just to make things work better. They had some problem where they would occasionally flag image uploads as dangerous files. Image uploads are a large part of our system, and 5% or so were getting flagged by some filter they run. I don't pretend to know why it happened, but I do know that bypassing Cloudflare solves the problem.

How many recipe sites does Cloudflare serve up? That's their speed- overbloated garbage designed to make money for the creators, not something useful for the users.

So maybe the web will return to more of the state it was in back before 2000.

Back before every website was filled with ads. Before everything was paywalled.

I am very happy to get my AI answers rather than going to a site with pop-ups, ads, and a paywall. But I will gladly visit a site that is designed for USERS rather than advertisers.

Cloudflare makes money by serving companies that have enshittified the web. If they all go away, and the web goes back to a place where people create content designed for users, I am all for it.

Does anyone have any sympathy for the decline of the enshittified, google-ified, ad-supported web?

The performance needs to be at LEAST the Series S.

For me, it's all about the super-fast storage. Once I moved from One X to even the Series S, the fast storage is what made me really appreciate the upgrade.

Just last week I installed a game from ~2021. As part of the intro video they told me how great it was that my character could be any gender or non-binary. I would have full freedom to express myself, etc. etc. That was the top feature they mentioned.

That really was a time where DEI was the most important thing in gaming- rather than the gameplay. It wasn't imaginary boogeymen, it was what was really happening.

Even just 3 years later it seemed horribly outdated. I wonder how the developers feel about that game now.

I think Game Pass is awesome. I've got way too many (4) Xboxes in my house, all with Game Pass. Me and my 3 kids can all play the same games, play against each other, or not. My kids are never asking for more games because Game Pass always has something new on it. If I wanted to play something with my kids I would normally need to buy 3 copies of a game (my daughter only plays Sims and Fortnite) so we can play together. I don't want to spend $180 just to try out a new game. I was super excited about the recent MechWarrior that came out, but honestly I was bored after about 20 minutes. But Donut County kept me going for much longer.

I love the GaaS model. Even at $80/month (4 subscriptions) it saves me a lot of money.

That was my thought.

If they are going through tons of different processes during an upgrade, they are making tons and tons of changes, and the logs will fill up.

I know I've had a server stop working due to runaway log files at least once...until you find the 'Delete log files when they get X big' features.

I may be working on a different scale than you...but I am given VMs to work with. They almost always under-spec the VMs, and I need to ask for more disk, and more memory.

The admins don't understand why I keep 6 versions of a database during development, and I don't understand why they can't just give me 10 times more storage. We usually have a back and forth for a couple of months before things get sorted out.

This has been going since we moved to VMs, rather than me just having the entire disk capacity available to me.

You're right about when things started to go downhill big time.

Reddit used to be a platform where millions of different opinions could be represented.

Then during the Ellen Pao era Reddit started to try to control the message, not just provide the platform. Some opinions became 'correct' while others were demonized.

The platform should have been left open.

You're a bit wrong.

Pushing reading and education is white supremacy, because setting the expectation of standardized English is how white people retain their power.

I agree with the rest of what you said.

But reading and education using standardized English is not woke. Not woke at all. You need to stay up on this stuff!

You don't need to bring your Xbox on a business trip. Xbox has Cloud Gaming, which has the huge advantage of not being yet another Google boondoggle. It's from a company that actually wants users to be part of it's service for the games- not for the user-data it collects.

Maybe the Saudi's will buy Stadia- seems like the perfect match.

First- you're right. Google is going to blow this big time.

It reminds me of Skype. Microsoft had Skype, then they added 'Skype for Business', and they were incompatible.

The second time someone in my organization was on the wrong Skype, and unable to get into a conference, we had to dump Skype because it was too complicated.

And slightly un-related, but if you can figure out the different versions of Adobe Lightroom, and what the names mean, you must be a genius. Because that program suffers from the same incomprehensible naming scheme.

At what point do tech companies lose the ability to make sense? Is it based on market cap?

I might be a fool...and that's okay.

But I love it when I can find something I need on the Microsoft Store. It's way better than looking for software elsewhere, and needing to determine if I'm downloading the real version of the software, or if it's fake/malware.

I don't need to worry about the updates, etc.

My experience with the Microsoft Store is that it is easy and painless. I wish they had more stuff there.