What's the old adage? Software expands until it can send email?

As always, hindsight is 20/20, but when you're living it, the half-baked decisions and add-ons are a product of you figuring it out on the fly. You don't have the knowledge of which proposal will solidify into an industry standard, and you don't know which vestigial implementations will be a nightmare for backwards compatibility down the line.

The context is also lost. Javascript was famously coded in a day or whatever and called 'javascript' not ecmascript as marketing to compete with Java. Besides that well known case there's presumably thousands of esoteric business decisions made back then which shaped the "sprawling, ludicrous" landscape, and which are now lost to time.

Yes, the web should have always been a programming language. And the flying cars of 23xx should have never used a z-debuffer doodad.

Yup. Can't redirect the ocean. So-to-speak.

Yeah the allure of cable was always that you got more (boutique) options. Like an entire channel dedicated to cartoons, e.g

Yeah, I dunno. There's a guy on Instagram right now making techno-futuristic stories I equate to micro-episodes and...it gets old. Economies of scale would say that finding the good content in the sea of dogshit would be impossible if everyone was doing that. Premium is premium because it's scarce; not everyone is doing it.

Don't worry, there will be algorithms to help you find what you like. And content will still go viral within subcultures.

As always, anticipated (at least in some sense) by Neal Stephenson:

https://www.wired.com/1994/10/spew/

Except the algorithms don’t help me find new things I like. They never have, and I’m starting to suspect that they never will.

What they find - what they’re designed to find - is more of the same. Which is only “more things I like” in à very, very shortsighted sense.

Maybe this is because of scarcity.. if existing algos are applied on top of infinitely generated entertainment then perhaps we'll see something even more addictive than YouTube.

I don't like they buried their own show, Westworld, to fuck the actors on residuals

Personally, I didn't like it that much. Super long, droll, the casting was misstepped, and they changed the ending.

It was too long.

It's the sound that's missing from a home viewing setup

Great home theater sound systems with subwoofers are cheap and readily available now. They make the home movie-watching experience dramatically better than it used to be.

Home theater sound is often/usually better than the theater, if you actually put any effort in. Many theaters can't do proper Dolby Atmos with height channels. You can install a setup at home for ~$1500.

Adds complexity, cost, and clutter. Meanwhile, the living situations of many (most?) people forbid it; no big-kicking subwoofers in apartments and condos, and you're probably keeping the volume at polite levels.

And for all that, it's likely still not up to par with a theater, unless you geeked out on a dedicated theater room.

MaxNet if you want to go final form Fortune 100

Netflix Plus (Netflix+) which is a side subscription to all of that which lets you syncopate different playback screens to one account, or some other esoteric value add which muddies the waters