What.cd was the Library of Alexandria for recorded music, the depth of what was collated and properly labelled there was far beyond anything that has ever existed on any other service, paid for or not. Every permutation of every release, endless live recordings, often multiple of the same event, absolutely incredible.
Private trackers as I understand it, are still a thing in the mid 2020s. Did a replacement that matches (or surpasses) What.cd not pop up in the meantime?
I'm just wondering how a strong community like that was struck a deathblow. It's not like all of its content disappeared.
Orpheus and redacted (previously passtheheadphones) both appeared shortly after what.cd’s demise. I believe they both now have more total torrents than what.cd, however the depth is still not what what’s was 9 years on (I know this because some of my uploads from what are still missing, partially because I no longer have the source material). And, the “cultivation” (ensuring no duplicates, recommendations for releases, general community, etc) is nowhere near what’s.
I would say all other media (or at least, the media I care about - film, tv, books) has what.cd equivalents, sometimes multiple. I think Spotify and AM killed 95%+ of “true” private tracker interest for music, especially with lossless and surround releases being available. The diehard core are still there (names from 15 years ago are still active) but it’s really not the same.
Orpheus and Redacted existed but it's kind of hard to beat the convenience of streaming for the low price in 2025.
Granted you can set up automated *arr systems with PLEXAMP to get a pretty seamless "personal Spotify" setup IME getting true usefulness out of trackers of What's quality always required spending real money - to obtain rare records/CDs on marketplaces - or at least large amounts of time if you went the "rent CDs from the library" route. I personally haven't ran into much RYM releases lacking on Apple Music and what is lacking I can find on Bandcamp or YouTube.
We are in a situation where it's a choice between unchecked corporate/oligarchic power or government power, at least the latter is nominally accountable in a democracy.
X controls Musk, not the other way around. Foreign influence campaigns control X. Thus governments buy the services of a rich patsy to control/destroy their opponents.
$1000/person is reasonable? You could literally have a secretary/admin spend _multiple days per year per person_ managing things for that much. The software administrative complex is completely mad.
The thing is, they don't need to be more complex. Their administration bloated because it could in order to enrich the people in the administration. It's the MBA/middle management disease.
Why exactly are Universities all-inclusive day cares for young adults covering every life need under a single administrative umbrella? It's like a capitalist commune. Landlord, hospital network, a few professional sports teams, dozens of amateur sports teams, several restaurant chains, life coaches, a police force, and on and on and on.
They do everything, the things they do they overcomplicate, and they overreach control of every tiny thing all under one umbrella. Of course it's absurdly expensive, but there's no reason it needs to be besides there's no incentive for anybody to cut back on anything ever.
Countries understood in the age of TV/newspapers that control of the media was a sovereignty issue. Any nation that wishes to remain truly sovereign, particularly in the English-speaking world is going to have to grasp the nettle and block or force divesture of Meta & the other US social media giants.
Cambridge Analytica was the canary, the gloves are off now. Australia's under-16 social media ban is a good first step but we need to go much further and fast, as much as government control is undesirable at least a democratic government is somewhat accountable, the nexus of US tech giants and it's sprawling intelligence services is not.
There's zero overlap between banning social media for kids and banning news from Rupert.
P.S. that soveregnity issue is not likely to be acted on because there are always a lot of people who prefer foreign influence to domestic opposition! Just ask the Roman Empire.
Completely agree with this. There's a reason the FCC exists and it has nothing to do with electromagnetic frequencies. This agency, just like the Fed, needs to be broken away from politics completely. It's almost too late.
Workday, Palantir, ServiceNow - a new generation of Accenture/Oracle et al 'consulting' parasites that wine and dine their way into organisations (and governments) and then bleed them dry. There's a reason software spending endlessly goes up but productivity has flatlined.
These companies exist because non-tech companies building in-house software for their complex workflows also tend to run millions over budget and create brittle, bespoke software.
Also, I wouldn’t put Palantir in the same bucket as Workday and ServiceNow. It’s expensive, but it does work.
So now 'professional management' bring in these firms and instead run hundreds of millions over budget to create brittle, bespoke software. It's profoundly damning on our industry that decades of software development later most productivity gains stopped at about the point Excel and email became widespread. Software has eaten the world('s budgets) with little to show for it. No wonder all these parasites are so excited about AI, another whease to flog to naive orgnaisations that will inevitably spiral in cost, deliver nothing of value and suck more budget from anything useful. Then sell them 'cybersecurity' and 'observability' on top because now their security is Swiss cheese.
