decasteve

I have adjusted estimates saying that exact thing to a publisher, but never in a traditional software environment unless it was a physical injury or sickness.

These companies are not "the Internet".

Why don't members of congress lead by example and delete their accounts/memberships with these social media companies? And stop spending their campaign money on social media. Boycott them, as individuals.

Then stop these companies from stalking everyone around the Internet by passing legislation to call it as such. Pass real privacy legislation.

Go after their advertising business model with anti-trust. Prevent tech monopolies from continuing to acquire and conglomerate.

Censorship becomes an unwinnable game of whack-a-mole without addressing the root causes.

The Fed printing money isn't the engine, it's the throttle. The engine is powered by a treadmill that requires everyone to run, i.e. being consummate consumers. Throttling up requires running faster, thereby increasingly consuming more.

I hope we don't exhaust ourselves to keep up.

The cynical take:

They'll do what's profitable over what's accurate.

If you're not the customer, you're the product, doesn't quite fit. But it's a catchy analogy to illustrate a point.

Users are more like the soil of the product. Google is the farmer harvesting data that grows from it and profits from it.

Our new tragedy of the commons.

> The media has ruined America. Game over.

MSM, including Facebook and Twitter, empowered this monster and profited from it. This joke of a candidate was propped up and put front and centre instead of being ignored. They fed the Troll and moments before he turns to stone, they take credit for cutting him off.

The final straw for me was in 2016 when he was nominated. I deleted all social media and actively avoided US news--even then I'd hear conversations about it everywhere--even outside of the US.

Good luck America, you'll need it.

A bunch of different things:

1) Spending more time with people I love.

2) Traveling.

3) Low-impact hobby farming and forestry with horses.

4) Learning to do new things.

5) Connecting with new people in my community. Volunteering.

I wondered if this would move along more quickly if hosting from home were easier. Give everyone their own IP addresses and people tinkering their way to personal servers becomes more likely.

Looks like a glob of solder to me.

> Shaming people who use mass-scale social media could help.

Start by shaming government officials and organizations, any official government channels, even schools and school boards, that require tools provided by surveillance capitalists. If a ToS and privacy policy to a third party is required, then your right to freedom of association is infringed upon.

If governments make official releases only to walled gardens, then those who choose not to associate are cut-off from important information in the political process.

Giving up your equal rights unless you give in to surveillance capitalism is a threat to democracy.

Start there.

What drew me to AltaVista was that it gave me results that didn't exist elsewhere. It took some boolean gymnastics to get precise results, or going a few pages deep, but stuff, if it existed, was findable.

I almost wish there were less precise and more obscure options out there today. A search engine that purposefully didn't index mainstream news, social media, nor shopping/product sites.

RE: debug.com

As a teenager who didn't know any better, it was empowering to gain that level of access to a computer, to realize a certain level of control over it that was previously abstracted away. It felt like some insider knowledge that I was becoming aware of.

pass: https://www.passwordstore.org/

Reason: command line simplicity

Did you buy those cereals recently? What method of payment did you use?

This was indeed bound to happen. The discussions we have are what's needed to decide how the internet/web moves forward. And there's a bit of cake eating and having it too from both sides.

There's an expectation from the publishing/serving side of the equation that the content is being served to a proprietary app or a web browser that works a particular way. With the browser being one of Chrome, Firefox, etc., along with Google's YouTube apps.

On the user side, especially those who understand how the content is served, that the browser is not the only abstraction allowed. Google themselves run bots to scour the internet employing all sorts of tricks to access and index content. There's a fundamental way in which the http protocol works and its content served that is client agnostic. Everyone, Google Search most of all, have benefitted from this.

Making tools other than browsers illegal will fundamentally break the internet in my opinion.

> ...intent is factored into the law.

What gets lost or missed is the underlying intent of the protocols and tools being used to share content. An http server serves files independent of the client/user-agent–that's how the web works. If a work is published this way then that's the expectation. If YouTube and the RIAA want it to work another way, then use a different protocol/medium and put the content behind a login and limit access.

I'm not saying people should be free then to republish/share copyrighted works. Just that we are free to use tools to retrieve files that have been served openly via the web.

I remember learning about it as a kid and I remember the ice storm in '98. I enjoyed the talk--well done!

A few things on the history that often comes up, but I didn't see mentioned in the article:

I thought Quebec had pushed this high voltage technology in the 1960s. (I can't find the source on this at the moment...)

Buckminster Fuller also popularized the idea of an integrated world electric grid in the 1970s and in his book "Critical Path".

Thanks for the link! Nice to see someone working on it.

I'm surprised a federated activitypub alternative hasn't popped up yet.

Open source image editing/processing software has gotten better: Digikam, Darktable, Inkscape, and GIMP. (while Photoshop/Lightroom have gotten worse imo)

Linux and BSDs have gotten significantly better and with better hardware support.

In general, if I had a choice between today's software and the software of 15 years ago, running on today's hardware, I'd choose the software of 15 years ago in a heartbeat.

NoScript is inconvenient, but essential. All of the other extensions are airbags whereas NoScript is the seatbelt.

Scrupulous? Nobody is going to disallow / on Google's user-agent.

I'd suggest respecting Google's robots.txt as much as Google respects our DNT settings.

Using actual timbers in a place like Canada should be the norm. Many of the biggest trees are left after a clearcut because they're just too big. When everything around them is cut they tend to die quicker (due to exposure). If they do get cut and milled, they often get processed into dimensional lumber (2x4s) instead of being used as timber.

You are not wrong. However, houses could still be built from wood like the 500 year old houses and churches made with actual timbers. Timber framed houses would use a lot less wood in the long run due to less waste and greater longevity (especially when coupled with bricks and concrete).

Milling large trees down to 2x4s and coupling it to drywall to build homes that don't last is a travesty.

The airplane and the radio brought people closer. It also improved the coordination and delivery of mass destruction.

Technology can be a rollercoaster ride of benefit and detriment.

Any chance it's their anniversary? Or a special date for them?

Timber framing here. That's woodworking.

Why keep shipping bottles around? Leave them where they are. Ship the liquid in tanker trucks and fill the bottles at the destination.

I remember getting sources from university ftp mirrors for Linux (still do for OpenBSD). I wouldn't be surprised if some of these repositories are now hosted by the 'giants'.