Unity is REALLY bad and unintuitive for 2D games. It's a 3D engine that begrudgingly lets you draw sprites except alpha and overdraw are really expensive. Basically any 2D engine will perform 1000x better out of the box.
Early 2000's was the heyday of illegal music services though. Audiogalaxy being the best but things like Napster and Limewire and emule were just too tempting for any legal alternative to swoop in yet.
I miss the diversity in web design back in the day. From blinking, colorful and seizure-inducing to very dark pages with little torch gifs. Weirdly enough every website now looks the same (ok maybe we have 3 archetypes of web design) even though the number of sites has grown exponentially for decades.
There were probably tens of thousands of apps like that. Maybe more. Most made by small teams that definitely don't care about the privacy implications at all. A lot of that data is still out there somewhere being sold.
Having access to the detailed user data of billions of users is definitely something new and it's being used for efficient propaganda worldwide. FB has again completely naively unleashed a beast they had no intention or intuition on how to control. Anyone who remembers Facebooks early days should not be the least bit surprised that they are playing fast and loose once again.
Cambridge Analytica had 200 clients. Now not all of those are major elections but CA is also not the only player who's been doing this. Governments and shady organizations have been perfecting media-based mass manipulation for decades/centuries.
While there are certainly plenty of people who need more storage than is practical to put in-memory, most people don't. E.g. it's rare enough to find people with single datasets in the 1TB+ range. Most databases I've come across at clients max out in the tens to hundreds of GB range. Many more could be easily split (e.g. they may be multi-TB or above, but are that way because of aggregation of data that is logically separate, such as relating to different customers, and can easily be sharded) - though whether or not that's worthwhile is a separate issue.
So while you're right, for most people it's not going to be a practical problem. Query performance tends to be a bigger problem in practice, and IO bandwidth is often the main cost driver for servers (with NVMe SSDs providing so much additional IO bandwidth that they often pay for themselves several times over by reducing number of servers needed for people who insist on "traditional" disk focused databases), pushing server costs into ranges where spending more on RAM but needing fewer servers to handle the IO load, is more and more often a good tradeoff.
The latency doesn't sound that bad. It's 200ns to access memory on another local NUMA node, and 500ns to access memory on another machine using NUMAlink.
Fascinating tech. I had no idea this could be done with Xeons.
Absolutely right. I was terrible at online poker since I wanted to have fun playing it. You can't bluff someone who knows the math in the long run. You'll lose all your money.
Yeah a business where the gross and net income are the same definitely doesn't exist. Taxes, equipment, hosting, setting up interviews, marketing the podcast, selling ad slots...