I empathize with you, but it’s also worth saying that not all firms are the same. Just as not all in-house teams are the same. There are good ones and bad ones. Even inside firms there are good teams and bad teams. Enterprise software is complex and good software engineers are expensive. These projects are delayed and go over budget because their complexities are grossly underestimated.
ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it? Is there no product demo at all during the purchase process? Do the sales people actively hide it or something?
I work in a department that has been using ServiceNow for at least 5 years, and I still do not know how to look up a ticket by ticket number. I just pretend I'm following along when my colleagues reference a ticket.
I just spent a minute poking at it: my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding. (Edit: it took 48 seconds to load the ticket.)
They also have a little stopwatch button on some pages that pops up a "Browser Response Time" window that tries to put the blame for slow page load times on the user's browser. Weird, wonder why they need that...
Yes! It always amazes me there seems to be no obvious URL scheme for servicenow.sadcompany.com/<ticket-number> Like, did the developers forget to implement that?
Yeah, and there's no search field, either. Surely, this is my misunderstanding and I should click the "Show Help" icon for a product tutorial, right? This pops up a window saying:
> Now Assist offers real-time guidance and support for users seeking help with Virtual Agent. This feature’s generative AI skills blah blah blah
Ok...? There is no input box to interact with "Now Assist" or the "Virtual Agent", it's just like a marketing blurb for some other feature.
F500, we have a pretty custom ServiceNow, but all I do is put the ticket or any other identifier in the search box and go. Takes 2 seconds to be in the ticket. Granted, that interface sucks too, but I suspect your main problem is internal to your org and the people that configured your ServiceNow.
Your system was configured by muppets if you don’t have a search box - it’s a massive beast that like all enterprise-grade software is a toolbox for you to bend to your will, but the downside is that if your configuration people don’t have empathy for the users (and looking at you especially, contract architects) you end up with a system that is optimised for whoever talks with the vendor, and not for anyone else.
What? Unless someone actively removed the search field, you should have quite a big search field in the top right corner, where you can basically search for anything you'd need.
> my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding.
Like all SaaS in-house implementations, this is entirely on how your company's ServiceNow developers.
I've worked on multiple SNOW implementations and things can go really bad when you go crazy with the customizations.
Your comment makes me understand the product even less. So it’s SaaS where you have to develop it yourself? What exactly is the company providing? Why do its customers simultaneously want to outsource this to a vendor and then spend resources customizing it down to the level of “basic CRUD operations work” and “the user sees a search field”?
ServiceNow is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS), not a SaaS, that allows development of new products on top of it.
At its core, there is a workflow management engine that third parties can use to implement their own, stateful, process centric products and services.
We have ServiceNow proper (the CRM) and a completely unrelated to CRM third party product that we have purchased and which is implemented on the ServiceNow platform. Both have nothing to do with each other and are used by different business users.
You don't develop it, you develop on it. SN provides the underlying software, implementations, hosting, upgrades, etc. Salesforce is another example of this.
Not to say that ServiceNow is great, but not being able to type the number into the search bar (top right) sounds more like a user issue than anything else.
I love that ServiceNow has completely broken the back/forward behavior in its own unique way.
Yes, many other sites also break this navigation, but SN takes it to a whole other level.
Want to open and edit multiple records in different tabs? You're a braver soul than I. Better also double check what record you go back to when you click Update. Which is of course different to when you right click and choose Save.
What comes after UI16 for user interface design? Well, UIB, of course. UI16 still looks straight out of 2016.
I, too, made this assumption. Then I learned it was an actual product my ex-employer had selected and kept using.
It still didn't make sense why an enhancement request and a fix request couldn't be moved between queues. Or why I received three (at least) emails when an issue was closed.
> ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it?
When I first saw ServiceNow, I was impressed - because my point of comparison (I worked for a university at the time) was BMC Remedy, which was terrible. And some years later I did some consulting for a major bank which was using some 3270-based IBM solution (Tivoli something… I believe it has finally been discontinued) and ServiceNow is light years ahead of that too.
I get the impression the innovation drivers at OpenAI have all moved on and the people that have moved in were the ones chasing the money, the rest is history.
