Another game experiment - I wanted to see if it was feasible to have a two player game on two separate phones running in static HTML where the networking code uses chirps sent via the microphone. It seems to work!
Build a two player competitive pong like game where two players use their phones close to each other and the game state is sent via audio noises which the web microphone API can interpret - but add graphical and gameplay twists to make it a lot more fun and intertwine than pong
Everyone should read the above.
Cringely had so many stories where he seemed to be part of, or present to witness, significant events in the computer industry - after a while you become suspicious that one person could really do/see all these things. Like he was a 'Forrest Gump' of technology.
I really liked the guy, and his speculations about IBM.
But it's wild to get involved in a Kickstarter involving the star of Plane Crazy. When I watched Kickstarters fail and the people who started them grow increasingly unstable, I would always think about Plane Crazy.
Too bad that it didn't get a lot of distribution; there's a link on this HN thread pointing to a copy on youtube that was taped off PBS in Chicago, and I literally saw it on WTTW in Chicago. I don't know where it could really be marketed - it might be great to reedit it into a feature.
But its theme is that Cringely would bite off more than he can chew during what one might not recognize as a mania. You would see this pattern in almost everything he did, unless he was lucky enough to get it right on the first try.
1) he would make a lot of promises based on a dream of accomplishing something that no one had ever done before,
2) experts he would consult would tell him that they didn't think it was possible, but that they'd be happy to be surprised,
3) as the problems would pile up and he would gradually come to the realization that he was going to fail, he would first look at those problems as interesting challenges,
4) improvise inadequate solutions to show he could meet those challenges,
5) ignore the experts who criticize those inadequate solutions, and that tell him that these were the problems that made them think this was impossible in the first place,
6) mock and attack the experts who criticized his inadequate solutions (likely as stuck in the past or jealous of a non-expert invading their turf),
7) then start to conceal new and compounding problems,
8) then fully and knowingly lie about the problems (likely justified to himself as simply buying time for one fix he's obsessing upon to work),
9) then start to blame people who don't believe those lies for inadequately supporting him (he just needs a little bit more time),
10) then attack those people - his investors, friends and family (I just need another day or two!),
11) then attack himself for being low enough to attack the people who believe in him and love him,
12) then consider suicide.
Have there been any "Plane Crazy"-style documentaries about any of the spectacular Kickstarter failures?
The weird thing is that a lot of people that are ultimately successful share a lot of these traits. But I think the big differentiator is in how you deal with any of them, you can have the trait of not immediately rolling over when an expert says something can't be done. That's fine. But if ultimately you can't do it either you simply admit the experts were right after all and you move on. The further down the list you go the bigger the success if you eventually do manage to deliver, but the bigger the loss if you don't.
Where Cringely went from interesting to a risk to himself and others is where he refused to stay connected to reality.
I can relate: I start a lot of projects where I'm usually in over my head. But I always learn, sometimes learn a lot and some of those projects eventually do work out. But I don't have my ego invested in any project and I think that is one of the bigger differences, some stuff works and is obvious, some stuff could work and is not obvious, some stuff can't work but it is not obvious (to me at least) and some stuff simply can't work and it is obvious. The third category is where you lose the money, the second is where you make it, the dividing line between the two will give you Theranos, UBeam and Moller on one side of the line and CISCO on the other.
I get why the banks are not happy, but I can tell them that I am not going to use Chase Wallet, Bank of America Wallet, Citi Wallet...just pay the fee and be thankful for the reduced payment friction, which they invariably make money from. PS: Nobody is going to use Paze (yet another half baked wallet), other than to collect the free $10 to sign up for it.
Somewhat related, even Walmart relented and now supports Apple Pay/Contactless. Every big merchant has now relented (Kroger, Home Depot, Walmart).
This is the government's problem. I tend to be on the side of less government, but it is so obvious that payment facilitation should be a service provided by the government. The government is just allowing corporations to collect rents, because they are lazy and incompetent.
