@jerry first Merry Christmas, mate, and thanks for all that you do for us.

Second, I had a similar, but opposite, recent epiphany about Hi-Fi audio.

I was getting a little jaded, with even high quality noise cancelling headphones.

I recently bought some meaty tri-amped triple crossover studio monitors and a 10 inch sub, and started playing some of my favourite albums (yes I’m old. I listen to albums).

Honestly it brought me to tears. I’m autistic, and a musician, but the fullness of sound we’d almost entirely left behind in favour of convenience and compactness felt like it was talking to me on a weird, cosmic level.

But during my speaker research, I saw more and more signs that the worm was turning. Portable digital audio players were front and centre on shop fronts, affordable again, too… not ‘audiophile’ (but good enough for any audiophile). Mainline artists were selling in lossless, direct to customers again. The standard of equipment I’d looked at five years previously was now affordable to the average Joe. I can go to a store and buy any new album on vinyl and CD for less than I could in the 90s (inc inflation). The likes of Taylor Swift and Five Finger Death Punch are leading the way in taking ownership and control of their music, and others are following. I’m no Taylor fan, but I bought all her shit when she did.

I’m wondering if we’ll look back on streaming like we looked back on tape. And I LOVE tape, but it’s messy, noisy, degrades and malfunctions even on high end gear. Streaming is convenient, but I can’t put it in applications I want, or store a drive full of music that I don’t need to input my password to listen to. I can’t give money directly (or nearly) to artists that I enjoy.

For the likes of WAF/Proxy services, the change I’m seeing is that given the enormous outages in the last couple of months alone—with the orgs I work with having lost many millions in that time—they’re moving to creative self-rolled solutions on their own edge to better discriminate and handle traffic themselves. This is one area ML and AI are really making inroads. Bandwidth, compute, and storage are dirt cheap.