2025 July Retrospective

I probably said this more times than I can remember, but July felt especially short. I don’t want to speak for everyone, but it felt like we barely managed to wrap our heads around Zuckerberg’s now traditional, and expected 4th of July appearance, then boom all of the sudden the 31st showed up in our calendars. Luckily, there’s still one month of sweet summertime left, which is always a plus.

Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition

The definitive edition is out and I’ll stop talking about it until some additional content drops, which should be later in the year. I pinkie promise!

It sold well over 200K units, which is in line with what has been estimated by the mighty Gamalytic.

Hardware

I was a true smart-watch snob as a kid, well into my teenage years in fact. Now, I say smart-watch, but what I really mean is cheap knock-offs, with tiny buttons and a basic contact list with some additional not too exciting features thrown into the mix.

Then, once mobile phones became rather ubiquitous having a watch became kind of redundant for many people, including myself.

This remained the case until a couple of years ago, when I bought a Huawei GT 2e, then a few years later a Huawei GT 3, and at the end of the month I upgraded to a Huawei GT 4.

Having a watch like this in the 90s or even early 2000s would have totally blown my and everybody else’s mind. But, then again probably a great many other things would have done the same no doubt.

On-line Censorship

Those of us who are old enough, we know all too well that there have been many signs and attempts to turn the information super-highway into a global cybernetic nanny state of some sorts. After so many failed attempts and false starts, it appears that the great undoing is finally happening, and on-line censorship is becoming de facto law of the land. Hopping from country to country, and from region to region like some sort of a parasite looking for a host.

It’s also patently clear, that persistence, does pay off after all. Rewriting and reworking the same proposal over and over again, until it’s finally voted in as law by people who are not qualified to clean toilets, does work.

Crying about it, after it has been voted in is like crying over spilled milk; Touching, but ultimately totally useless. So, what is there to be done? Alas, not much, because once the box has been opened, any, and all ways to circumvent the law can be made very risky and dangerous through the means of other laws of course.

The Internet as we know it today, will be nothing more than a distant memory in the next 5 to 15 years. Local neighborhood networks will become a thing again, and piracy will skyrocket.

I would have never ever thought that I’d have to write about anything like this in my lifetime, let alone in the 21st century. Yet, here we are at the cross-roads. One road leading to free and uncensored exchange of information as it was always meant to be, while the other leading to intellectual darkness. And the path has been chosen for us, yet again by the descendants of farmers and shoemakers; the likes of whom have left nothing but death and destruction behind.

But one thing is crystal clear, socialist brain-rot is a hell of a drug.

Poaching (Contd.)

I was talking about poaching in the last month’s retrospective, and it looks like after Meta ended up recruiting everybody and their grandmother from OpenAI, it has turned its gaze towards new shores, and has done so in such an aggressive manner, that some people, including myself have thought that perhaps some existing Meta Veterans might have found themselves being taken to the train-station. This turned out not to be the case in the end, yet it still leaves a kind of a weird and sour taste in my mouth.

The whole thing feels way to aggressive and almost forced. Only time will tell if this whole thing was actual 4D chess that will pan our or just plain old fashioned checkers.

Speaking of AI, it’s kind of funny how everybody seems to have moved on from the AGI is just around the corner spiel, which was getting quite tiresome to be perfectly honest. It’s all about super-intelligence now, am I right fellas?

Oh, and let us not forget about Ani and Valentine, the great dynamic duo that will solve the so called fertility and birthrate crisis no less. It’s only a matter of time now.

Bookmark Management

We have the most advanced and feature rich browsers ever, yet none of them come with an actually useful and usable bookmark manager.

Is bookmark management or bookmarking itself just not a thing anymore? Do people just keep and endless list of pinned tabs? Do they copy and paste URLs into their favorite note-taking tool?

What makes all this even weirder is the fact that even the so called “Read Later” like tools have withered away into the void. So, what gives?

Is this whole thing just RSS readers, round two? Makes one wonder, especially now when everybody wants a piece of the AI pie.

Wouldn’t it makes sense to have all your bookmarks indexed and ready to be fed into an LLM powered assistant type thingie? Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Take a look at the bookmark manager that came with Netscape 6.1 way back in July of 2001.

This is what they took from us. What a shame!

Monday Dad Joke

Q: Why did the laptop go to the 4th of July BBQ?

A: It heard there’d be some fireworks and wanted to spark some new connections!

I just realized that calling this the Monthly Dad Joke might have been more appropriate. Oh well!