They’re more like taxes than rents. It’s a constant cost applied to all goods because of the ubiquity of use means we pay with or without playing the credit card/payments game.
It's not a government problem, it's a competition problem. Fundamentally 1-3% is actually a very competitive rate for organizing the easy transfer of money and handling fraud. Merchants would rather the cost be free, and banks may want a larger slice of the pie, but until someone comes up with a better way of paying money for both sides this is the best we have. If government got involved all that could happen is fees would increase and then we'd miss out on future efficiency improvements and savings.
There are distortions in that "market" because credit cards aren't just for payment acceptance and fraud handling (which are narrow functions).
In the U.S., many credit cards bundle short term credit, rewards, travel benefits, insurance etc. This bundling is why merchants can pay up to 2-3% in fees.
The payment clearance and settlement parts are much cheaper. That's why many countries are able to build domestic payment rails (e.g. Pix in Brazil) that process transactions at low cost.
The USPS is overwhelmingly the most efficient and inexpensive way to ship things. Try sending a letter cross country with UPS - it costs $15. USPS costs $0.50.
The USPS lost $9B last year. If our government considered The USPS a real public good, they would pick up the bill and give them more budget. Instead, The USPS had to get in bed with Amazon to keep the lights on and start delivering on Sundays.
It was $2.7 if you remove the forced retirement obligations that private companies don't have to do, which is only about 3% shortfall. And a large part of that was also due to private competition taking more of the market - in part because the USPS isn't as competitive as it could be, again because of costs incurred outside its control.
Certain individuals, such as Susan Collins and Tom Davis, who were the largest names behind the 2006 law to force this on the USPS, were clearly doing it in an attempt to make the USPS fail/become less competitive. PACs affiliated with FedEx, UPS, etc gave more than $192,000 to Collins’s campaign / PAC from 2000 to 2004. FedEx’s PAC has given Collins more donations than any other congressional candidate in that PAC's history.
There is a huge chain of evidence suggesting members of congress don't want the USPS to succeed due to self interest.
This is fundamentally looking at it the wrong way.
Why do we need my bank to send money to your bank via Visa or the Federal Reserve or any such thing, instead of having my bank send money directly to your bank? All they need to do is both support the same openly specified protocol for transferring money.
The "network" part of what they do could straightforwardly be done in a decentralized way using ordinary DNS (for the parties to discover the servers of the others) and TLS. When your card issuer is Example Bank then your "card number" would be 123@example.com and the merchant or their bank knows to contact the servers at example.com to initiate a transaction for that card.
It seems like the primary thing they actually do is currency conversion, which a) isn't strictly required (e.g. plenty of small US merchants might hardly notice if they only accepted payment in US dollars), and b) could just as easily be transparently provided as an optional service by either of the card issuing bank or the merchant bank for cardholders or merchants who expect a non-trivial number of foreign currency transactions.
If you have an open standard decentralized protocol that banks are required to support, that's the network effect solved. Merchants and anyone making the software that merchants use would want to support it because you're getting rid of Visa's fees.
> From NETs in singapore to girocard in Germany, Alipay to UPI.
Singaporean here. NETS is a shitshow of a dinosaur trying to stay relevant. They started as more of a debit card system like EFTPOS [1], but now lean more into merchant acceptance for both credit cards and QR codes. (Singapore is huge about credit card rewards, so few people want to use a debit card with PIN entry and no rewards these days.)
I think the problem with them, and many companies that focus solely on a tiny market like Singapore, is that their organisations tend to be full of comfortable dinosaurs that don't stay up to date with financial software engineering practices (I've lost money from government site transactions that were a hassle to get back), and there's a captive market because of their duopoly.
The biggest reasons they still exist are because they're a joint venture between the big 3 local banks, and our government likes their initiatives to have some competition to emulate a free market.
Pix, from its Wikipedia page, sounds like a bank account aliasing system, just like PayNow in Singapore.
