…week of Feb 8, 2021
Welcome to my weekly letter! This week we are sending off something old and potentially seeing something new 🙂 Without further ado…
Weekly Read
- ‘Nox Archaist’ Is the Newest RPG for the Apple II (vice.com) – Think the Apple II and 8-bit graphics RPGs are gone? Think again! Here is a brand new game with NPC cameos featuring legends such as Richard Garriott (he’s the creator, and THE Lord British, of the Ultima series) and Steve Wozniak!
- A Farewell to Adobe Flash—and the Messy, Glorious Web (Wired) – yes, Flash that powered everything from funny cartoons (in retrospect, it’s like the Tiktok/memes except 20 years earlier) to transportation, is finally dead. Except…
- The Internet Archive is now preserving Flash games and animations (TheVerge.com) – Flash is dead, long live Flash! The wayback machine of our time, Internet archive, is on a mission to develop a safe replacement to preserve all the goodies.
- GitHub CEO: We’re nuking all tracking ‘cookies’ and you should too (fortune.com) – 3rd party [tracking] cookies is going away soon too. This serves as a good reminder for anybody who hosts a site or service to do the same.
- Chrome’s Cookie Update Is Bad for Advertisers but Good for Google (Wired) – one way or another, the ads company like Google and Facebook will need to figure out people’s usage patterns and preferences in order to effectively connect the dots between the advertisers and their targeted audience. If it’s not tracking cookies, then what? This article alarms us with some potential issues in the ‘post-tracking-cookie’ era.
Thoughts
30 years ago, the world welcomed PCs into people’s homes, Apple II and x86 architectures provided us with the playground to start building, as well as consuming digital content.
20 years ago, the world welcomed the transition from AOL/dial-up to broadband. The Internet became a shiny new world delivered mostly through Flash (including Youtube!) – people, now better connected than ever, were creating even more things, from websites, to Youtube videos, to vector-based Flash animations, to social media platforms.
10 years ago, the world realized we are all in a cookie jar. Because Cookie is what established our online identities, it is how the ads company figured out who we are, and what we do, and what we may want to see and buy. Cookies carried the whole internet through this era of e-commerce, and then extended into SaaS products that further allowing individuals and workforce to become even more efficient, and build more cool things. (It also got us into the era of hyper attention/engagement economy, thus necessitating mass scaling architectures enabling ML and AI.)
What would be the legacy of this decade? PaaS and IaaS? Autonomous vehicles? Environment-friendly energy source? 5G’s making things even faster, and helping narrow the digital divide across all people? or just… Dogecoin? One can guess that we will extend the development of ML and AI and apply via widely deployed 5G infrastructure, speeding up human’s technical advancement across various areas: from vaccine development, to autonomous driving, to saving the planet as well as finding another habitable one.
To another 10 years of adventure, where we “boldly go where no one has gone before!”
Stay Tuned…
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