I saw a few years ago one group buying spools of fiber just to 'slow down' the trades. As they were submitting them to different datacenters across the country. They wanted everything to show up at the exact same time so no one would front run their trades on different datacenters. They are willing spend millions on HW if it gives them an edge in the market. They would buy bespoke boards that could hold 16x the RAM if it gave them a 50ns edge.

Yes, this is IEX. Some guy wrote a book about them called "Flash Boys'.

I can not think of any reason they would not want to do it.

However, I do seem at least 2 downsides to this method.

Number one it is at least 2x the memory. That has for a decently long time been a large cost of a computer. But I could see some people saying 'whatever buy 8x'.

The second is data coherency. In a read only env this would work very nicely. In a write env this would be 2x the writes and you are going to have to wait for them to all work or somehow mark them as not ready on the next read group. Now it would be OK if the read of that page was some period of time after the write. But a different place where things could stall out.

Really liked her vid. She explained it very nicely. She exudes that sense of joy I used to have about this field.

dobbs and msdn were my reading while I was waiting on a 2 hour compile many times. then msdn went terrible, and dobbs out of business :(

Honest question do you really use all of those tabs? As a small handful of tabs user I use the bookmark feature to hold things I want to keep for later. ctrl-d and it is in the list. Even then 99% of the time I open it again and go 'why did I keep this'. I get it that it is your workflow. Just sort of curious why you would consider that a 'power user' thing? Would not saving them to the bookmark list be more of 'power user' sort of thing to do?

I don't know why, but equating how many tabs a person has open to how much of a power user they are sounds like something right out of a south park episode.

Apparently bookmarks and self-hosting a read it later web app on my home server but only having 5 tabs open at a time makes me a filthy casual.

hey, light power user here - for a while I was using tabXpert browser extension for this, but they have recently changed to paid-only and I havent had a chance to check out their competition but might end up just buying it anyway

it groups sessions, not just tabs, so i can (for example) have all my banking websites together as a session that i can open and close as a window of tabs. the convenience is it organizes the sessions as named things that i can manage in a UI. transfer tabs from one session to another, close tabs, check tabs that have been closed in that session, etc.

if you know of any tools like this or an easy way to manage it independently without a 3rd party browser extension, I would be interested. Sounds like maybe you are doing something similar but at the desktop level, creating a new desktop to pick up and put down? are they savable and transferable between devices? I like to close everything down at night to run some games with friends, and am going to be building a new comp soon and for various reasons starting fresh with software and importing things as i need them rather than flashing my current setup forward to the new hardware

I agree with this a lot tbh. I think we need to have better support for tiling or something iframe-like in web interfaces. Probably for deep research or focused work, we need something more tree-shaped than the flat tabs-with-back-button structure web browsers expose.

Interesting. I personally aggressively prune open pages. If I have too much open I get off task and wander into whatever random thing pops up. Anything that needs long term storage I bookmark it in a folder.

Using the session manager that is one I used to use. But backed away from. I use a lot of tools to keep me on task and not wander off into random things.

For me it is about attention and focus. You seem to have a very different pattern than what I use. ctrl-w and alt-left arrow are my buddies.

I've never explored 20-30 search results. Not since Google anyway. If I don't find what I want in the first few I rephrase the search or try a different search engine. The world beyond the first page of results basically doesn't exist.

totally.

MS ended up where it was at because there was basically NO upgrade path between the few different GUI frameworks they had. They broke the whole thing in 2002 when they decided .NET was the way.

You had to basically retool your whole GUI for whatever they were pushing at the time. Then they basically abandoned win32 GUI items and put them in mothballs. Then change their minds every other year.

No sane person is going to pick that model of building an application. So the applications kinda stagnated at whatever GUI level they came into being with. No one wanted to touch it. If I am doing that why am I sticking with windows? I can get the same terrible effect on the web/mobile and have a better reach.

Even their flagship application windows is all over the place. If you click on the right thing you can get GUI's that date back to windows95. Or maybe you might get a whitespaced out latest design. It is all over the place. It has been 10 years at this point. They should have that dialed in years ago.

I do not think Google will be able to pay attention long enough to have a stable GUI. Apple maybe. As for MS you can see it from the outside there are several different competing groups all failing at it.

MS needs another 'service pack 2' moment. Where they focus on cleaning up the mess they have. Clean up the GUI. Fix the speed items. Fixup the out of the box experience (should not take 4gig of used memory just to start up). Clean up the mountain of weird bug quirks.

spam murdered it.

It got ridiculous pretty quickly. The overhead to spam was so low as the protocol was designed to be low friction for posting. The system then took care of carrying the payload everywhere in a reasonable time. People fought back with filters and kill lists. But was not really enough.

