gxqoz (u/gxqoz) - Readit News

gxqoz commented on Happy Public Domain Day 2026 publicdomainreview.org/bl... · Posted by u/apetresc

gxqoz · 2 months ago

I've always been curious about what it means for a movie to enter the public domain. A few years ago I sent a mail to Planet Money in what I thought would be an interesting hook but never got a response:

"Hi Planet Money, today is public domain day. I see that Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis is now in the "public domain." I was curious what that meant at a practical level for a German language silent film.

If Planet Money Movies wanted to release their own version of Metropolis, how would they do it? Can you just go to Amazon, buy the Blu Ray, and somehow release your own? What about the anti-piracy measures on the Blu Ray? What about the work that Transit Film did in restoring the film from the original negative? Does that count as some sort of newly original work? It's a silent film and a foreign film. How does the soundtrack and translation work?

If you have to make a new copy from the original reels, what if someone is hoarding them? Does that mean you could buy all the copies and prevent someone from releasing a public domain version?"

gxqoz commented on Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot support.mozilla.org/en-US... · Posted by u/phantomathkg

bayindirh · 10 months ago

I have another theory, actually.

I'm also a very old user, since the first days of the service, and I don't know how many saves I have it inside (will see when my export arrives).

The latest iteration's search was abysmal, and I normally refrain from using strong words. It failed to find exact matches from titles, the words or excerpts I know that exist in the article I'm searching for, and as a result, it became a FIFO basically. Unless you consume the list directly, hitting something you are looking for was nigh impossible.

After being berated by support to use the search "properly", I started to build my own app, a TUI tool to curate the list, but it was going slow. Honestly, I'm a bit relieved now since I'm free from developing that software, and I can dig the data in my own terms.

BTW, my export is just arrived, and it's a series of CSV files which has the usual suspects as columns. I can import this into a SQLite and dive the way I want.

One less thing to worry about, but this doesn't mean I'm not bitter about its demise, too.

Edit: It turns out I have ~37K saves. Whoa.

gxqoz · 10 months ago

Yeah I have 32k saves and hit the same problems with search being extremely unreliable. About 5 years ago quotes stopped working in search. Trying to find "The Grapes of Wrath" would return all instances of "of" and "the." You could sort of hack it by searching for the most distinct word (maybe "Grapes") if you already knew exactly what you were searching for. I long suspected there was some architectural change they made on the backend that broke this and they didn't want to admit in support articles. Perhaps the Mozilla legal department determined that having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk and they moved to just having the URL and maybe the title (this would also explain why "permanent copies" disappeared).

Anyway, as the 32k articles indicate, I was a power user of Pocket so part of me is sad it's going away. But they've really been checked out since maybe 2019 with regards to any real support for this product.

gxqoz commented on Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot support.mozilla.org/en-US... · Posted by u/phantomathkg

testfrequency · 10 months ago

Super bummed about this.

I know a surprising number of high profile CEOs and founders who live by Pocket, really has just been quietly reliable and simple way to reserve content for later.

Despite there being so many other $apps that can fill the gap here, none of them seem to be as clean and straightforward as Pocket has been for me.

Anyone here paying for Matter or Readwise? I know Instapaper may seem to be the obvious migration path, but since my landlord is kicking me out, maybe it’s time I move to a more robust solution.

gxqoz · 10 months ago

I tried Matter but it lacked Android support at the time so didn't go deep into it. I've been a heavy Readwise user for the last two years or so. It's better than Pocket in almost every way, although as I've moved into the 99.9th percentile of archive size I'm seeing some annoying perf issues they'll hopefully fix. At least they have a Discord and are making actual updates to the app, something that Pocket stopped doing probably five years ago.

gxqoz commented on Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot support.mozilla.org/en-US... · Posted by u/phantomathkg

uxcolumbo · 10 months ago

They should at least allow to download their copy of the saved articles, PDF or HTML or whatever format they save it in.

This is such a betrayal. Some old links might not exist anymore, so it's useless to only get the links.

EDIT: Betrayal, because the main reason I paid for Pocket was the archiving of articles and now I can't actually export the archived copies.

Their decision of not enabling export of the archived copies now makes it very unlikely that I'll ever pay for any of their paid services in the future.

A shame really because I like supporting Firefox as a browser.

gxqoz · 10 months ago

I think doing this would expose how poorly they've actually saved their copies of articles. Pocket has always had a very funny definition of "permanent copy" which doesn't mean what you think it does! I'm a little saddened by their demise but the service has been so terrible for so long that I've long since moved to the much superior Readwise.

gxqoz commented on Sega Saturn Architecture – A practical analysis (2021) copetti.org/writings/cons... · Posted by u/StefanBatory

nolok · 2 years ago

The article describe it as if the design was surprising with how many chips there were etc, but it's important to understand the context : complete lack of synergy and "fight for dominance" between the Japan and USA team, SEGA JP was making a 2D console, SEGA US was making a 3D console, the JP team was about to win that fight and then the PSX appeared so they, essentially, merged the two together.

You end up with a 2D console with parts and bits of an unfinished 3D console inside it. It makes no sense.

