Granted they're not the growing and bustling places they used to be, but there are still both niche and "lifestyle" forums that are alive and stable. Other than this place, one of the latter is where I spend most of my online socializing time.

Standards as in parts of the spec, as you said in the original reply:

the new MatrixRTC spec

Which is a fork of the WebRTC protocol and another "standard" on top of the REST HTTP protocol.

I should have been more specific with my language, it is federated, but specifically messages (events) are a distributed DAG, and I find the Matrix protocol overly generic for a replacement for something specific like Discord.

The end goal of Matrix is to be a ubiquitous messaging layer for synchronising arbitrary data between sets of people, devices and services

Matrix has moved very very slowly and I'm concerned it'll have the same fate as XMPP, where it's a bunch of very complicated standards, with maybe one compliant implementation that nobody wants to work on.

I also don't think it's a particularly good protocol design for a Discord replacement, it's not federated it's a distributed message protocol, which is an order of magnitude more complicated and intensive than potential alternatives.

That said, many non-perfect things have achieved widespread success, so I'm at least hopeful that Matrix/Element are able to catch on in a wider capacity.

As someone who runs a Mumble server (and has for over a decade) – it's really not a replacement for the user experience that is Discord.

People want a unified UI, the ability to create communities with some amount of customization, embedded/live content, plus voice and video so they can chill and play games together. Mumble is just voice, and while it's a very good implementation of that, it's not even in the same user space as Discord.

I think it's "the algorithm", people basically just want to be force-fed "content" – look how successful TikTok is, largely because it has an algorithm that very quickly narrows down user habits and provides endless distraction.

Mastodon and fediverse alternatives by comparison have very simple feeds and ways to surface content, it simply doesn't "hook" people the same way, and that's competition.

On one hand we should probably be doing away with "the algorithm" for reasons not enumerated here for brevity, but on the other hand maybe the fediverse should build something to accommodate this demand, otherwise the non-fedi sites will.

There can be theoretical audit or blame issues , since you're not "paying" then how does the company pass the buck (SLA contracts) if something fucks up with LE.

Ironically the shortening of cert lengths has pushed me to automated systems and away from the traditional paid trust providers.
I used to roll a 1-year cert for my CDN, and manually buy renewals and go through the process of signing and uploading the new ones, it wasn't particularly onerous, but then they moved to I think either 3 or 6 months max signing, which was the point where I just automated it with Let's Encrypt.

I'm in general not a fan of how we do root of trust on the web, I much prefer had DANE caught on, where I can pin a cert at the DNS level that is secured with DNSSEC and is trusted through IANA and the root zone.

IP law needs overhauling, but these are the last people (aside from Disney et al) I'd trust to draft the new ones.

The US manages to store 1.5B pounds of cheese it doesn't do anything with, I think China can handle constructing some warehouse to hold what it digs up from the ground.

I've got a Xonar Essence STX II still faithfully plugging away in a PCIe slot, it'll be a sad day when I get a new system and it's no longer compatible.

Sony Pictures Core, Kaleidescape, probably a few other niche ones.

if not x then … end is very common in Lua for similar purposes, very rarely do you see hard nil comparisons or calls to typeof (last time I did was for a serializer).

Streaming services pretty much top out at 80Mbps, but more typically are around 15≃20Mbps for even 4K content, so even if they straight quadrupled the bitrate for 8K content you'd only be hitting UHD BD rates.

I don't disagree that BD will not exist for an 8K market, but that's because physical media is being killed.

This isn't even getting into the actual mastered resolution of much of this content, which you're lucky if it's even in 4K, most stuff is still mastered in 2K.

There isn't a particularly good delivery mechanism for 8K, Blu-Ray tops out at UHD/4K, and streaming is so bitrate starved 8K doesn't even matter.

Most of the VCS ops in Hg are actually written in C.

GitHub is mostly written in Ruby, so that's not really a performance win.

Like I said, we're stuck with Git's UX, but we were never stuck with Hg's performance.

I don't think it's hyperbole to say a significant percentage of Git activity happens on GitHub (and other "foundries") – which are themselves a far cry from efficient.

My ultimate takeaway on the topic is that we're stuck with Git's very counterintuitive porcelain, and only satisfactory plumbing, regardless of performance/efficiency; but if Mercurial had won out, we'd still have its better interface (and IMO workflow), and any performance problems could've been addressed by a rewrite in C (or the Rust one that is so very slowly happening).

Same with mice, Logitech uses a combination of under-designed (denounce and chatter can be fixed by using both the NO and NC terminals to perform latching in firmware) circuitry, out-of-spec voltages, and cheap wrongly spec'd microswitches, which results in their mice suffering from double click and other similar issues after a year or so of usage.

You can put switches that are closer to spec and will last many more years, but really they should be using 5V and both momentary terminals.

If only, this is "modern" PhysX, we'd need the source to the original Ageia PhysX 2.X branch to fix it properly.

The amount of stupid AI scraping behavior I see even on my small websites is ridiculous, they'll endlessly pound identical pages as fast as possible over an entire week, apparently not even checking if the contents changed. Probably some vibe coded shit that barely functions.

Man this reminds me of the lockers we had in middle school that used dial locks, cheap masterlock jobbies that despite having notches between the major numbers, just being within 2 of the actual number would register.
Plus it felt like they'd slip internally so if you dialed too quickly (because class starts in 3 minutes at the other end of the building) you'd have to start all over.