Saying “everyone” played those two titles is still incorrect. Personally I think the landscape was more fragmented then.

Absolutely is fragmented. Even though I own a Wii I've never played Zelda or any Mario games, and I don't think I know anyone who owns a modern Nintendo. We all live in bubbles. And we change bubbles occasionally; I no longer play Fifa or CoD mostly because of the kernel anti-cheat. I got bored of CSGO. I play less gory games now because of family. We play less Lego games because we grow up.

From UI perspective you are right, but not for APIs.

The APIs definitly used to be open enough that you could hit a "Generate token", hit one endpoint with cURL and then receive a firehose of all public tweets from that moment on, no reviews or validation at all, all you needed was an account + token.

I think this is a huge reason for the initial popularity, because it was trivial to build really fun experiences on top of that, until they cut it off for whatever reason (guessing money, one way or another).

At the same time, you could also view tweets without being logged in, and you saw replies too.

> and then receive a firehose of all public tweets from that moment on

The complete firehose was expensive and paid-only.

You could get a sampling of Tweets at a lower rate through the API. It wasn’t the complete firehose, though.

That sample was complete though as long as there wasn't too many tweets. I.e, as long as your query was specific enough, you _did_ get all tweets.

My Windows 10 updates had been failing for the past 6 months. When shutting down my PC I'd get the notification to "update and shut down", but the update would routinely fail. I thought the outstanding updates were the reason I wasn't given an option to update in place to Windows 11, but that was actually because my i7 7700k isn't officially supported. I ended up needing to create a Windows 11 iso that doesn't enforce hardware requirements with Rufus [0]. I was building a new gaming rig in tandem, so I reformatted the lone remaining SSD on the machine and left the new windows install unactivated as I plan to give it to a neighbor or family friend who can be tasked with buying a copy of windows. But this means I was left without any free Windows 10 -> 11 upgrade and had to buy a new license for the new rig. I didn't try to do anything other than browse the internet on the unsupported hardware, but things seem fine.

So far Windows 11 on the new rig has been very smooth/stable and I can't think of any issues I've had after 2 weeks of gaming and other typical use. But the amount of internet-driven widgets that ultimately are a medium for ads is frustrating.

[0] https://github.com/pbatard/rufus

I remember there is an obscure setting in the registry to disable the automatic upgrade on shutdown. (I had not used it in a long time, so I forgot the details.)

W10 IoT LTSC doesn't have this issue.

Buying a Windows license in 2025 is kinda crazy

Is local not infeasible for models of useful size (at least on a typical dev machine with <= 64GB RAM and a single GPU)

I want to say Mark Zuckerberg but I think Meta's investment is also targeted at creating their own social media content

I think you may have been under a rock for the last 5-10 years

Far more than that, so tell me, are my association of Russia and United-States to imperialist behaviors actually outdated, or are some cultural traits unfortunately still persisting through time?

Well, what query engine do you use?

We use normal RDB tool like DBeaver against Trino JDBC and it works fine.

That's the "urban" part.

Vite and an express server