So happy to see that the comments so far are just Burning Man hate. I appreciate SomaFM's impact on my appreciation for electronic music and alternative music streaming services back in the '90s, but outside of that I'm pretty sure it's mostly been a net negative from a cultural standpoint in total.
I have the DroneZone playing on a dedicated SomaFM web radio in my living room right now. This makes up for a lot of negatives in the world. As a genuine question are the specific net negatives of Burningman? (The classic burner who is better than you because he goes to burning man sucks and all but I'm pretty sure that guy would suck just as much if he made his whole personality about anything else).
I can't see the dystopian music of John Foxx's Ultravox! (or Gary Numan for that matter) without seeing it through the Ballard/Crash Zeitgeist of the "New Romantics".
(Although I see now that "Crash" was published first in 1973—wow.)
I used to maintain a project called LikeBuster back when Facebook started polluting your news feed with people's likes in. It was a lesson in how brittle DOM-based filtering was. Makes me miss times when a few well-placed CSS selectors could drastically improve your web experience.
Per Cory Doctorow, this is exactly why every website is trying to push you to their app -- so that they have legal grounds to prosecute anyone who tries to find workarounds to the constant enshittification.
Myst was really interesting when it first came out, but games like that are woefully out of date in a world where most games are immersive, and where players are accustomed to onboarding systems like tutorial levels to help prevent frustration and focus on story and enjoyment. I also just really don't think that in this world's collective attention span, nobody wants to play a game where you have to traverse the entire map a bunch of times to solve a puzzle by trial and error.
I've done this before as a free replacement for my OpenClaw bot. It loses its connection sometimes and you need to redo the handoff with your phone. But otherwise, nice to have a use for my old Mac. It's also running my Home Bridge, which Claude can interact with. Pretty cool.
The bullshittery is the thing that will not survive enshittification. I keep telling people that all the tokens we're blowing are going to explode in cost as soon as these companies run out of other people's money. To me, this means being laser-focused on your core competencies and only "farming out" stuff to AI that you would offload to a vendor. We're all familiar with the level of risk there, and the kind of encapsulation you need to swap something out if a vendor fails you.
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