Arantor

I can pick up functionality and accessibility ones. Performance could be a waste of time if you’re on cloud or non-self-hosting where you don’t have the tools to make necessary changes, and I think there are better people than me to talk about board layout, structure etc.

As a side thought: maybe if the review were more targeted - board structure & layout, functionality, performance or accessibility for example - you might find it easier to spread the load.

Yup. Especially as WP 6.7 seems to be going for a new record of buggy this time round.

Yeah but then you’re running it on WordPress.

I have, and I remain the only editor, mostly so that anything that does come out of discussions gets managed by me for consistency. Essentially, my wiki is the encyclopedia of a fantasy world, it has all the lore that exists, cross referenced and made as consistent as possible, so that the rest of the writing group has a reference. It also has a couple of custom MediaWiki extensions, one for handling the Google Maps integration and one for integrating Pinterest boards into some articles (e.g. mood boards for different provinces to give a feel for the different types of architecture)

No-one knows. Presumably Google will still update those because that’s not “the Chrome browser” but ChromeOS (which is a modified version)

It’s not really a newer technology - it’s a different one. Smartphones as we know them have been around for almost 2 decades at this point - the iPhone debuted a year after the Nintendo Wii for context, and the Wii wasn’t exactly the graphical powerhouse. Actually that’s not a great comparison. The same year as the debut of the iPhone was the first Assassin’s Creed game. Complete with installer for Windows Vista, because at that time Steam didn’t just let anyone publish games (it was on,y in 2008 that people could integrate Steam without Valve being the publisher) What’s actually interesting is how much faster mobile has gotten in the time. Considering that you have criteria for mobile that don’t exist in the same way for consoles (which, at this point, are basically PCs that run a custom OS) - consoles have a higher power intake, higher capacity for getting hot and capacity for storage by virtue of not moving around, while phones have all these criteria in a much more restricted capacity. Given that, it’s incredible to think that a top of the line phone is comparable to a PC maybe 4-5 years old, as the current numbers put phones down at approximately 10x slower in raw compute in benchmarks than current gen laptops, and allowing for Moore’s law, that gives us 4-5 years as a timeframe. Which for a device that fits in your hand and won’t get up to approaching 100°C is pretty neat, but in reality the throttling factor is battery life rather than compute. People see the price tag and they want to play for a few hours. But a phone isn’t going to be able to go full throttle for hours, even if plugged in, because at full throttle they’ll actually still burn through more power than they’ll be able to charge.

You can but the folks who would don't. Because if you're going to be spending $70 upwards (standard AAA pricing) on a game, you're not about to play it on a tiny screen. Folks that really want to play AAA games on the move are going to go with the Steam Deck or the Switch, where AAA gaming already exists and where people already have libraries. It's the perfect stop-start game, combined with both gacha and collectible mechanics, so it hits all the dopamine receptors going.

Phones don't (yet) have the compute power that current insane-budget AAA games currently demand to give them their look and feel, and they already balk at having to make a slimmed down version for the Switch (which still has more graphics horsepower than many phones) Certainly it's been tried before over the last 15 years, but between the aforementioned lack of horsepower and the lack of a controller, AAA has largely given up - consider also that the most successful games on mobile are those that favour and are designed for stop-start play, e.g. while you're waiting in line for something or in the bathroom...

Whatever happens this will be interesting. Forcing Google to split off Chrome is a particularly interesting question because it gets into: who then maintains it? Will a new company be set up to manage it, and if so what will its funding structure look like? Microsoft, Brave, Opera etc. also then have a vested interest in sponsoring that new company. On a side note if that happens, one assumes Firefox's funding will largely dry up because Google will have limited reason to fund them (since their value to Google is primarily in existing as the browser that demonstrates Chrome isn't a monopoly... ooops) But anything that encourages browsers not to be a vehicle for Google to control more of the internet is fine by me.

You have no way to know. It can't cite its sources. On the other hand, it can make up things that sound good, up to and including things that look like references. For example, if you use ChatGPT to file a lawsuit like some lawyers, be sure to check the precedents it's citing do actually exist... Nope. Hard, hard block.

I don't think they intended it to be the juggernaut it became, but the reality is that it's always a safe bet to invest in the shovel-seller during a gold rush, especially if the shovel-seller is also the one who will buy your nuggets in exchange for cash. It's a vicious cycle they've made.

