mei0Iesh

I wouldn't marry someone who'd announce it on Facebook. It'd be like if you leaned in for your first kiss, and they said, "Wait, let me Instagram this".

I can't read any of that because I'm distracted by the mental image of Bill telling someone the best books he read, with some conversation, and that person asking some questions while writing notes, then spending hours in front of his laptop, emailing a draft to someone else, who asks Bill a few more questions then returns a draft to someone else who finalizes it and publishes on "GatesNotes" written as if he sat down on his blogging backend and typed it out in a textfield.

I have no idea the process behind this website, but it seems unlikely enough that he'd sit down and write it himself that I can't take it seriously. From what little I read, it doesn't sound like something produced directly from him without first passing through others, at least for formatting and correction.

Digital postal mail:

* http://www.virtualpostmail.com/

* https://www.postscanmail.com/

Maybe I could see annoyance about the perceived dependency on Let's Encrypt. If someone is used to setting it for multiple years, then feeling like the transaction is complete for a long while, then LE could appear too involved. It's almost like the server needs a permanent attachment to an organization, to keep pinging to ask permission to exist on the web. If everyone goes 100% HTTPS/2, with automated renewal, then one could imagine a possible scenario where Let's Encrypt going out of service would break large chunks of the web. Or gives them too much power to selectively deny renewal and break sites with unattentive admins.

I'd be a little hesitant to switch commercial or critical sites to using Let's Encrypt right now. But overall, no, I like automated renewal. I think I'd choose to get a new certificate monthly, instead of 3 months. The provider I was using before with very low prices requires me to go through a manual process through their website. The main feature to me that'll cause me to switch is being able to set it and forget it. With automated monthly renewals, the 90 day expiry is extra buffer in case something goes wrong.

Sure. But I was also pointing out the relationship to Systemd. BSD is being talked about because of what's happening to the Linux culture thanks to powerful groups like Red Hat and Ubuntu, and the choices of major desktop environments, and how it affects the software ecosystem. Systemd is the symbol of what some view as corruption. That makes BSD seem like a refuge. But what they don't realize is, one of the founders of FreeBSD is eagerly in favor of all that Systemd and other modern intrusive type of approach, and it might go the same route. Then what OS will they use?

... I don't think you caught what I did there.

This makes perfect sense. There's a huge evolutionary advantage in calling attention to a bad actor (someone behaving in a way not advantageous to the tribe), because that person will either change, or be expelled from the group, or downvoted until their comment disappears, which helps the group.

Every year is another wave of this story, just like from the headlines it sounds like NASA just discovered water on Mars every year.

It's not all bananas, only the one shipped everywhere right now, and it's not supposed to be gone for decades. You can still get bananas if they can be locally produced, and we might find alternative breeds or do some gene editing.

I wouldn't worry about this too much.

Where was the proof presented for this? That idea doesn't sit well with me at all. Maybe they meant to say that it's hard for most people to want to sit still and stare at text all day. It's hard to ignore urges to go out rather than stay inside and read tutorials on the web.

I don't think programming itself is hard. Most people program. It's just that they do it without thinking about the steps they're programming, and they do it without a computer. Parents program all the time, "If you don't finish your homework before 7 PM, then you will not get dessert!"

I think this is an article, and one with votes on here, because it's flattering the audience. Maybe say complicated mathematics is hard. But not "coding". That's what dumb people like me do who prefer to stay inside and play around with text on a computer. Of all the possible jobs I can think of, coding is near the bottom of the list in terms of difficulty. Anything involving a jackhammer is much rougher.

That includes sleep? If you sleep 8 hours, awaken at 6 AM, then eat at 2 PM, it's a 16-hour restriction period?

I naturally go longer than that without eating each day. If you skip breakfast and lunch times, and include the hours you're asleep, it's easy to "fast" for closer to 20 hours or more every day.

I wouldn't force that though, I think everyone is different, living different lifestyles, and their optimal eating cycles will reflect that. When I'm working primarily sedentarily on the computer, then I'd rather work all day and eat quickly in one sitting at the end of the day. But if I'm spending all day doing manual labor outside in the sun, I'll naturally want to eat and drink more in between.

What else is exciting? This is the most exciting thing for me, which is actually pretty sad. It's 2015, and HTTPS still isn't widespread, and something like this wasn't done before? It's a good little new thing, but it doesn't really push anything forward. It feels like we're still where we were a decade ago.

That's good. Can you make anything? Like x+ is x+=1, x++ is x+=2, x+++ is x+=3? x+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Is this like the Apple idea to have a 1-button mouse? I like to ++ things, because when I'm coding, it fits better with that focused efficient state of mind where you don't have to think about x + 1, you just say ++ and it's bigger. But I'm not an Apple programmer, so maybe this isn't for my style.

