> ut phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.

Yes, and corporations are doing all the same stuff to our PCs as well.

Modern video tools provide an enormous selection, much of which is free.

But I'll always miss VirtualDub.

Local video could be a nightmare in 90s. I remember those days. I remember when it was revolutionary that the Microsoft Media Player came out, and you could use one player for several formats, rather than each video format requiring its own (often buggy) player. Getting the right codecs was still a chore, though.

MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.

I have no problems with YouTube at all. Perhaps it's because I pay for Premium (primarily to get YouTube music).

Regardless, Google services getting worse over time is becoming a law rather than a tendency.

I used to dream about owning a programmable calculator in the late 70s/early 80s, but by 1980 we had Apple ][s in my high school and in 1982, I was able to use the PCs in college, first programming in BASIC and later Turbo Pascal, which was the best PC development tool in the 1980s. Most of my classes were in Pascal. My first job was in C++ and I was doing C++ by 1993 and still am.

Now I write Python for fun.