Another alternative (in the US, at least) is tapping a piece of plastic instead of your phone and not inviting any of the tech giants into your transactions at all. What an unforced error, to shovel more of your data at them needlessly.
> is tapping a piece of plastic instead of your phone and not inviting any of the tech giants into your transactions at all.
Apple doesn't see individual transactions when Apple Pay is used at retail stores' tap-to-pay terminals. The secret card payment token is sent from the phone to the credit-card's issuing bank and bypasses Apple servers. In this way, using Apple Pay is more secure and private than plastic cards because the real card number details remains hidden from the merchant.
The iPhone does contact Apple servers to add a new card to the digital wallet. Apple servers then contacts the issuing bank to get the secret token the bank generates and then puts it in the digital wallet. Conceivably, the "add a new card to digital wallet" could also have been done without Apple in the middle but it would require a much more convoluted, less secure, and more user-hostile workflow to do it. (e.g. the end user would have to know what bank endpoint to contact, manually enter the long and cryptic digits of the secret token, or maybe scan a QR code on a computer screen that's vulnerable to interception and phishing.)
Importantly, this provides a degree of protection from compromised PoS terminals. Ever since I switched to nearly exclusively using Apple Pay for physical shopping I’ve had no unauthorized charges, whereas back when I was still tapping, inserting, or swiping my card I’d need to call and get a card or two replaced almost every year.
I’m not super familiar with the implementation details but wouldn’t inserting not be as safe since there’s a physical connection?
With tapping I could see how that is more secure but if they’re still providing the card details versus the secure token or something well… maybe it’s not?
Inserting and tapping is mostly the same process, apart from the physical layer of the protocol (NFC vs interfacing the chip directly).
Unless there’s a hidden magnetic reader in the chip-reading portion of the terminal, in which case the scammers could read like 1/3 of the magstripe data? Which doesn’t seem that useful tbh.
> Unless there’s a hidden magnetic reader in the chip-reading portion of the terminal, in which case the scammers could read like 1/3 of the magstripe data? Which doesn’t seem that useful tbh.
At least around where I am (Ohio, USA), at gas pumps and ATMs: Inserting the card for contact EMV typically means inserting the whole card.
In doing so, entire card is pushed all the way into the same slot that is also used for reading the magstripe, and to the same depth that is used for magstripe transactions.
This quality leaves the door open for magstripe skimming.
(It may be a stupid way of building things, but things exist in the real world that are built this way anyhow. Whether the information on the mag stripe still has any utility for a would-be thief in 2026 is a different matter.)
> at gas pumps and ATMs: Inserting the card for contact EMV typically means inserting the whole card.
Fairly standard for ATMs, yeah. I’ve always wondered why they do it like that.
And I think I’ve seen ticket machines like this in Finland – not a typical ATM-like receptacle, but you do insert the card all the way in and it locks it down. (I guess Ohio gas pumps also have something like that?)
So yeah, those things exist, but the “typical” terminal style where you only insert the card halfway is fairly safe at least. :-)
The credit cards, I believe, have pledged to eliminate magnetic stripes. Although given how long it takes us to do anything for all I know that will be by 2060. They are also planning to extend credit cards past 16 digits, which may also require the magstripe to go away.
Physical connection doesn't matter. This isn't a Hollywood movie, there isn't some mega-virus which magically seizes controls of trivial objects by passing through a connector.
All three modern technologies ("original" Chip & PIN, wireless or a phone) are basically the EMV protocol, which is a fairly crap protocol which wasn't reviewed by experts before deployment - but is at least designed by people who have heard about cryptographic security and wanted to do that.
The original credit cards are just numbers written on a card. Clerk sees your number, memorizes it, now they can make arbitrary transactions indistinguishable from yours. Basically no security.
Magnetic stripe cards look more sophisticated but the stripe is basically the same numbers again but in a way humans cannot read. "Cloning" is just a matter of a machine copying those numbers onto another card's magnetic stripe. There's no real security improvement, though it is more convenient for the bank...
