Web Excursions 2022-01-17
How Tumblr Became Popular for Being Obsolete
Tumblr is something like an Atlantis of social networks.
Once prominent, innovative, and shining, on equal footing with any other social-media company,
it sank under the waves as it underwent several ownership transfers in the twenty-tens.
But it might be rising once more.
Tumblr’s very status as a relic of the Internet—easily forgotten, unobtrusively designed, more or less unchanged from a decade ago—
is making it appealing to prodigal users as well as new ones.
Tumblr’s C.E.O., Jeff D’Onofrio, told me recently that forty-eight per cent of its active users and sixty-one per cent of its new ones are Generation Z.
That’s the same demographic that Facebook and Instagram are concerned about losing.
The platform became known as a petri dish of Internet quirkiness, cultivating subcultures such as “bronies” (male fans of the cartoon “My Little Pony”) and “otherkin” (people who identify as non-human).
In 2013, when Tumblr had seventy-three million accounts, Yahoo acquired it for more than a billion dollars.
But, in 2016, the company did a writedown of seven hundred and twelve million dollars on the acquisition after Tumblr failed to grow advertising revenue.
When Verizon acquired Yahoo, in 2017, it bundled Yahoo and Tumblr under the parent company Oath.
Another blow came when Tumblr issued a blanket ban on adult content—something it had become known for—in December of 2018 and promptly lost thirty per cent of its traffic.
The next year, Automattic, the commercial arm of the content-management system WordPress, acquired the site for a reported three million dollars.
It was easy to assume that Tumblr was dead.
D’Onofrio’s tenure, by contrast, has been characterized by an unusual pursuit of preservation.
“We’re not telling people how to behave, not telling them what to do or how to comport themselves here,” he said.
It’s one of the few social networks where users can still publish entries that resemble blog posts.
Tumblr’s main feed doesn’t shuffle posts algorithmically based on what it determines might appeal to a user.
“It’s harder to be a brand” there, Karina Tipismana, a twenty-year-old student who uses the service primarily for its text-based jokes and “Succession” GIFs, said.
“It’s the periphery of the internet; nothing important is happening there.”
There aren’t influencers on Tumblr the way there are on Instagram and TikTok,
and the experience for all users might be more pleasant as a result.
According to Tumblr, revenue is up fifty-five per cent since July of 2021.
Yet the company currently sees only around eleven million posts a day;
Twitter, by comparison, is said to host five hundred million daily tweets.
The fact that it maintains a following should remind us that we use social-media services by choice; no platform or feature is an inevitability.
What does Safe Mode do to an M1 Mac?
In macOS Mojave, starting up in safe mode caused a full check of mounted volumes using
fsck
,which checks all snapshots too, so could result in extremely long startup times.
Apple stopped doing that in Catalina, and hasn’t reinstated it in Monterey either.
Apple’s current Help information [that keeps the obsolete description] is thus at best misleading.
The kernel extension manager
kernelmanagerd
behaves quite differently during safe boot.It doesn’t load any of the kernel extensions in the Auxiliary Kernel Collection (AKC)
It also manages some of the standard macOS kernel extensions differently, and some may not be loaded.
However, all those kernel extensions in the main Kernel Collection appear to be loaded normally.
While standard system
LaunchAgents
andLaunchDaemons
appear to be run as normal,third-party items seem to be blocked completely.
This also applies to user
StartupItems
.
Open Directory, as both root and user, reports that safe boot is enabled, and is likely to change its behaviour as a result.
Endpoint security similarly detects safe boot mode,
as does SecurityAgent
Most visible caches,
such as those used by Launch Services to list recent apps and documents,
are completely unaffected by safe boot.
The strangest behaviour of all isn’t in safe mode itself,
but what happens when you next restart your Mac to return to normal user mode.
For that restart, and that one alone, validation of the SSV appears to be skipped.
Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft Weave a Fiber-Optic Web of Power
In less than a decade, four tech giants— Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Meta (formerly Facebook ) and Amazon —
have become by far the dominant users of undersea-cable capacity.
Before 2012, the share of the world’s undersea fiber-optic capacity being used by those companies was less than 10%.
Today, that figure is about 66%.
In the next three years, they are on track to become primary financiers and owners
of the web of undersea internet cables
connecting the richest and most bandwidth-hungry countries
on the shores of both the Atlantic and the Pacific,
according to subsea cable analysis firm TeleGeography.
