HDDVDs weren’t rejected by the masses they were a casualty in Sony’s vendetta against the loss of Beta and DAT. Both of which were rejected by industry not consumers (though both were later embraced by industry and Betas even outlasted VHSs). They would have won out for the same reasons that Sony lost the previous format wars (insistence on licensing fees) except this time Sony bought out Columbia and had a whole library of video and a studio to make new movies to exclusively release on their format. Essentially the supply side pushing something until consumers accepted it, though to your point not quite as bad as AI is right now.

8-Tracks and laserdiscs were just replaced by better formats (Compact Cassette and Video CD/DVD respectively). Each of them were also replacements for previous formats like Reel to Reel and CEDs.

UMDs only don’t exist still because flash media got better and because Sony opted to use a cheaper scratch resistant coating instead of a built in case for later formats (like Blu-ray). Also, UMDs themselves were a replacement for or at least inspired by an earlier format called MiniDisc.

Capitalism’s biggest feat has been convincing people that everything is the next big thing and nothing that has come before is similar when just about everything is just a rinse and repeat, even LLMs… remember when Watson beat Ken Jennings?

Anybody can download Windows images too. That doesn’t mean the OS is free.

Sega even had an earlier console in 1983 called the SG-1000. It was only released in Japan though.

I mean… Corel still looks the same too…

Would you prefer something Microsoft has cooked up recently?

My point was that it didn’t give way immediately to electricity as the person I was replying to said. Even if you go from the first commercial steam engine it was still ~250 years before magnetos were regularly being hooked up to steam engines for small electrical applications.

I wouldn’t go quite that far but yeah, in my view there have only been a handful of main paradigm shifting changes; Language, fire, tools, husbandry, agriculture, metallurgy, electricity.

The primary separation between humans and pretty much everything else on earth is the passing of knowledge from generation to generation so if I had to pick the innovation I would probably pick language.

I’m not sure if we are talking past each other this point or what, but take the Internet since you mentioned it;

Let’s compare to transistors for instance. You could have (and did have) the internet without transistors and you could have transistors without the internet. Nobody would argue that either are not massively impactful inventions but neither would exist without electricity. Electricity is the paradigm shifting breakthrough. In the same way neither cannons nor guns were the breakthrough themselves.

…but the pace of iterations seems to be slowing down.

I thought that was the whole conversation we were having. My main point was not only that innovation is slowing down but that we should expect it to slow based on the trajectory of previous paradigm shifting breakthroughs.

… all building on what came before.

That was my point though. Metallurgy gave way to cannons and guns but we don’t have a “cannons and guns” age. Everything is iterative but occasionally we have something come along that changes everything and starts the iterations anew. But that has never continued after, just been followed by more iteration.

Also, it took over 1000 years to get from the first steam experiments to a useful engine.

Isn’t it though? Each age has had its technological advance that defines that age. But at no time did the next age come immediately. It was always reasonable to assume that after electricity there would be yet another lull before the next paradigm shifting innovation. It seems to me that the great lie of capitalism has been convincing people that every new product is that next great innovation.

Why would they use PWM to drive an LED in a DC circuit when they could just drop the voltage to make it dimmer?

How is paying somebody else to read the manual going to help you operate the cruise control while going down the interstate at 85MPH?

Technical writing was a required class in my CS program. Is that not the norm?

I got downvoted into oblivion a few weeks ago for suggesting something similar about car manuals. I’m glad to see that the sentiment isn’t totally lost. I honestly don’t get why people don’t read the fucking manual.

Indeed, the models I have seen have a very short battery life, or check in infrequently, or only check in when movement is detected, or use cell signal triangulation to save battery, etc.

I’ve seen some pretty small GPS trackers with cell modems, I wouldn’t be surprised if these were that instead depending on the price.

Yeah but luckily by the mid 80s it was completely digitized and just there in the basement for reference.

That would be Cold Welding.

You are talking about the difference between a website and a web application. Nothing is broken. Given that the alternative used the be Flash/Coldfusion I’m not sure this way is worse.

Not necessarily, lots of old TVs and console radios only had one speaker. As well many old LPs split the lyrics onto the separate channel with the intention that it would be listened to in mono with one speaker. This is why some old masters still have all the lyrics on one channel and all the music on the other.