EMV ("Chip and PIN") is rather more complicated and could in principle be entirely secure - they could make it implausibly expensive to "clone" an EMV card, and require that you actually know your PIN for every transaction, so then crooks would need to learn your PIN and have the actual card, and that's a high bar.
In practice we didn't do much of that because it would be inconvenient, and so there are technical deficiencies, but realistically that XKCD "wrench" thing applies. Difficult technological attacks rarely happen, crooks threaten to stab you if you don't co-operate or they break into your home and steal your stuff, they do not come up with breakthrough cryptanalytic attacks on protocols. Mostly.
There are two forms of wireless. The first was “magstripe emulation” and it’s exactly what you think it is. The card would hand over the exact data on the magstripe.
It’s also exactly as secure as you think: it’s not.
That hasn’t been used for a long time, and I don’t even think people accept it anymore. May not have for years. At least for credit cards. It’s quite possible that’s still how door access cards or maybe gym membership cards work. I don’t really know.
Everything now and for many, many many years, has been EMV over NFC. And you’re right on that one it is essentially identical to sticking your card in the EMV reader.
The exact technologies used for "access cards" have varied over the years, but last time I checked most of them still aren't doing anything even vaguely secure. The card says "I'm card 1234-5678" and the access system checks that is on the list, welcome in. Like magnetic stripes it isn't obvious to the human operator, but just like magnetic stripes you can just clone it by listening and reciting the same, "I'm card 1234-5678".
Now to be fair, you'd often find these systems are so clumsily installed that you don't need to clone a card anyway, the out-of-hours access has an "emergency" generic key you can buy from a hardware store, the controller was placed on the wrong side of the door - that sort of thing. But even a well-installed system is typically vulnerable to a competent intruder.
>Apple doesn't see individual transactions when Apple Pay is used at retail stores' tap-to-pay terminals.
when I added my credit card to ApplePay, transactions made with the bare card would show up on my phone even though the phone was not involved: you're saying my phone has access to that transaction and Apple does not?
This information comes from the card issuer directly, after the transaction has completed. It usually requires the mobile banking app to be installed.
The wallet app has a way to get the information, but it’s not from the tap itself. The tap interaction is not able to provide this information back to the phone (because the transaction auth happens long after the tap interaction completes).
Taps are designed to work with fully offline devices (which is why you can tap a plastic card, it is powered by the card terminal for the duration of the tap only, and requires no online interaction)
> This information comes from the card issuer directly, after the transaction has completed. It usually requires the mobile banking app to be installed.
except of course it fucking doesn’t, I don’t have Chase or Amex apps on my phone… and yet my transactions are on my phone and watch and in a list inside my “wallet” and probably in the phone settings somewhere as well :)
Man, its amazing how confident you are about this, considering I know individual people who independently work at Visa, Mastercard, AND Apple, who have worked on mobile payments who independently confirm that none of them know any personal info and that its all pass-through.
So, are you sure you know what you are talking about?
This kind of appeal to authority [believe me because I say so!] doesn't really add much information, does it?
The report, above, is that previous transactions are visible within Apple's payment app. Apple agrees[1]. I'm willing to accept that this observation is based on reality and that it is reported in good faith.
Meanwhile, the suggestion is that Apple has no knowledge of transaction history.
Is there a way in which these two seemingly-conflicting concepts can be constructively combined into an understandable whole?
This is baffling, there's all sorts of information on my phone that Apple has zero knowledge of, why would the transactions be different?
Do you think Apple has complete copies of everything? I don't understand where this supposed contradiction is supposed to exist, unless you think that Apple has complete knowledge of all phone contents, which would require complete ignorance of the entire platform.
> This is baffling, there's all sorts of information on my phone that Apple has zero knowledge of, why would the transactions be different?
It's kind of unique. It involves finances, and reporting transactions, and it involves their app with their branding that runs on hardware that they unilaterally control. They apparently even take cut from the middle of each of these transaction.
If Apple does all of this with zero knowledge, then I am willing to accept accept that...
