As someone who has designed and used telemetry systems, I’ll never quite understand the strong aversion some people have to them. Telemetry is what lets me tell my boss “yes people really do use our software this way and we can’t break it” or “90% of crashes happen right after the player uses a grenade”. And despite what some conspiracy theorists would have you believe, telemetry data for software from reputable companies does not get sold or used for marketing purposes. Our lawyers make sure of it, and also make us go through privacy reviews to make sure that data isn’t leaking PII.

a game I made in 1995

a game someone else made in 1995 which was later hostilely acquired by EA only to see it immediately fire all staff and shutter the studio

FTFY

Veritasium has really gone down hill. I honestly think it started when he did the video on “clickbait” and actually realized how much more lucrative it was to make shittier clickbaity content than make straightforward science content.

It went from “here’s why magnetism is just electric field + relativity” to “I buried myself in cement - you won’t believe what happens!”

“Backwards compatibility” is a totally different thing from “cross compatibility”. Of course proprietary software is going to be less cross-compatible.

Figure 1: Human discovers that hosting a web service for hundreds of thousands of users is expensive.