The real secret sauce is that Valve is private and doesn't have external investors. As soon as you're owners are primarily interested in short term capital extraction everything else is inevitable.
I think you are correct here. If you want to look at the decline of the US ... this is perhaps a good place to start. Short term capital extraction little long term strategic planning. Maybe Cisco is a good example.. lets move all of our switch hardware production to China and still charge the consumer 3500$ per switch. Equals short term gain, makes lots of millinaires... and then just a few years later.. now Huawei makes excellent switches that are mostly on par with Cisco at a better price point.
This is a bizarrely negative take. No residential is being charged negative prices without very, very explicitly joining a plan that exposes them to the direct minute-by-minute wholesale price. Most 'EV' plans include free hours during the day (and much cheaper power in the early hours as well), it's likely it'll be standard within months thanks to this.
They are now also subsidising batteries while should help meet the wave of solar with a wave of distributed storage capacity to smooth out grid demand as well as successful rollout of grid-scale batteries.
This is a generational success story big enough to have geo-strategic implications.
So long as you ignore the working-poor. Those who live pay check to pay check, can’t afford solar / battery - or are renting so none of that applies to them.
Yep. Years ago I got sick of listening to people who don't believe in climate change and emission reductions due to tribalism crowing about the solar pv on their holiday house and their incredibly low electricity bills while cost of living keeps going up for lower income families. Everywhere you look anything good is twisted into a wealth transfer. If you are left behind you are never catching up now. Between the housing market and everything else the myth of a classless society has been completely obliterated in a generation.
But isn't the OP article about distributing the benefits to the wider population? Add to that the uptake of batteries GP is mentioning will substantially reduce both the need for back-up power and the cost of transmission that have been driving up electricity prices.
So you can have three hours of free electricity, while you’re at work, the kids are at school, you’re renting so no battery for you, electricity has already increased 100% and continues to increase, but only once a year, and now you’re being offered something your 10 year old second hand appliances and petrol cars can’t take advantage of.
Forget trickle down economics, it’s deluge-up. From those who can barely afford it to those who barely need it.
Let’s not pretend there isn’t a cost of living crisis in Australia, and electricity prices factor in to everything.
Cheap reliable plentiful electricity is the backbone of an economy. Not sitting down and working out how you can use less power next month.
We should be sitting down trying to work out how we can use more power next month, in order to leverage that power to have a better life, warmer / cooler homes. Starting businesses and not having electricity be the killer.
> So you can have three hours of free electricity, while you’re at work, the kids are at school, you’re renting so no battery for you
Probably not useful for cooking dinner or watching the evening news, but most dishwashers and clothes washers have a delay start option. Your fridge is also working its hardest during the middle of the day.
> and now you’re being offered something your 10 year old second hand appliances and petrol cars can’t take advantage of.
A washer/dryer combo would be useful for delayed start. But as mentioned, delay start has been a common option for a long time now.
> We should be sitting down trying to work out how we can use more power next month, in order to leverage that power to have a better life, warmer / cooler homes. Starting businesses and not having electricity be the killer.
BESS are the deluge up you're asking for. Much of the stress on the grid is that power generation is distributed unevenly. Grid scale battery prices have been crashing stupidly year on year, to the tune of about 20-40%, and those effects are only just starting to hit the consumer market. The uptake curve has been reasonably steady, and at current projections we would have 24 hours of world-wide storage by 2035. Which is nuts!
I think this is sensible policy. It ought to reduce power prices across the board. At the very least, energy companies would have few excuses to hide behind if prices don't become more competitive.
Another sensible policy to help renters would be to force landlords and owners' corps to put timers on their electric hot water systems. It's a kind of energy storage that most people don't consider.
I'm from Australia and my electricity provider has 12pm-2pm free electricity.
As other's said, dishwasher and washing machine has delayed/smart start options, so that is free for me. That saves at least 3kWh per day for me, so ~$30 per month. So it really helps with CoL crisis.
And yes, those appliances are (almost) 10 years old.
Ya just have to remember that it’s table scraps compared to the 100% plus increases in electricity prices we’ve already been subject to.
And this is in a country that has the same volumetric gas exports as Qatar, which provides it citizens free healthcare, free education including university and vocational training, and electricity at 3.2 US cents per kWh.