Once the ISPs decided they did not want the added cost of running the servers usenet tanked pretty quick. Still alive here and there. Not even close to what it could have been or even was.

Surprised someone has not made a mastadon to usenet transfer protocol. It almost fits both projects goals.

This.

I grew up with BBS access for a number of years, but no USENET access.

When I finally got access to USENET ... what a terrible place it was! SO MUCH SPAM.

And the few newsgroups not riddled with spam just had poor behavior. The nice thing about BBS conferences were they were all moderated. And the ones I was part of required you to use your real name (as verified by the BBS sysop). They took it seriously - if a sysop was found not to be compliant, his BBS was kicked out of the network for a period of time.

The only good thing about USENET was the tooling (news readers, etc). Otherwise, both early web forums and BBS's had it beat.

Spam fell off drastically after Google Groups disconnected from Usenet a couple of years ago.

Binaries killed Usenet, not spam.

Little bit of both. From my own anecdata, most people I knew left usenet due to spam problems. Most of the people who did not were primarily the ones using it for binaries. And then yes, the binary angle started the trend where ISPs stopped offering it altogether, which even further reduced the likelihood that people would use it.

And then there were weirdos (sickos?) such as myself who hung on for an absurd amount of time and never once used it for binaries

I had to selectively stop carrying parts of USENET (I ran what was briefly a fairly important node globally) because of the volume of the binaries, and various sex and bestiality groups (probably still including some badly-scanned ASCII-rendered images!

Each version up thru Win8 had a style guide. If you wanted the windows sticker on your box you made it consistent. Why would you want that sticker? If you did not have it it was much harder to get floor space at many of the big box stores.

It was at win8 where everyone just noped out and just started doing whatever they wanted. XP/2000 was the last era where anyone really cared.

MS has done this for years. The have had several overall brands. Visual, live, .net, direct, Active, X, etc etc etc. They will even sometimes have a couple in flight at the same time. Right now now it seems to be copilot and m365. I probably even forgot a couple.

Arguably it's even worse when they try to give "unique" names to similar-in-spirit products.

I will never forgive them for all the hair pulling I had to do to try differentiating between Team Foundation Version Control, Team Foundation Server, Team Foundation Services, Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Online, Azure DevOps Server, and Azure DevOps Services.

I have long suspected that Microsoft product branding and naming has more to do with their intended sales and contract structure than actually being informative with respect to what the product does.

It will be exactly that. But that is a 'them' problem. I can look at it a go 'that looks like a bad idea' but they are the ones who have to live with it.

At some point someone will probably take their LLM code and repoint it at the LLM and say 'hey lets refactor this so it uses less code is easier to read but does the same thing' and let it chrun.

One project I worked on I saw one engineer delete 20k lines of code one day. He replaced it with a few lines of stored procedure. That 20k lines of code was in production for years. No one wanted to do anything with it but it was a crucial part of the way the thing worked. It just takes someone going 'hey this isnt right' and sit down and fix it.

> But that is a 'them' problem. I

When a TUI requires 68 GB of RAM to run, or when they spend a week not being able to find a bug that causes multiple people to immediately run out of tokens, it's not a "them" problem.

My wife plays 'dont starve' like mad (well into 4k hours). She has never step foot in the underworld. Building huge structures on the main area. So I figured I would show her terraria and minecraft. No interest at all. She voraciously played any point and click adventure game she could. That included many hidden object games (good and terrible). There is one Sudoku game she has also several thousand hours into. The match 3 games were amusing to her for a few weeks and she gave up on them. FPS and factory sims are out for her ('they look boring'). So what sticks and doesn't is all over the place.

I guess it's like me and movies. I like sci-fi, but that's not enough for me to like a movie. I don't typically watch dramas, but if it's got enough other interesting things going for it, I can enjoy a drama film.

I really like certain directors, but not everything they make.

I know there are some that can enjoy something based on a single aspect alone, but I imagine most are like me. Then again, it's possible I'm the weird one.

What about Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress?

Don't Starve has a certain point-and-clickiness about it. There's one player character and a lot of noticing objects of interest and clicking to pick them up. That's probably important.

If I had to guess, I would say no. Also if I had to guess she would say Rimworld is 'too scifi' and Dwarf Fortress would be wildly too much management for what she wants. I showed her Oxygen Not Included. It was too sci fi even though she liked the graphics. I can usually spot games she would like, with an occasional miss. Those two would be surprising if she did. I can usually pick out the ones she would not like. There is even a bugged out game 'tale of a pale swordsman' that she used to play all the time. But I think she has grown tired of that one. As it is bugged out on the ending.

Me on the other hand 'yeah I forgot about those two and need to check them out'. My back catalog is quite deep at the moment so I am trying not to buy anything until I play what I got.

That is the thing about suggesting games to someone. It is tough to do. Even though you wildly like the game others do not.