I had a few dates with an asian woman in the US who called herself only half-sarcastically a “Twinkie,” which the Internet told me was yellow on the outside and white on the inside. I laughed to be polite not knowing what she meant, but when I learned it made me feel racist by proxy.

This is the typical Jack Welch stack-ranking nonsense. The theory is that there will always be a bell curve or similar distribution that requires a certain percent (Welch said 10%, but it’s all over the map) be cut while new hires are constantly brought on.

It kills morale and forces employees into short-term impact patterns to avoid the constant churn of cuts. It also means that performative work rather than actual substantive work is encouraged, since the appearance of productivity in whatever metric is stack-ranked is all that matters.

Finally, it encourages people to do the minimum, because the alternative is to compete for bonuses that are only going to the people who meet the highest appearance of productivity metrics, which doesn’t correlate strongly with actual productivity, just as actual productivity (in terms of “producing” output) is also not strongly correlated with value (such as by knowing enough to efficiently complete tasks such that you are not appearing to “produce,” due to being extremely efficient).

HDCP isn’t DRM’s ultimate form of course. HDCP “3.0” or its successor will not be so easily cracked, and Widevine is not as cracked as past protection schemes have been.

All of our non-Linux platforms will tighten DRM over time. Apple is already locked down. Android is moving to require boot-lock strong encryption and authentication to access sensitive apps, which is very difficult to spoof. Media companies will require that for future versions. Windows is on the TPM train. HDCP is just part of that “trust” chain, and it absolutely will be strengthened to match the base protection.

Edit: Didn’t realize HDCP is already at 2.2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection . Some interesting developments - namely a reminder that movie studios will also use lawsuits under the DMCA to try to suppress any technology that defeats DRM.

Piracy is resilient but there is no natural law that says piracy will always be available.

There will be a TPM 3.0. All those mechanisms in XBOX Series and PS5 that are actually effective for extended periods at preventing mass piracy, like one-directional fuses and minimum software updates for new releases with per-device keys, are not going to disappear. Tech and media companies are now working together to bypass the user in trust chains, so they only have to trust each other.

In a streaming-only world, I predict there will be a time soon where pirated content is not a bit-perfect copy because the digital environment is fully locked down. Maybe an analog reencode of display output will be a workaround. But like TPM, HDCP will advance, and maybe that avenue will be cut off too.

Once we lose physical media, we may be cooked.

Some weren’t connected? For most PCs that had it, it was a real thing, though counterintuitive and marketing-speak, because enabling “turbo” was just normal speed and disabling would run in a slower mode for compatibility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button