That issue changed my view of GitHub, and related things. I'd seen a few animated gifs in other threads this past week, but it didn't really sink in until this.

I used to hold scientists and programmers to a different standard than most normal people, because it seemed like a certain level of advanced understanding was necessary to build anything functional in those fields. But I've since realized that special ability does not carry over into all areas of life.

It feels like seeing a ghost. I'm embarrassed to be registered with GitHub, and also to be human.

You installed py27-letsencrypt from ports? I posted a command in here that I used on FreeBSD and it worked find to register a certificate without disturbing the running web server. The webroot authenticator does work in FreeBSD.

Now that it's public, and I verified it works...

https://letsencrypt.org/donate/

They keep trying to push the idea that letsencrypt should be ran as root. If you disagree with that, I ran it as a normal user using:

    letsencrypt -t --work-dir /tmp --logs-dir /tmp \ 
    certonly --webroot /www/public -d example.com

Except on my system the letsencrypt command did not work. It failed with an "Operation not permitted". So I edited the webroot.py file, and commented out line 108 that said:

    # Remove execution bit (not needed for this file)
    os.chmod(path, filemode & ~stat.S_IEXEC)

It ran fine without root, sudo, or su.

Then I added this to nginx.conf:

    listen 443 ssl http2;
    ssl_certificate /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem
    ssl_certificate_key /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem

It gets an A+ on ssllabs.com, and it works fine in the browser. When I click the lock it says "Let's Encrypt".

Yes! Only a couple hours left and everyone can try it.

I'm using HTTP/2. Here's some quick stats:

    # tail -n100000 access.log | grep 'jquery.js' | grep 'HTTP/1' | wc

    3,095

    # tail -n100000 access.log | grep 'jquery.js' | grep 'HTTP/2' | wc

    6,074

You can't: "This patch replaces the SPDY module in NGINX."

https://www.nginx.com/blog/http2-r7/

"Before installing the nginx‑plus‑http2 package, you must remove the spdy parameter on all listen directives in your configuration (replace it with the http2 and ssl parameters to enable support for HTTP/2). With this package, NGINX Plus fails to start if any listen directives have the spdy parameter.

NGINX Plus R7 supports both SPDY and HTTP/2. In a future release we will deprecate support for SPDY. Google is deprecating SPDY in early 2016, making it unnecessary to support both protocols at that point."

I didn't say first, I said responsible, and first doesn't really matter. Albert Einstein's e=mc^2 wasn't first, it was already published by someone else written slightly differently. But he made it popular, and that's what counts for widespread adoption and propagation of tech.

You sound like an older hardcore nerd. You're from a different planet. What was going on in your circles was not at all a reflection of the web on a whole. Most people didn't even use ISPs in those times, they were on private systems like AOL. The dynamic web we know today, where almost every website is not static HTML, is because the majority of people making any little website had access to PHP, and free tutorials to learn.

If you were a corporate/academic programmer at the time, or lucky enthusiast, you had access to more things. Most commoner folk stepping up to a local ISP shell from BBS did not have access to all kinds of goodies. There also was less formal education available, so even when technologies existed, without mainstream marketing and documentation, it simply wasn't accessible to the masses. Cold Fusion was proprietary software from Macromedia you had to pay for, as I recall. Some admins were restrictive, and didn't even like you compiling your own stuff.

PHP really was responsible for the dynamic web. It had enough community support to enable newbies to wrap their head around the mind-boggling shift to dynamic server-side websites, and it became commonly provided with cheap or free shared hosting.

A big reason why it succeeded was because it was possible for people who only understood HTML to transition, since a PHP file could be nothing but HTML to start with, and people used a lot of templating rather than start from scratch with code that echoed out HTML. With things like Perl, it was not an HTML templating script first, and so that made it less streamlined and simple for the task of making websites.

This is an arrogant and immature type of thing to write. This is programming, not high school cool-kids club. PHP is a wonderful tool that was mostly responsible for the dynamic web. Before it became popular, the web was mostly static HTML with an occasional CGI form, probably written in something like Perl, mostly just for emailing the webmaster. Maybe some small amount of JavaScript for something like rollover effects, but that's about it.

It's kind of like the situation today with the resurgence of JavaScript. One day the kids of the next decade will be posting snarky attitude basically calling JavaScript users retards because they don't use the cool-kids' PepoCOde. Lame. PHP is still excellent technology, and very relevant still for building dynamic server-side websites.

It used to be that people using JavaScript were made fun of for being "scripters", not "programmers". Everyone knows JavaScript is the language of Mort. Only Franken Elvis uses C.

Yay, null coalesce operator! That shortens a lot of common redundancy. When will there be a FreeBSD port?

