Snark took off around the same time the web did because it solves a specific problem of the attention economy: how do you signal intelligence, distance, and in-group membership in as few characters as possible. Earnestness is expensive, it takes context and charity, but a snarky aside is cheap and instantly legible to your tribe. Once media, then social media, got rewarded for engagement over accuracy, snark became a kind of default compression algorithm for opinion: less argument, more vibe. The irony is that the word itself has this long, meandering, almost quaint history, while its modern use is basically an optimization for ad-driven feeds and quote-tweet culture. We didn’t just get more “snarky” because we got more cynical, we got more snarky because the systems that surface speech pay better for sharp edges than for careful thought.
"Snark is often conflated with cynicism, which is a troublesome misreading. Snark may speak in cynical terms about a cynical world, but it is not cynicism itself. It is a theory of cynicism.
We used to own tools that made us productive. Now we rent tools that make someone else profitable. Subscriptions are not about recurring value but recurring billing and at some point every product decision starts bending toward dependence instead of ownership.
Back when subscriptions started to be a thing some people (myself included) were cautiously optimistic.
The problem with paid upfront and paid upgrades was that it eventually resulted in bloated programs because the only way to continue having a business was to add features.
Subscriptions, in theory, could leave the focus on user experience and fixing bugs, because in the end the people who are paying are those that like your product as it is now.
Now of course this optimism was misplaced. Subscriptions permitted to move as much of the logic as possible out into cloud.
> Subscriptions permitted to move as much of the logic as possible out into cloud.
Constant internet connection permitted that. Cloud is only a convenience: you don't have to install and update anything locally, it is updated centrally for everyone by knowledgeable admins instead of some users having problems locally and needing support for each upgrade.
I know this from experience, one company has a local desktop version of our product, but they complain that it requires work from administrator, because users can't upgrade their desktop clients automatically, so they want local-hosted webpage version. This is SCADA system for district heating.
Normal internet users don't want to deal with local-hosted own servers, they want to press a button and it should work. Cloud based systems make that a little more possible.
On a technical level yes. But unless you are selling expensive hardware widgets it can be hard to justify constant upkeep cost of servers without a recurring revenue.
That said I too lived through hosting on premises web services that we later pushed to cloud due to the hassle of maintenance. Self hosting is great when you have a dedicated team to keep it running.
So, I would argue that cloud necessitates subscriptions, not that subscriptions allowed everything to be in cloud. It's connected but in other direction.
For me it's more like "people used to make free tools so that nobody owns them, no everybody complains they don't come for free without effort". Think of gcc, linux, and many others. There was a huge effort invested in them by people that could sell their knowledge and choose to share it.
We can build today complete products with nothing paid on the tools. This was NOT the case 30 years ago.
Interesting point about the ESP32 and music playback! I've been tinkering with similar projects, and it’s wild how much potential these little devices have. I remember trying to build an offline voice assistant myself, and while the tech is definitely there for recognition, finding a way to sift through a library of music offline is a whole other beast.
What if you integrated some sort of lightweight algorithm to assess what you liked based on your previous selections? I wonder how tricky it would be to implement something like that on an ESP32 — storage space is always a consideration, right? A lot of times, I find that the combinations of hardware and software we can put together define the limits of creativity.
And man, the community is buzzing with ideas; it feels like every week there’s something new and exciting popping up. I can't help but imagine what's next! Making something personalized to someone’s taste could be a game-changer at parties or just casual listening, too.
Interesting point about the color analysis! It kinda reminds me of how album art used to be such a significant part of music culture. I’ve noticed that with videos, especially on platforms like YouTube, the visual style can really draw you in or turn you off immediately. It’s wild how much emotion can come from a simple palette choice or color scheme.
Back when I was tinkering with some video editing, I became really fascinated by how specific colors can evoke specific feelings. After messing around with different filters and palettes, I realized it’s a whole language in itself. Wonder if this tool could track viewer engagement based on those color schemes? I mean, does a certain color set get more clicks or shares? Could be fun to see the data on that! And there’s always the ethical side—using someone’s video for this without their consent could lead to some interesting discussions in the community. Anyone else tried something similar?
Interesting point about Cranelift! I've been following its development for a while, and it seems like there's always something new popping up. That connection with e-graphs adds a neat layer of complexity—it’s kinda wild to think about how optimization strategies can vary so much yet still be rooted in similar ideas.
I wonder if there's a place for copy-and-patch within Cranelift at some level, maybe for specific sequences or operations? I had a similar experience trying to streamline some code generation tasks and found that even small optimizations could lead to surprisingly big performance gains.
I think it's cool how different teams tackle the same challenges from different angles—like how CPython's JIT works, for instance. It really makes you appreciate the depth of creativity in the community. Do you think there are other JITs out there that are using these techniques in ways we haven’t seen yet? Or maybe there are trade-offs between speed and optimization that some projects have to weigh heavier than others?
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