What do we get? None of that. We get citizens living in tents. In a resource rich country.
And you people think our governments are capable of making wise decisions about long term energy policy. Check your ideologies.
When was governments picking winners ever a good idea?
When has that ever worked out well.
When was other people choosing what to do with other people’s money an ideal we should vote for more of?
I'm from Sweden and hearing those energy prices really caught me off guard. With taxes and fees we pay ~€0.1 per kWh on average.
I have stopped caring about when house hold appliances run, our main energy consumers are heating (during the cold months) and charging the electric car.
Back before we locked ourselves in to wind and solar, and gas peaker plants, and a massive pumped hydro project that will approximate never be finished.
Sweden’s energy mix is predominantly nuclear, oil, and hydro. Wind and solar account for 10% and 1% respective.
There’s no escaping the fact everything wind and solar go electricity prices go up. Drastically.
In Australia, since 2005 wind and solar have increased to about 11% and 17% of electricity generation respectively.
And that time period correlates perfectly with the just over 100-200% increase in electricity prices, depending on where you live.
In 2005 I was paying AU$0.17 per kWh in South Australia, now that’s up around AU$0.44 per kWh. Elon even put in a big battery in South Australia. Hadn’t helped. Hasn’t helped reduce the cost of electricity. And that’s what the Australian government wants us to hail a success.
That’s 250% increase. While general inflation in the same period has been 67%.
Wind and solar haven’t even really started to put a dent in Australia’s over all energy use, which is dominated by gas and oil, and people are falling over each other to get in line to vote for more of it.
Other locations with big batteries and big electricity prices include Victoria Australia, Melbourne the capital is widely considered the California of Australia, and California itself. Big batteries, big solar, big electricity prices. Fact. Find me a counter example.
Germans are hanging solar panels off their apartment balconies. Not because they want to. Out of desperation. Just like poverty Africa. That’s equality: everyone can have nothing, and they’ll like it. My god.
No one is running an industrial economy on their balcony.
> In Australia, since 2005 wind and solar have increased to about 11% and 17% of electricity generation respectively.
> And that time period correlates perfectly with the just over 100-200% increase in electricity prices, depending on where you live.
I'll say this one thing and get out of the way. The price shock began in 2022[1] (see figure 1). The rise in energy costs aren't due to solar and wind generation, which is the cheapest there is. It's due to the transmission and variability of intermittent renewable energy, and also sensitive to export prices of gas due to our weak policy on gas reserves. Batteries are the answer to that as they can store when its cheap and dispatch to the grid when it isn't (and that includes home batteries). The Neoen battery which you mentioned, was the world's first big battery. It's been wildly profitable, which is basically driving the market to invest more in grid scale batteries and less in large scale renewables. So the federal and state governments aren't picking a winner by backing batteries, these policies are just accelerating us towards a cheaper grid using the momentum that's already there in the market. The federal government is also trying to offset the ending of the state-level bill relief for those that can't afford batteries, and reducing grid pressure/prices in the evening when everyone gets home.
You can’t have distributed low power density intermittent solar and wind electricity generation at scales that matter without stupendous amounts of steel and concrete transmission infrastructure having to be built where no one lives or works, nor wants to, to connect them to places people do want to live and work.
There’s no way that can be separated from grid-scale wind and solar.
The level of self deception renewables advocates subject themselves to would be funny if I wasn’t forced to pay for it.
You also can’t have it without peaking capability. Which means being able to cover possibly all demand instantaneously, and that was always going to mean expensive gas / battery projects that sit idle a lot of the time. We tried it I warn you.
That wildly profitable Neoen battery? Where do you think the profits come from? Thin air? The end user. That’s you and me mate, we’re paying for it. Low income earners disproportionately so. Renters who can’t have solar or batteries. They can just freeze in the dark.
I’m all for profits when they’re mine. I can’t understand why anyone would worship someone else’s profits. Your profits are my costs.
I just drove half way across the country, from the south east to the middle of South Australia.
Broken wind turbines 300k, from the nearest industrial centre. Probably 600+k from the nearest capable industrial centre.
They’ll never get fixed. No one is driving a $1200 an hour crane five hours each way to spend six days set up waiting for a technician and parts from Europe who was supposed to be here two weeks ago to fix one or two turbines / broken blades. Those handful of broken turbines probably don’t even have spare parts available, every wind farm is a new model of turbine, locked in to one manufacturer indefinitely for after sales parts and service, and if they do have spare parts and service available the payback period on the repairs would be astronomical.