> Do you think Apple has complete copies of everything? I don't understand where this supposed contradiction is supposed to exist, unless you think that Apple has complete knowledge of all phone contents, which would require complete ignorance of the entire platform.
...but I'll only accept it if the functional operation can be explained.
This kind of non-explanatory browbeating doesn't further my understanding of anything at all. I have never endeavored to undertake a faith-based approach to understanding technology, and I'm certainly not going to begin doing so today.
Yeah. But this is the US. This is all we’ve got. Having the central bank do it would be communism, and that’s bad. I learned about it from Saturday morning cartoons.
Ironically it's the central bank (and associated regulations) that cause these intermediaries to exist to begin with.
A protocol to support decentralized payments is a hobby project for an individual. You give each institution an identifier (e.g. their domain name) and each institution gives each customer an account number. If you're account 123 at Chase then you sign in as #123@chase.com, tell Chase you want to send $5 to #456@bankofamerica.com, they send the money and Bank of America tells their customer they have a new deposit. If you want to collect money from someone, you tell your bank to send their bank a payment request and they can either approve it manually (e.g. so you can deliver the goods for a one-time purchase) or configure some rules for which accounts get approved automatically up to some threshold amount (e.g. for recurring payments). Also no reason for banks in different countries not to all support the same protocol.
That doesn't require a central bank or any centralized third party payments intermediary. All it requires is for banks to know how to send money to other banks, which they obviously already do and the specific implementation of that isn't even relevant to the customer-facing payments protocol. So how does this not exist? It can't be that no one wants it, so it's got to be that someone (e.g. Visa/MasterCard) doesn't want it.
Zelle, from my understanding, is a “protocol” – many banks support it in their own apps. (Scare quotes because I’m not entirely sure it’s a proper well-defined protocol.)
And there’s nothing preventing PoS from supporting individual wallet apps – see e.g. WeChat Pay / Alipay in China. (Alipay+ is also a “protocol”, i.e. other banks and wallets support it.)
What I mean by protocol is that there is an RFC or equivalent and anyone who implements the spec and has a bank account can then talk to their bank using the standardized protocol. If that exists for Zelle then where's the spec?
I’ve searched for ‘zelle spec’ and came across this line:
> Zelle® is available in over 2,400 banking and credit union apps.
so I’m pretty sure there is a spec because there is no way in hell this many banks are using ad-hoc protocols to talk to each other and/or a centralized system. But yeah, I don’t see anything published.
Chances are it’s something ISO 20022-ish. (Either that or an Excel spreadsheet.) Speaking of which...
> and has a bank account can then talk to their bank using the standardized protocol
...if you’re a big enough business, you probably can also speak ISO 20022 to your bank. If you want it on your personal account however, well, that makes two of us, but from practical standpoint what I care more about is that I can punch in an account number and send money near instantly, which Zelle seems to provide in the US (but I have to make do with whatever Wise provides, probably regular ACH judging by speeds).
https://api.payments.jackhenry.com/docs/zelle/overview/ Is a white label api that you, as a bank, can implement/hit. Just like your local small business vendor can choose to also take Venmo and CashApp, they can also choose to take Zelle. I've bought a burrito with Zelle before.
yea, feels like tech giants do not have access to this already? they know where you are and what you do every second of every day, keeping away from ( while they know I was a target ) what was the amount on my receipt is really giving it to them :)
> It points to Google's Android, which supports multiple wallets and does not collect a fee from card issuers for contactless payments. It suggests Apple would not be able to continue to charge "substantial fees" if it were forced to support other mobile wallets on Apple devices.
This described supporting multiple wallets, which I don’t care about. I don’t want multiple wallets, I want one wallet.
Android supporting multiple wallets isn’t a feature of Google Pay, it’s a feature of Android. Although the implication in the article is that Google not being able to charge the fee is a side effect of any app being able to act as a “wallet.” Which I’m not 100% sure is true.
