dicriseg (u/dicriseg)

dicriseg commented on Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout? · Posted by u/thyrox

thaumaturgy · 2 years ago

The end result was a stalemate. Reddit did not change any of its policies. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it.

Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.:

https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews

https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive

https://subredditstats.com/r/videos

All of the most popular subreddits show a steady decline from 2019 to present, with a sharp drop in July 2023. Once this happens to a platform, it's rare for the platform to ever get those users back at scale. It's safe money that Reddit will now be a zombie platform, a la Slashdot -- still up and running with some users, but with flat or declining activity forever.

dicriseg · 2 years ago

I don’t go there more than once a week anymore because there isn’t a good mobile app. I previously doomscrolled Reddit for a couple of hours each day. It’s been great for me!

dicriseg commented on OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns wired.com/story/openai-st... · Posted by u/skilled

toomuchtodo · 2 years ago

"Cluster is at capacity. Workload will be scheduled as capacity permits." If the credits are considered an asset, totally possible to devalue them while staying within the bounds of the contractual agreement. Failing that, wait until OpenAI exhausts their cash reserves for them to challenge in court.

dicriseg · 2 years ago

Ah, a fellow frequent flyer, I see? I don't really have a horse in this race, but Microsoft turning Azure credits into Skymiles would really be something. I wonder if they can do that, or if the credits are just credits, which presumably can be used for something with an SLA. All that said, if Microsoft wants to screw with them, they sure can, and the last 30 years have proven they're pretty good at that.

dicriseg commented on Should I replace my 56k modem with a 28.8K Modem? (2001) forums.anandtech.com/thre... · Posted by u/edent

axpvms · 2 years ago

I was also doing dialup internet support around that time. Talking a senior citizen through setting up a dial up networking connection on Windows 95/98 using a winmodem on a line which was obviously noisy with no way to see what was on their screen was pretty common.

I remember one time I'd gotten the connection established and they said "now what?", and I said "You've connected to the Internet" and they said "so what do I do now?" They'd gone out and bought the internet package because it was the thing to do, but had no idea what to do with it. I ended up showing them how to go to Google which had only just been released that month.

And I definitely relate to being adverse to hearing a ringing phone

dicriseg · 2 years ago

That is an amazing story. And you know that because of you, that person probably still calls their browser “the internet” because you showed them how to get to google.

I can’t imagine any old person calling tech support now and getting that kind of help. But think about how many people got their very first exposure to the internet just before you hung up the phone. Crazy.

dicriseg commented on Should I replace my 56k modem with a 28.8K Modem? (2001) forums.anandtech.com/thre... · Posted by u/edent

gr4yb34rd · 2 years ago

I remember stepping people thru reinstalling DUN so many times I could probably still do it in my sleep to this day.

dicriseg · 2 years ago

Click on start. Yeah that’s in the bottom left. Yup that one. Then look for settings. No the word settings. Has a little arrow next to it. Yeah hit that. It didn’t do anything? Wait, click with the mouse button on the left. Yeah it brought up a little menu to the right? That’s good. Now look for… ok let’s start over and remember not to click anywhere besides where I tell you to. And keep the mouse where it is. Ok find the start button again. No its in the bottom left of your screen…

dicriseg commented on Should I replace my 56k modem with a 28.8K Modem? (2001) forums.anandtech.com/thre... · Posted by u/edent

ryandrake · 2 years ago

I think a lot of the problem was how difficult it was for the average computer user to tell the difference between a real modem and a Winmodem. Some manufacturers deliberately failed to distinguish them in marketing, pretending they were both "modems". Retailers were in on the scam, too. The whole puddle got muddied to the point where a savvy consumer needed to keep a whitelist of "real modem" make and model numbers with them going to the store. You could usually tell by the price, though, as you say they were cheap (garbage).

dicriseg · 2 years ago

This is unlocking memories for me. I think we used to tell folks something like "If it's under $50 and Walmart sells it, that's a winmodem" or something like that.

In theory, one of the selling points was that as standards changed, you would just upgrade your drivers/software and not buy a new modem. That probably made a lot of sense if you bought a USR Winmodem, but those $20 unbranded models were lucky to ever see an update. If you were lucky, you had a reference model and could use the OEM drivers which did occasionally get updated. But by the time these things came about, V.90/V.92 existed, and dialup standards were kind of frozen in that 56k-if-you-were-lucky state. There wasn't anything to upgrade to - you got DSL if you wanted more bandwidth over POTS lines, or you went to cable.

Also I could be completely full of shit on the above. These are memories from 16-18 year old me.

dicriseg commented on Should I replace my 56k modem with a 28.8K Modem? (2001) forums.anandtech.com/thre... · Posted by u/edent

Scoundreller · 2 years ago

I suspect they enjoyed talking to me because I sounded like a young woman (in a ~12 year old boy's body).

It was a no-name 486 DX2 66MHz from "Consumer's Distributing" (defunct soviet-style Canadian retailer), and a cheap model at that. 8250 was probably a cost-cutting measure they felt like they could get away with.