By 2024, the four are projected to collectively have an ownership stake in more than 30 long-distance undersea cables,
each up to thousands of miles long,
connecting every continent on the globe save Antarctica.
Combined, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon poured more than $90 billion into capital expenditures in 2020 alone.
Their entry into the undersea fiber-laying business was inspired by the growing cost of buying capacity on cables owned by others,
but is now driven by their own insatiable demand for ever more terabytes of bandwidth.
This has made profits razor-thin for traditional players in the cable-laying industry,
like NEC, ASN and SubCom, he adds.
By building their own cables, the tech giants are saving themselves money over time that they would have to pay other cable operators.
That means the tech companies don’t need to operate their cables at a profit for the investment to make financial sense.
Indeed, most of these Big Tech-funded cables are collaborations among rivals.
The Marea cable, which stretches approximately 4,100 miles between Virginia Beach in the U.S. and Bilbao, Spain, was completed in 2017 and is partly owned by Microsoft, Meta and Telxius, a subsidiary of Telefónica, the Spanish telecom.
In 2019, Telxius announced that Amazon had signed an agreement with the company to use one of the eight pairs of fiber optic strands in that cable.
In theory, that represents one eighth of its 200 terabits-per-second capacity—enough to stream millions of HD movies simultaneously.
Sharing cables with ostensible competitors—as Microsoft does with its Marea cable—
is key to making sure its cloud services are available almost all of the time,
something Microsoft and other cloud providers explicitly promise in their agreements with customers.
Reserving some capacity for telecom carriers like Telxius is also a way to keep regulators from getting the idea that these American tech companies are themselves telecoms
Tech companies have spent decades arguing in the press and in court that they are not “common carriers” like telcos—
if they were, it would expose them to thousands of pages of regulations particular to that status.
Google, alone among big tech companies,
is already the sole owner of three different undersea cables,
and that total is projected by TeleGeography to reach six by 2023.
Google has built and is building these solely owned-and-operated cables for two reasons.
the company needs them in order to make its own services, such as Google search and YouTube streaming, fast and responsive.
to gain an edge in the battle for customers for its cloud services.
I Wrote Task Manager and I Just Remembered Something...
I'm the Microsoft (Redmond, '93) developer that wrote TaskMgr
at home in my den in about 1994
and then the NT silverback devs let me check it into the main tree
even though I was a greenhorn at the time.
This is all based on XP, as I left long ago,
but it's still the same core app underneath
If Task Manager ever hangs or crashes, start another by pressing ctrl-shift-esc.
Winlogon will look for an existing instance and try to revive it for up to 10 seconds.
If the old Taskmgr doesn't start making sense by responding with a secret code within that time, another one will be launched.
Task Manager will load in reduced mode if resources are short,
like only loading the Processes page if that's what's needed to get going.
It's one of the very few apps that won't just "fail and bail" when things go wrong.
If Task Manager ever becomes internally corrupted, kill/close it.
Restart it while holding down CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT,
and Task Manager will reset ALL internal settings to factory fresh
If all your titlebars disappear and you just have a graph,
double-click dead client space to switch back to normal mode.
This no-titlebar mode is a mode I added to follow the NT clock,
where you could remove borders as well, but it confused more people than it ever helped I'm sure!
I initially drew the meters as 7-segment LEDs but that wasn't localizable to all cultures
CTRL-SHIFT-ESC will launch Taskmgr without any help from the Shell,
so if the Shell/Explorer is dead use this key combo to bring up TM and then reset/restart the shell.
If the shell can't start something or is hung, try Task Manager.
It has a mode where it will load without ANY references to the shell32.dll
and allow you to start programs like CMD.EXE without the start menu.
You can find the binary for any executing process in the process table by right clicking and pick "Show File Location".
There should be nothing that TaskMgr can't kill -
it will even escalate privilege and (if you have it) enable debug privilege to attach to and kill apps that way if needed.
If TM can't kill it, you've got a kernel problem.
you can add many additional columns, remove others, drag them around to reorder, etc.
The reason there's a Window class called "
DavesFrameWndProc
"is because to get flicker-free resizing I needed group boxes to not try to paint on one another,
so subclass them, give them their own
wndproc
, and enablingWS_CLIPSIBLINGS
duringWM_CREATE
.
I was hardcore about memory and flicker in my day, so it was under 100K for the exe and never flashed or crashed