It’s cheaper to let them rot in place and build new ones elsewhere. You don’t get greenfields grid-scale rebates for performing maintenance on ten+ year old equipment.
I dare you to run the numbers on the quantity of steel and concrete needed globally to transition to wind and solar.
Or don’t, cos it will put you off renewables. And there’s nothing worse than having your preconceived notions of what’s right and wrong jump out of the math and throttle your brain. The concrete related CO2 emissions alone will choke the planet way beyond what we’ve merely dabbled with getting to this stage.
I used to do paid and volunteer work for The Wilderness Society and donate to Greenpeace. Then I learned applied mathematics.
> stupendous amounts of steel and concrete transmission infrastructure
Rooftop solar and home batteries keeps power where it's used for domestic use. Large scale solar is also deployed near to mining and refining sites, and not by mandate, but because it's the most economic option. If you have batteries you don't need to build out transmission.
> You also can’t have it without peaking capability.
Once again, enough batteries and gas peakers are out of business.
> That wildly profitable Neoen battery? Where do you think the profits come from? Thin air? The end user. That’s you and me mate, we’re paying for it.
They come from arbitrage. Buy low, sell high. They same thing that anyone with a home battery or EV can do. Neoen actively reduced the market prices for electricity by increasing supply at the right time. That means the people of South Australia profited mate ;)
> Renters who can’t have solar or batteries.
The OP article is about distributing free power to everyone to take advantage of. Assuming that plays out, I can only see this as Good News™ for renters.
> They can just freeze in the dark.
Lighting isn't really what's chewing up the power. But certainly people going cold because of high energy prices sucks. Again, the prices have increased due to gas export prices increasing the wake of the Ukraine conflict. This isn't "self deception" it's just economics.
I could list ways that free energy in the middle of day could be used by renters and for low income earners to stay warn, but I get the vibe that you've got an axe to grind and I'd be wasting my time. So, as promised, I'm moving on.
That's a weird uninformed take. Both solar and battery are heavily subsidised in Australia if your household income is less than $180k AUD. Average solar 6kW installation with subsidies is ~3k AUD, 30-40kWh chineses batteries are 4-6k AUD after subsidy.
Median full-time salary in AU is ~90k AUD, and we have pretty good minimal wages, so solar panels are affordable to almost every working homeowner.
Young people don’t own their own homes, the banks do.
And many young home owners are now suffering mortgage stress, same with renters. That is, 1/3 or more of their income goes to repayments / rent. Double income households, at your AU$90k are paying $760 a week in rent or mortgage repayments.
I recently worked a minimum wage job, and you are guzzling the koolaid something chronic if you think $24.95 is workable with a mortgage, the one necessary car, and all the associated taxes and insurances. Fuck me.
I worked out I’d be only $50 worse off week on the disability pension.
Admittedly I’ve made some stupid decisions in my adult life, but, unsurprisingly, we can’t all be far out on the righthand side of the bell curve. I’m just a dumb blue collar worker.
Mine (a VPP) does pass it on. They charge me the going wholesale rate. If the wholesale price is sufficiently negative they pay me to use electricity. That's pretty rare, but it does happen every few months. The wholesale price has to be below about -4.5¢ for my price to be negative because the people who own the wires get to add a fee regardless of what direction the electricity is flowing, as does the government (admin fees of some description).
The converse is also true. If the price spirals to $19/kWh, I get to pay that too. At that price as single night could cost me $400, or it would if I didn't have a battery.
Which possibly explains why you haven't heard of it. If you don't have a battery big enough to get you through at the peak and shoulder hours and enough solar to charge it during the day you are better off with a more traditional retailer, who charges you a fixed price regardless of the wholesale price.
At least recently[1] most Australians and an overwhelming percentage of under-16s supported the ban. Similarly in the UK[2]. This is a topic in which it appears it is the online discourse that's wildly out of alignment with broader public opinion and I'd argue potentially one of the reasons may be that it will make it harder for bot-nets to mass-manipulate public discourse so easily.
I think people support a lot of things in theory. But in practice, less so. Probably because they're often implemented in ways prone to abuse or simply unfair to an average citizen.
