Genghis Khan also not too bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica

Whose peace are we now living under and what atrocities did they commit to establish it?

I think this is a rationalization. Humans are always tempted to look up to power, and what's more powerful than an empire? It goes unquestioned that we should respect the Roman empire, for instance, and you pretty often see an argument for the Mongolian empire. But these days, we know that violence is bad so we have to find other reasons to justify our feelings. So we talk about the "peace" they established after all the war. But is the cost really worth it? How many people not attacked by bandits do you need to justify an innocent murdered by raiding soldiers? Never mind that even the "peace" is often sustained through oppression. The Romans didn't invent crucifixion for Jesus, it's something they did. Never mind that the empire never lasts, and plants seeds of the next dozen wars as it falls, watered with yet more blood.

Ask yourself: if you honestly intended to create peace, would a century or more (in the case of Rome) of bloody conquest actually be the optimal plan? I would say no. An actual plan for peace through strength looks more like NATO than Rome.

Any good an empire builder does is accidental. Whatever they tell you or even themselves, they do it for glory and power, and their actions are optimized for that over any actual benefits. They were not nobler than the conquerors and colonizers were rightfully decry today.

Sometimes you have to do a lot of things that look very bad in order to do some greater good that overshadows all the bad you did.

I thought American space flight etc was directly indebted to the people behind the V bombs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

The Saturn V was simply a scaled up V2. The critical components were all there:

1. boundary layer cooling

2. pre-heating fuel and cooling the nozzle by pushing the fuel through tubes in the nozzle

3. baffles to prevent pogo-ing

4. turbo fuel pumps

5. supersonic airframe

6. guidance system (although primitive)

The V2 was an ineffective military weapon that did little damage - because its guidance system was too primitive to be able to hit a target. Hitler also poured enormous resources into the V2 program, shifted away from producing weapons that were effective.

Isn't OpenJ9 "just" the VM and not the class library? Also it's IBM-backed so it's more a case of pick your poison there.

Serving requests is a feature of Youtube and if they don't want to serve your client... well you didn't pay for it anyway.

They corned the market, drove everyone out of it, and are now rent-seeking. Can't say you have much of a choice between youtube and any other video provider that has the same content on it.

>They corned the market, drove everyone out of it, and are now rent-seeking.

It's almost dumping [1]: they gave a service away for free (even if they were losing a lot of money) just to make it unfeasible for any other company to start a competing service.

Vimeo could have been a competitor, but then they pivoted to a professional market and now that Bending Spoons bought them [2], I'm not sure they will even have a future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302

It is dumping. The whole YCombinator VC Silicon Valley model is entirely based on dumping. They call it "burning VC cash", which is an overly wordy synonym for it to muddy the waters, and it would be positive for the world if everyone installed a browser script that did a `s/burning vc cash/dumping` on all text elements.

The equivalent here is if Sony owned the most watched TV network (by far) and decided that it would work fully on Sony Bravia tvs. People with LG or Samsung TV's could only watch a degraded version.

We all pay plenty. Don't forget that every product you buy that advertises on YouTube forwards some of that money to YouTube, even if you then don't watch the ads. I would be happy to pay the same amount for everything, but somehow block vendors from spending any money on ads, if it were at all possible.

But what if it's a Catalan cat charity?

Didn't it have user accounts and comments?

I guess if you count "silently blackholed by the other server with no recourse" an acceptable result then Apple / Meta can offer you that kind of interop too.

The iPod and N64 are about 20 (or more, for the N64) years back from now, no? So about as far back as bell bottoms were from the 90s.

I think the real reason is that it’s an entirely different media experience than the current types. Most modern games are either gambling traps (microtransaction hell) or extremely high fidelity products that leave nothing to the imagination. In McLuhan terms they are hot forms of media, but the old ones are cool in that they invite imaginative participation. Hence the popularity also of intentionally retro looking contemporary indie games.

The Nintendo 64 will be 30 years old this summer.

Yes, 30, you can feel bad now :(

Compression filters are in PostScript.

It's not even clear that they were the ones suggesting inclusion. They're just saying their library now supports the new thing.

https://pdfa.org/brotli-compression-coming-to-pdf/

> As of March 2025, the current development version of MuPDF now supports reading PDF files with Brotli compression. The source is available from github.com/ArtifexSoftware/mupdf, and will be included as an experimental feature in the upcoming 1.26.0 release.

> Similarly, the latest development version of Ghostscript can now read PDF files with Brotli compression. File creation functionality is underway. The next official Ghostscript release is scheduled for August this year, but the source is available now from github.com/ArtifexSoftware/Ghostpdl.

Yes, I do not see any source of financial gain that could motivate them for this, because both MuPDF and Ghostscript are free.

MuPDF is an excellent PDF reader, the fastest that I have ever tested. There are plenty of big PDF files where most other readers are annoyingly slow.

It is my default PDF and EPUB reader, except that in very rare cases I encounter PDF files which MuPDF cannot understand, when I use other PDF readers (e.g. Okular).