The phone holds on to a credit card number and some extra information. What service is happening here? Is Apple doing something meaningful every payment?
So it doesn't generate a second card number like other things I've used?
But anyway it sounds like the answer to my question is no, Apple is not doing anything meaningful per payment. They play a role in setting up a card and that's it. Is that accurate?
When you add a card, your bank creates a device-specific Device Account Number, encrypts it, and sends it to Apple w/ a key used to generate a unique sec code for each transaction.
Not if you're tapping in a store. Apple's servers re-encrypt the payment data for specific merchants if you buy in an app or on a website. Apple brokers requests for adding a card, or suspending one via Find My, or setting one up again whenever a person changes phones.
Of course they are, passed on as increased prices for everyone, which is exactly the problem. Sure the banks here would like these fees gone, but it also hurts society in general.
And customer are also paying cash handling fees, which in the U.K. at higher than card handling fees.
Companies that prefer or only take cash tend to do it for tax evasion rather than cost purposes.
U.K. fees tend to be about 1-1.5% all in, for cash or card (excluding cost of employee taking cash to bank). Things like pix, net, grocers about 0.5-1%. Nets QR is cheaper than Nets rfid.
How about Chase continues to eat shit on that 0.15% extra profit they really want to capture, but aren’t owed… and everyone else goes on with their day?
Walmart only relented because they finally broke through the final missing link of the contactless issue. They got customers conned into giving their phone numbers at checkout, just like it's the grocery store.
Cards get linked to accounts automatically behind the scenes based on first6/last4 card number tracking, then everyone else self-selects to punch their phone number on the screen.
Same reason Walmart Radio is such gruesome auditory cancer, it's part of the data collection and advertising vehicle.
That could be part of the reason, but also I think insisting on chip all this time just really slows down a store that doesn't really spend on cashiering all that much. Tap to pay can shave off a few seconds on every transaction (ever been behind someone in the store who finally pulls out their wallet, finds the business end of their card, inserts it, waits 20 seconds...).
Millions of transactions a day, over thousands of stores, it can make a huge difference in time saved.
This is even worse now that tap to pay has proliferated. Customers who are not Walmart regulars (and some that are) will wave their credit card, phone, or watch over the terminal and wonder why it’s not working.
Cashier must explain: No tap. Best case is the customer shrugs and inserts card. Bad case is the customer is confused or argues about it. Horrible case is that the customer must fish through his belongings for a credit card or cash and takes minutes to realize he has neither.
I guess Walmart figured that these scenes repeating daily was not worth whatever its strategy was.
> Tap to pay can shave off a few seconds on every transaction
I don't really get how this can be possible. A person can definitely get their card out of their wallet in less time than it takes the cashier to finish scanning their items.
Obviously if the customer is confused then it can take arbitrarily long, but how is a phone less confusing than a card? People don't get to the register only to realize that their card's battery is run down or it's the first time they've used a phone for payments and then they want to stand there for 15 minutes in front of you trying to set it up.
Remember CurrenC? The thing a bunch of them tried to make that failed horribly during test with no consumers liking it? If I remember a description it involved using an app where you had to scan a QR code, and then the point of sale terminal had to scan a QR code on your phone or something like that.
It was all so hilariously badly designed compared to tap and pay.
I took great joy in watching its downfall. It also only worked with debit cards, meaning you didn’t get the buyer protections you use from buying things on a credit card.
CurrentC was designed to collect all your transaction info so that its owners could analyze your buying habits. I’m delighted that not-CurrentC won that war.
(I personally use Apple Pay, but my understanding is that Google Pay has the same privacy advantages for end users. Both of them are light years ahead of the other boondoggle.)
Yeah, but it meant they didn’t have to pay credit card fees. And isn’t that what’s really the most important thing here? Lol.
As far as I know, the current Google Pay is identical to Apple Pay: it’s just EMV tap-to-pay. So it would be the same protections. Samsung pay too.
