This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

I wonder if it works like IRC. The “plague” this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you’re kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.

Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there’s never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.

Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there’s always going to be a server, even if it’s not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it’s “free” but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There’s always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn’t really need it.

The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user’s machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven’t used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn’t changed, then it also doesn’t support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.

Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they’re pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn’t viable. I don’t know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.

But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It’s not a web app, it doesn’t live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there’s no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.

Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there’s that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else’s unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.

We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that’s what Matrix is.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it’s normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the “business casual” version of Discord. This doesn’t seem to be true, but that’s how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.

I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack’s name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you’re fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.

• If the charging infrastructure is as universal and as reliable as gas stations, so whenever the landlords want to make sure all the parking stalls have at least Level 1 charging

• What about better public transport, I’m ready to stop putting money into an “asset” that depreciates at $300 per month, while the debt jacks up interest fuck me the depreciation on a car makes the interest look like a reasonable tip to your server

• And yeah, twice, the batteries should be swappable, they can be semi-permanent but assume a 2-year replacement time with a standardized installation, fuck paying $45,000 for a really fast cellphone that stops working when the battery does and replacing the battery means ripping the glue apart and the car is never right again. They have to be AT LEAST as swappable as engines.

The thing is that there are a ton of people who’ve built honest careers on Youtube, mostly by catering to an adult niche. There is a near zero chance that I will suddenly find out that Torque Test Channel have, like, dark problems with kids. These people don’t have scandals. Maybe somebody takes an iffy ad dollar that’s a conflict of interest or something. The end.

But those are things your dad watches, they get a solid 100k views per average per upload and we both know that number is nothing on YouTube.

No, if you want to see serious numbers on YouTube and keep your average views above 1 mil per upload, you need children. You need 12-year-old eyeballs, ones that aren’t supposed to be watching you because you’re for older kids, the forbidden fruit.

If you want tween eyeballs, you need a shrieking fucking weirdo. You need a grown man who will act like the sort of 12-year-old boy that your 12-year-old boy would act like if he had power and people couldn’t tell him to calm the fuck down. They’ll be glued to that fuckin guy. Views and views for days while they live their fantasy of a world where mom can’t tell them no, and they can have stunning emotional fits about video games until they exhaust themselves.

Nothing else will do, is the problem. He can’t really be faking it, either, that’s just annoying, no, there’s got to be something wrong with him that children love to watch.

And so, over and over and over again, it turns out that the exhausting, obnoxious man who you loved as a child is fucked up, for real, once the years wear on, and you finally become an adult yourself, but this kook has had far too long to stew in his weird power trip, probably isolated from adult company because fuck being that guy’s entourage. He’s got too much money, so he can make stuff happen. He’s got no oversight. Even Jimmy Seville had to hide it from the help most of the time. This guy’s in a house alone to do as he pleases.

It’s a bad recipe, and it bakes shitty cakes.

Every once in a while the cube of fate rolls funny, and you get Jerma, who should be one of these guys but instead his audience appears to be grown transwomen and their friends, all of them deranged, poisoned by years on 4Chan and Tumblr, with Jerma at their mercy, so whenever that situation goes sideways we can probably put Yackety Sax over the footage and actually enjoy it. That trainwreck should be a real treat.

That dead woman called Tumblr is still walking with a healthy strut these days, also soaking up some displaced Redditors. Horny shit is slowly but surely returning to Tumblr’s fields, as well.

Tumblr illustrates the problem with porn in general, they didn’t shut it down for no reason, they shut it down because the pedos had decided to use it as a dissemination portal for their vile shit, and the structure of Tumblr made it difficult to moderate away, especially at scale. Thus, Apple threatening to pull them from the app store, for good reason. All they could do was go scorched earth on porno.

So that’s the issue we’re going to have, here, and I’m not sure if the “some guy running an instance for the fuck of it” model is prepared for it.