2025-01-21
9 分钟Foreign I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, January 20, 2025.
Have you ever heard of Coyote Time?
No, not your annual Coyote Ugly rewatch party.
Coyote Time is an affordance in video game design where the game intentionally waits a brief after you run off the side of a platform before it plummets you to your eminent demise.
It's named after the Wile E.
Coyote cartoons, and it's apparently been making me feel better at video games than I actually am for the entirety of my life.
Ignorance, as they say, is bliss.
Okay, let's get into this week's news.
It's time to make computing personal again.
Benj Edwards deftly describes how surveillance capitalism and DRM turned home tech from friend to foe by asking a litany of rhetorical questions about the past.
What percentage of your income had to go towards annual software subscriptions on a 20th century Windows PC?
Which part of this TV set kept track of everything you watched and then secretly sold the data to advertisers?
Which part of Windows 95 fed you ads without your consent and kept track of everything you did remotely so Microsoft could keep stats on it?
Which part of Amazon.com in 2000 tried to get you to buy millions of no name, counterfeit and dangerous goods propped up by stealth advertising and fake reviews?
Which part of Google in the 1990s and early 2000s blanketed its results with deceptive ads or made you add Reddit to every search to get good results that weren't overwhelmed by SEO seeking filler content?
When you say it like that, Benjamin Hmm, he continues.
Quote Every generation looks back and says things used to be better, whether they are accurate or not.
But I'm not suggesting we live in the past.
It's possible to learn from history and integrate the best of today's technology with fair business practices that are more sustainable and healthy for everyone in the long run.
End quote Benge has a few ideas on what we can do individually to push this idea forward, but he believes it will take collective action to to make meaningful changes.