It was kind of neat that Samsung had that thing for a short while that would somehow trick the magstripe reader in a POS terminal by blasting magnetic fields at it to think that you had swiped your card.
I think there was a different one before that that was not, but I’m also pretty sure that’s long gone. And I think it was more like Apple Pay on the web, where it was really for paying in a non-card environment. But I’m not an android person, so I’m not sure.
Probably, but there is an upper limit on what people will be able to tolerate, everyone is aware of it and capitalism is trying to make products that meet it.
So, it’s not unlimited cost here.
The fact right now is that handling cash is more expensive than handling card- even with the fees, which is why Sweden, Estonia etc; are essentially cash-free countries.
At some point the fee’s will make you break-even I guess?
I don't really care about any of Apple's business partners being upset about their business terms with Apple. Developers want a bigger cut, banks want a bigger cut, Foxconn wants a bigger cut.
My interests as an Apple user are aligned with Apple. But even if I wasn't an Apple user, market forces determine what the "fair" cut is for everyone.
"My short term convenience trumps all" is why everything sucks and we have far worse short and long term convenience and efficiency in everything. Thanks for that.
I won't use $bank-wallet either but that's a seperate issue which is that the bank is not really any better than Apple or PayPal or anyone else. The only reason they "fight" Apple tax is because they want to do $bank tax.
Another argument for turning finance into a public utility. Instead we have different factions of rentier capital competing for who gets to parasitize us.
Many MRI “abnormalities” are, well… normal.
“Age-appropriate” findings on MRI readings are vastly under-appreciated. If you are over 50, have no pain, and place you into an MRI, you have at least a …
A 20% chance of having a meniscus abnormality.
An 80% chance of something being listed as an abnormality in your knee.
A 10-15% or higher chance of having a rotator cuff tear.
An 80% chance of having a disc bulge in your back or neck.
I use an Island Router with Wireguard server built in, it handles DDNS and even the base Island router is beefy enough to give me up to 954mbps or so of Wireguard to right inside my home network. It took 2 minutes to set up.
That being said, I do understand the appeal of Tailscale and have used it.
I live in a small midwest market, and all the landscaping companies are locally owned and awful.
PE bought two of them, combined them into one, and now they, at about the same cost, do what they say they are going to do, answer the phone, hire competent people, and do a good job.
Likewise, PE has bought up most of the local plumbing and HVAC, and that's been a bit of a bummer, and gotten more expensive, but if you need someone right now, they are there (and answer the phone, etc), as opposed to the local concern who may be on vacation and can get back to you in 2 weeks.
There are some really good local small businesses/trades people, but like the 1950s, in a lot of aspects they are overly romanticized.
My controversial opinion: chains/large businesses are more convenient, cheaper, better (and more consistent) service, and the big one: you can complain up the chain when a local branch/franchise fucks up vs dealing with a sole proprietor. There's plenty of small businesses I do value (thrift stores, bodegas, etc), but for services? The choice is obvious.
Being of that age, hearing about and then using ethernet in the dorms was sort of like discovering Oz after living in Kansas. I had so many questions! How did they manage all that traffic? It was like having a firehose after using an eye dropper all your life.
I remember going from modem to internet and feeling like it was a "multitasking communication line" compared to the single-point connection the modem was capable of. With the internet I could contact many different servers at the same time. It was like having a thousand modems. My head exploded.
Remember when it was the fastest thing around and simple?
Now it's an also ran. AI doesn't help here. Focus on what made it great in the beginning, make it the most performant browser around. Put Fable on the case if need be. Do the browser thing well!
Another game experiment - I wanted to see if it was feasible to have a two player game on two separate phones running in static HTML where the networking code uses chirps sent via the microphone. It seems to work!
Build a two player competitive pong like game where two players use their phones close to each other and the game state is sent via audio noises which the web microphone API can interpret - but add graphical and gameplay twists to make it a lot more fun and intertwine than pong
Claude Opus 5.5 Extra in Claude Code.
Tags: game-design, ai, generative-ai, llms, claude-code
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