For a tech enthousiast and someone who loves reading dev postmortem, it's glorious. For someone who likes a clean design, it's irksome to no ends. For mass gamers of that era, where the big thing was "arcade in your living room" it's a disapointement, and SEGA not knowing which side to focus on didn't help at all.

The wikipedia article has a lot more details [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Saturn

gxqoz · 2 years ago

The latest episode of the excellent video game history podcast They Create Worlds (https://www.theycreateworlds.com/listen) does a good job debunking some of these myths.

gxqoz commented on Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI techcrunch.com/2024/02/13... · Posted by u/awkwardpotato

NoboruWataya · 2 years ago

An org like Mozilla making a real effort to bring open, privacy-focused AI to Firefox is interesting for sure. But I hope they don't get too distracted by the AI hype train.

Interesting that they are still as focused as ever on Pocket.

gxqoz · 2 years ago

I'm actually shocked that even before these layoffs there was anyone working on Pocket. I have not noticed a new feature in this product for maybe 3 years, with numerous things getting worse. How big is the team? What are they doing all day?

gxqoz commented on Games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen (2022) nicole.express/2022/the-c... · Posted by u/RyanShook

livrem · 2 years ago

> The Atari 2600’s demise is generally blamed on a glut of low-quality cartridges, caused in part by the console’s openness to unlicensed games

Every history about video games mention how low-quality games killed Atari, but is that true or just something that walled-garden console makers made up? I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms. Home computers in the 1980's did well without trying to lock out bad games. The C64 survived many years even if you probably have to wade through over 100 really bad games for each good game on that platform. But the Atari 2600 somehow was destroyed because it was not sufficiently locked down?

gxqoz · 2 years ago

This podcast goes into a lot more detail than most of the replies here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-video-game-crash-4...

It's not just a glut of "bad games." There are a number of specific things big companies such as Atari did that made them more vulnerable to this crash than they otherwise would have been.

gxqoz commented on Mic Test mictests.com/... · Posted by u/nitinreddy88

rozenmd · 2 years ago

In case you're tempted to upgrade from your laptop's mic, consider almost any mic other than the Blue Yeti: https://dontbuyayeti.com/

gxqoz · 2 years ago

Eh, I think this is overstating the case for the typical user (Zoom or gaming rather than something like podcasting).

The sound quality is more than acceptable, even when placed relatively far away from the speaker, for Zoom meetings. It will be night and day compared to a laptop microphone or AirPods (although this is true even with cheaper USB headsets). Unlike the other recommended non-headset microphones, you don't need a special stand or to ensure you're very close to the microphone. In terms of aesthetics, you also don't have to have a large microphone in your face on camera. Sure, this is the norm on Twitch, but every time I've been on a Zoom call with someone with this setup it's always at least a little awkward.

I also find the speakers in a lot of USB headsets to be either not the best or uncomfortable. I use a separate output-only headset and a Yeti as my input and this works well enough for me.

I find the microphone to have one of the most convenient hardware mute buttons of similarly priced options. Of course, mics with more intelligent muting may reduce your need to mute so often, but I personally prefer to have 100% control over this and not rely on software. One of my biggest pet peeves about all teleconferencing software is they give you almost no feedback on your sound quality and what's coming through in the background. I'd rather control that than the software doing something wrong.

Big picture, though, is to use any form of external microphone and headset rather than laptops + speakers. Even a cheap $15 headset is going to be a much better experience for everyone else on the call. Better sound quality from you and less echo (yes, software tries to take care of this, but in practice I've found this highly unreliable on the other ends of Zoom, Teams, Discord, etc. calls).

gxqoz commented on The MP3mobile (1998) utter.chaos.org.uk/~altma... · Posted by u/anschwa

interestica · 2 years ago

Around the same time I got a portable CD player that could play CDs, MP3s, and VCDs. Video CDs were pretty rare in North America but it wasn't much of a feat to author them yourself. You'd typically need two discs to hold a full length movie (MPEG1), but it was kind of a perfect size for television episodes (especially when utilizing RW discs).

And playing them on a CRT tv (still the norm) was a huge improvement over broadcast quality. I think that led to a further interest in DVD-authoring and then Web/Media development.

gxqoz · 2 years ago

VCD is a very undercovered format. Any budding media scholars out there could make a good book out of the format.

It connects to an area I'm growing increasingly interested in, the early history of the Chinese Internet and tech industry. (VCD players sold in enormous numbers there.) See for instance this fascinating piece on the Chinese Flash gaming scene: https://www.chaoyangtrap.house/flashing-for-fun-and-no-profi...

gxqoz commented on The MP3mobile (1998) utter.chaos.org.uk/~altma... · Posted by u/anschwa

aidenn0 · 2 years ago

5 years later I bought a car that, from the dealer, could play MP3s burned on CDs. The shuffle mode was terrible though; if you had enough songs, it would loop the order and not play every individual track.

gxqoz · 2 years ago

My car still has an amusing WMA logo above the CD player to advertise its support for playing CDs with WMAs burned to them. Never actually used that functionality though.