Most people probably bought internal modems so these UART issues wouldn't pop up. But we had bad experiences with IRQ conflicts locking up the mouse on a previous computer. Not an issue with Lynx/Pine/etc, but we wanted GUI and Netscape, so we were trying to avoid that. Unsure if our go-external plan made sense or not (does an internal hardware modem run its own UART or communicate over ISA to the board's serial port?).

It was a lot of calls, so I dutifully reinstalled the drivers and tried a lot of dialer strings.

dicriseg · 2 years ago

> Unsure if our go-external plan made sense or not (does an internal hardware modem run its own UART or communicate over ISA to the board's serial port?).

Internal hardware modems had their own UART. A lot of them had DIP switches or jumpers where you'd set the IRQ and COM port. You needed to set them to a free IRQ/COM pair.

This will take you back in time: https://support.usr.com/support/5685/5685-files/spvc336.pdf

dicriseg commented on Should I replace my 56k modem with a 28.8K Modem? (2001) forums.anandtech.com/thre... · Posted by u/edent

dayjah · 2 years ago

I worked at a non-AOL ISP as tech support back in the day and still have the occasional flashback to having to talk folks through uninstalling the custom TCP/IP stack the “Try AOL” CDs would install.

dicriseg · 2 years ago

There needs to be a special kind of therapist for people like us.

dicriseg commented on Should I replace my 56k modem with a 28.8K Modem? (2001) forums.anandtech.com/thre... · Posted by u/edent

Scoundreller · 2 years ago

Took maaaaaaany hours to for tech support to figure out why my $$$ 33.6k external modem worked sloooooooow. Often took them a lot of convincing that it was actually slow, a lot of early internet users had higher expectations, but I was coming from 2400bps service. Bazillions of failed packets reported in Windows Dial Up Networking.

Finally found the person that figured it out. Computer only had an 8250 UART for the serial port. $35 ISA serial port card with 16550A UART solved it!

dicriseg · 2 years ago

This was definitely when tech support could still be fun. We didn't have tiers or scripts or anything, just a handful of people on shift answering calls. You kind of loved when you got one like this when the customer calling in also had a good attitude about it. Probably because you knew the call was going to eat up at least a quarter of your shift, and you got to think a little. It sure beat the 10th time that day you were walking someone through uninstalling and reinstalling TCP/IP on Win95/98/ME.

All these years later I really do still have anxiety when the phone rings, though. I have an irrational fear of picking up even when it's, like, my dad, or picking up the phone and having to call a business to ask a question or something.

Do you happen to remember what sort of system you had that still had an 8250 but extended into the >14.4kbps era? Was this just a super old machine in the mid 1990's, or something in the 486+ range and the motherboard manufacturer had a lot of late 80's chip stock?

dicriseg commented on Should I replace my 56k modem with a 28.8K Modem? (2001) forums.anandtech.com/thre... · Posted by u/edent

ryandrake · 2 years ago

I also briefly worked in Student IT support junior year of my university and "Winmodem" sent similar chills down my spine. An idea that never should have happened!

You can boil a lot of tech changes down to either A: Let's take this problem that has been solved in hardware and move it to software! and B: Let's take this problem that has been implemented in software and bake it into hardware.

Somehow, A is always a train wreck, and B usually pushes the abstraction stack upward and moves the industry forward. Yet, we as an industry keep trying A and expecting good results.

dicriseg · 2 years ago

Yeah, in the case of winmodems/softmodems, it was because A is cheaper. Or, at least, you could externalize the costs.

In our case, we technically did not support your hardware - you had to show up with a working modem. But in practice, if you want to retain your customers, you need to support their hardware. At one point we used to have CDs full of known good drivers for all of the common softmodems that we'd send out if we couldn't figure out a configuration workaround. Even then, I had a handful of discussions with folks where I basically told them that their thing wasn't going to work - they either needed a different modem, of which we'd recommend a few that we knew some stores carried, or they needed to find a way to cut down their line noise. I'm one of those types that takes it a little bit personally when I spend a bunch of time on something and still can't solve it, so that always sucked. Maybe you could say that wasn't strictly the modem's fault, but even the cheapest hardware modems had better tolerance for line noise.

dicriseg commented on Should I replace my 56k modem with a 28.8K Modem? (2001) forums.anandtech.com/thre... · Posted by u/edent

ksherlock · 2 years ago

For those that don't remember, a winmodem (aka softmodem) was smaller and cheaper because the modulation / demodulation was handled in software with host CPU and RAM. Using an external modem would free up CPU and RAM since it's handled in hardware.

dicriseg · 2 years ago

I was doing dialup internet support when these things hit the market. What a fucking mess. It’s 25 years later and I still get anxious when the phone rings, because my brain thinks it might be a senior citizen who can’t connect after they got a good deal on a new computer. Sometimes we could get them back on line with an init string, but often they needed new drivers. Walking someone through either of those over the phone was brutal.

Getting online as easily as we do today is nothing I will ever take for granted!