Well, you probably should - but if they're coming around regularly and visiting, I'd be tempted to look at the requests to see what they're actually doing and whether it's worth reporting it to Hetzner as abuse of their network. They don't like people doing that kind of thing.

Serious question: do you test your backups regularly?

Hetzner is a hosting company. It's almost certainly not them themselves doing that but someone running a bot on Hetzner servers. Very likely it's a bot looking for vulnerabilities (this happens more than you'd think) Hetzner themselves have no real reason to run a bot like that.

I had a case where I had a rogue influence and I didn't ban nearly quickly enough. I'm not generally a fan of banning because the people who usually end up deserving one tend to be the kind of people who don't usually take no for a good answer, with the side effect that they end up using side channels to try to interact. This one particular individual ended up driving a number of the regulars off until ultimately the site was doomed. (Small sites have disproportionately large network effects) This was not helped by the fact that even after the person in question was banned, there were all sorts of exciting doctored screenshots of conversations that never happened from Discord turning up, because the person was that hell-bent on destruction after they'd been told no. Had I banned them sooner, chances are the rot would have been stopped before it was fatal.

We don't do Christmas in our house. On the flip side this also means we don't have to wait for a specific time of year to buy each other presents - we just do so when we see something that we think they'd like.

Like everything else Google does, it works both ways: companies pay Google to place their ads, and Google pays out the people who have those ads (including themselves, if the ads are shown on the search results pages). Of course, taking a healthy cut along the way for themselves. YouTube has been serving ads in this way since before they were acquired by Google, though Google was able to bring other revenue streams to the party (e.g. Premium, ability to sell access to legitimate movies) YouTube received $50bn in revenue in the last year, and part of how that works is because the system is cyclic: people make content that others want to see and monetise it - so they can keep making content, and so the system continues.

Does it really, though, in this day and age? 20 years ago, databases weren't what they are now. For context, I've run sites on MySQL, where individual tables have a billion rows, and that is billion with a b, as in a 10 digit number of rows. Provided you didn't want to do something insane like select that entire table, MySQL was happy enough to fetch recent things from it. Huge is relative. On a more practical level, I have been tech support on a 90+ million post SMF forum that ran on a single DB server and a single web server. That thing was getting 90k posts per day on average. (Sadly, it no longer exists. It was a beast.) Tech to scale these things exists in ways it didn't back in the day - whether that's more hardcore caching, whether that's more stable multi-node DB with replication (so, one writing node, multiple reads off the same DB)

For me it's always mixed; there's always the hope that it'll be amazing and do cool things, mixed with the inevitable feelings of 'oh I hoped it would also do that' (or, sometimes, 'I wish it did that without breaking') and 'now that's another thing that has to be maintained'

Forumotion is still going - whether you call them Forumotion, Forumactif or any of the other brand names they call themselves. Choice of hosted forums, choices of features, they never went anywhere. Icyboards closed due to the owner having time commitments and not wanting to sell. Zetaboards I believe sold themselves to Tapatalk during the latter's buying spree - a bunch disappeared during this time, including the once mighty Invisionfree. The reality is that for a lot of these, they weren't super profitable, but they could make money during the boom years. Latterly, not so much.

I released over 100 plugins for SMF in my time, including the helpdesk actually used on the main SMF site for the paying members. I haven't done a plugin in a while mostly because a lot of the last few years went into a specific niche fork of SMF that for complicated reasons I stopped working on. I'm debating writing plugins for XF but then I get into the hassle of maintaining them for people not me, and I had some pretty bad experiences in the SMF world with this.

It's an almighty torch to pass on - and even though I only hit a fraction of that in my SMF modding time, I can relate to it not being easy to do. Though I didn't pass on my torch because of not having the time or feeling Father Time around the corner, I just hit a point of 'this isn't me now'.

With advertising. Get enough views on a video and you get paid for ads shown before, during and after. Or you get a cut of the Premium folks who watch (because they pay YT for an ad-free experience)

That one in particular strikes me as kinda awkward - .co vs .com is prime real estate for trouble. But I’m not looking to use a .co, just to understand if I can/should push on with a good (+industry applicable) eight letter brand name where the .com is effectively dormant but I don’t own it, or whether I should come up with another name where I can get the .com.