"Dead Internet Theory" is, even if it wasn't real 5 years ago, now hyperstitioned into truthfulness as the days go on.

Bonus for the use of the word "hyperstition". :)

AFAIK the native Podcast app for iPhone is the only way to make PC-phone podcast file syncing work. This stops you downloading the same podcast file twice, once on your PC and once on your phone.

Did Hotmail offer email redirection at that time? I can't remember whether that sort of thing that would make it easy to switch away was offered.

I don't remember that detail, but I do remember most people not treating their inbox as an archive at the time. So there was less friction to switch to gmail, and more reason to do so due to the "real time" ticking storage amount of gmail, which then became an archive (again for most people).

> I do remember most people not treating their inbox as an archive at the time.

Indeed. For me, the step was gmail. With its humongous 1GB of storage, that was the moment when I stopped having to delete stuff to save space. It’s funny because a lot of people I know who were already older at that point kept the habit of deleting emails, even today.

For a similar fun set of reviews of past predictions of future tech, I recommend looking through Youtube channel "KnowledgeHusk"

Selected videos:

"People in the 80s Making Fun of Predictions From the 60s" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-B6zeAKAEQ

"2002 Tried To Predict 2025" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMZ9odjhOnU

"Terrible Predictions About The Future From 2005" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH9kf9KLVVQ

(and many more can be found in their Retrofuturism playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZkkImzuw5q9Kk5KIq1yw... )

You're right about that, Anki is named after the Japanese word for memorisation. (暗記 - あんき "anki")

https://jisho.org/word/%E6%9A%97%E8%A8%98

Was the demo version a separate story campaign like the Starcraft one was?

MobyGames [1] claim they are unique missions. More or less the same story, but different maps, objectives and briefing text.

Maybe I need to re-download it, and check out the differences. I remember playing those six missions so many times before eventually saving up enough pocket money to buy the game, but I don't exactly remember them being different.

And it's actually six maps, three for each faction.

[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/57961/warcraft-ii-tides-of-da...

Code golf is fun as a challenge, but it's obviously hell to find in a script someone else wrote that you're supposed to maintain.

FFMPEG does autodetection of what is inside a file, the extension doesn't really matter. So it's trivial to construct a video file that's labelled .mp4 but is really using the vulnerable codec and triggers its payload upon playing it. (Given ffmpeg is also used to generate thumbnails in Windows if installed, IIRC, just having a trapped video file in a directory could be dangerous.)

I think this effect might not be limited to video games - I remember when I was learning 3D modelling and rendering a few decades ago I started to break down scenery in my mind automatically, a permanent "how would this be made or faked in a program if you were to do it".

I think excessive concentration on a new skill can just create that pattern in your mind, no matter what the source.

General lore is that if you're creating training sets for visual recognition you can make about 2000 judgements a day. I've occasionally done about twice that and found my visual system misbehaving.

Have you ever played the bizarro dungeon RPG "Kowloon's Gate"? Navigating through that madness might be right up your alley.

I'll check it out. Thank you.