IRC

Some thoughts:

* Addressing a public press release to your private child's name

* Naming the initiative with your family's name

* Calling for "change now" as if the world isn't already working very hard every day towards progress

* Looks like a move out of a strategic playbook some advisers gave for "how to be President someday"

* Looks like they're marketing themselves as the royal family, like Facebook is the new kingdom

* Looks like that smug thing that's hip today where people compete to be most charitable

* Reminds me of the Melinda and Bill Gates thing, and the Google medical research thing

Part of this is the perspective of engineers who believe everything is solvable if you just build something to do it. If it isn't built yet, it must be because we're not working hard and fast enough. That if someone has billions of dollars, and are just willing to fund an initiative, they can take credit for curing all disease.

Part of it is the fear that's faced by people who felt invincible when they become old, or have a newborn infant. When you can purchase anything, the new difficulties are things like bacteria, viruses, and entropy. When you are a god in the eyes of the society and economy, yet a worm in the eyes of biology and ecology, there's no longer a clear path towards how to solve your daily concerns. If you're poor and need food, there's simple steps you can follow to acquire what you need. But when you're wealthy, what do you do to get well from illness, to escape the pains of aging?

These people, and much of the digital society today, need perspective and psychological understanding beyond what they have. But you won't see an initiative for that.

"They" isn't really used illogically.

If someone wants to understand, they only need to examine it beyond what they learned as rules in English class.

The use of "they" is usually general, when not really pointing to a specific person. If Dennis is standing in front of me, and someone asked me whom to speak to, I wouldn't point at Dennis and say, "They is the one to speak to".

But if I was talking about DennisP online, and I didn't know who was behind that vague identifier, and someone asked whom could help, I might say, "I talked to DennisP earlier, and they helped me with my problem."

For all I know, "DennisP" is an organization, or shared account. It's a vague generality, when the individual attributes of a person are unknown or irrelevant.

It's like when one speaks in general ways that apply to all mankind, and you might even use the word "you" to refer to, not YOU, but anyone.

"They" works great because a group is a vague fuzzy kind of thing. In the plural form, speaking of them, over there, and their attributes, it's not so much about the plurality, as it is the abstract fuzziness of it.

All that we're doing is applying that same fuzziness in the direction of what could possibly be a smaller target in terms of numeration.

That is why, I don't think those rules about singular and plural were ever really correct. It isn't the numbers that we were trying to convey with the words, but the fuzziness.

"He" and "She" are referencing specific object types with common properties across the whole of the specific object. Whereas "They" is referencing an object with either mixed or unknown properties.

Do you see what I'm saying? It isn't about the count, but the uniqueness of known attributes for a specific target. It just so happens that when you have many of an object, the commonality of attributes blurs, and so the "they" pointer appears to be about the number of objects. Then some people who aren't thinking beyond that get upset if you violate the number when using they to point to >1.

When really, it's just about fuzz.

I don't use "they" as any kind of feminist thing. I just think that "he or she" is not only incredibly distracting and inefficient, but it is the illogical one. Also referring to fuzzy things as "he" or "she" are both wrong, because they are trying to instantiate objects using a template that requires certain attributes when the properties of the spoken of object are unknown or irrelevant to the conveyed concept.

"He" when the boy template is needed. "She" when the girl template is needed. "They" when a fuzzy generic container works better. The number of people references is irrelevant. Just like how an organization may contain many people, but we refer to it as if it were a person. Even an individual person is an organization of smaller components.

That's nice, but the word "script" was nowhere on that page. It supports ActionScript? That is what made Flash special, the union of code and art. I'm unaware of a complete authoring environment for artistic coders to produce things like they could with Flash. In Flash it wasn't all graphics, or all code, you could mix and match any way you wanted. You could right-click right on a visual object, and put script directly on it, along with its own more typical video-like animation keyframes, and along with separate complete code documents to control everything at once. It was really powerful.

Also, it says CC. I've thus far managed to protest the forced subscription model, which Adobe can only get away with by flexing their near-monopoly position. If it is subscription-only, and especially if it doesn't support ActionScript, I won't be paying them any money.

How is that any different than something like television, or a magazine, or newspaper, or cinema? Nobody used to visit a studio. They produced content for something like ABC, which is one of the main feeding troughs for mass consumption.

But that's mass consumption, where it's feeding ground for swine. I look at things like Twitter, and I see a big pile of spam. Spammers following spammers to spam their spam to spammers. I won't be producing content for channels like that, just like I wouldn't write on Medium.

But keep singing to the choir, and boosting your "following", and watching numbers rise... as if they meant anything. Just like people realized calories could be empty, someday the general public will awaken to the obvious concept of empty follows.