I was skeptical at first, but your comment convinced me to take a look. It really is much easier and cleaner, and having it run in the cloud is amazing!
Nice job!
939 karma · joined November 12, 2021
Nice job!
Pastebin is another option for simple text.
For slightly more complex sites, check out Vercel or Cloudflare Pages. Both will host your site for free with reasonable quotas.
As for: > why isn't it easier today to put something on the internet than it was 10 years ago?
It IS. Just put it on farcebook or tweeter or medium or blogwhatever. Even easier than geocities.
People don't want to spend eons discovering and reading your poorly formatted text file or janky HTML that doesn't work with phones and is vulnerable to drive-by ad injections and such. If you just have a simple message, those networks do a more effective job (for better or worse) of disseminating it. Readers flock to those networks because it makes content consumption easier.
It's like asking why you have to jump through major publishing houses to get your book on the front of the store display shelves, when anyone used to be able to write and bind a book. You still can, but the world at large doesn't want to spend effort sorting through your stuff and every other amateur's. It's not the ease of publication that matters to them, but the curation. The signal to noise ratio is too low otherwise (and is still very low even with curation).
From the hosting side, free web hosts became a victim of their own success, economonically infeasible, especially as bots and spiders took over the net. Most of the web is junk these days and there's not really much money in making it easier to publish more junk.
From the dev side, the CI and build tools are only necessary if you want to heavily use Javascript for interactivity or clientside loading. Plain ol' HTML and CSS work as they always have, with no building required. Just host it somewhere.
Those things you mentioned aren't recent developments. Yes, there was a time when our government was capable of producing good output. What happened? Why are we still judging today's government by its successes of decades past...? Most of what you mentioned is literally last-century tech. The world has moved on; our government has not.
> You can blame the Government for not solving all shorts of issues, but people complain while at the same time they largely don’t want state or federal government internet.
Maybe there's one class of issues that government can't deliver on because the public mandate isn't quite there yet, like single-payer healthcare. But there's another class of issues that the public DOES want, the government already wrote the laws and allocated the budget for, and then did absolutely nothing about (like rural broadband grants basically going to corrupt telcos, with zero real enforcement). That has nothing to do with the lack of public will, just sheer incompetence and corruption.
Then there's the outright unconstitutional things, like warrantless wiretapping or drone assassinations of US citizens... to say nothing of recent developments, like Roe v Wade.
It's not that our boondoggles our more visible, it's that we fail at providing basic services for a huge portion of the population -- things that most other developed democracies can provide without much issue or controversy. By that measure, we fall far short.
Any plan to eventually offer drop-in support for Next.js? (Not just static builds, but the backend server/serverless functions too, like Vercel... maybe mapping certain APIs to Workers?). It would be lovely to be able to leverage the power of that framework on Cloudflare infrastructure.
Edit: Next and frameworks like it solve the "I love the idea of serverless, but don't want to reinvent the whole backend from scratch" problem. It's nice to have a framework abstract away problems like routing, caching, invalidations, buildchains, image transformations, etc. Cloudflare Pages and Workers can do almost all the same things, but requires more coding and configuration... that's the only reason we went with Next + Vercel instead of Pages.
But they tend to come up with their own classification schemes.
The idea of a interoperable semantic web wasn't a bad one, there just was no real presentation layer for it, and no popular demand for it without one.
However Amazon, Spotify, libraries, etc. classify their stuff internally, to their eventual end-users, the data is transformed into a HTML or app frontend of their design. Users don't see the underlying classification schema, just the product pages or book search or whatever.
Sure, you could probably use XSLT to transform a semantic document into pretty HTML, but most companies went the other way of using custom code to read data and output unstructured markup, because it was easier and faster. HTML and JS "standards" evolved way quicker than RDF could keep up with.
Beyond that, had there been a web-wide search engine that could easily let you search by classifications, microdata might've been helpful. But that never became popular. Closest thing I know of is Wolfram Alpha, and that uses its own algorithms and classifications too.
shrug
What do you think?
What are some recent examples? Especially dealing with technology?
I can think of a bunch of counter-examples where the government did not do a good job of regulating:
* Rural broadband failed
* Net neutrality failed
* Healthcare.gov was a fiasco
* Wireless spectrum auction never got us municipal/rural long-range wireless
* NASA's duties have largely been outsourced to private actors
* State DMVs are a shitshow
* Election integrity failed
* They can't figure out what to do about online disinformation
* Warrantless wiretapping: both unconstitutional yet ineffective, as in 9/11 and the lack of data sharing between agencies
* Foreign military misadventures, our traditional forte: Afghanistan, Iraq, both abysmal failures
* Healthcare: a joke compared to every other developed country
* Education: pathetic and getting worse
* Social programs: Welfare, what welfare? inequality and homelessness getting worse every year
* Infrastructure: crumbling
* Clean water: only for rich white people
* Immigration: heh
* Covid: lol
* Renewables: haha
* Nuclear: let's pretend it's not there
On every major policy front, the US government has been a disaster for decades. I'm no libertarian by any stretch, but our government is a complete shitshow compared to any other developed democracy. We have neither the leadership competence (decisionmakers and legislators) nor the engineering talent (career civil servants) who can tackle something as diverse as nuanced as IoT security, or arguably, digital security in general. Give them 20 years and they might be able to catch up to 1990s netsec, and by then the manufacturers will be two decades ahead and foreign intelligence services even further beyond that.
Our government is doomed, and taking us down with it.
The system is so incompetent and corrupt it lacks even the rudimentary feedback loops that might've otherwise allowed it to break the cycle. Seems like the only way for it to get any better is to completely collapse under its own incompetence. Egads.
Whether it's lets encrypt or Google or Apple or Facebook, the internet has largely moved away from a culture of small time hackers operating on barebones standards to super complex implementations gatekept by a few huge companies with infinite resources and conflicting values. They want to curate the web and monetize it, not lower the barrier to entry. You are free to use their ecosystems to produce things they can share revenue from, but everything else will only keep getting harder... what even is the web anymore but marketing landing pages redirecting to walled gardens.
In the meantime Google can single handedly monkey patch this situation within a few months and force manufacturers to catch up with the next product cycle. While a less ideal route, this seems far likelier to produce actual results within our lifetimes.
In short, in many of the small businesses I've worked for, it was trivially easy to collect analytics data, yet monumentally difficult to analyze or make use of it in a meaningful way. The signal to noise ratio was incredibly low. One aspect of that was the need to manually discover unusual events, usually by creating manual dashboards and alert thresholds. But lacking a strong data science background, designing proper statistical tests to identify significant events was not something I could easily do.
Sure, maybe podcasts use it as an underlying protocol, but users' experiences depend more on the front-end client (some app) than the playlist protocol. It's not really a discovery protocol either; turns out having a central index like Spotify or the podcast apps do works better anyway.
I think it's irrelevant in the sense that it could be trivially replaced by app-specific implementations, and few people would even notice anymore.
It's not that prose is any more or less valuable than classification, but that classification takes a lot of work and doesn't come naturally to most knowledge producers. It's a speciality unto itself that most people aren't super interested in. In the case of schema.org and RDF, that effort had no visible impact on anything, so people just stopped trying after a while. In the case of Wikidata, it's still ongoing, but nowhere near as popular as the more natural (to our species) output of Wikipedia.
FWIW, I'm saying this as someone who spent time classifying articles on Wikipedia, contributing to Wikidata, marking up our pages with microdata, managing databases for a living, etc. I'm not philosophically against better classification. Just observing that efforts to automatically describe human output via algorithms and ML seem to work a lot better than asking human content editors to self-classify their output with anything more complex than WordPress tags. People don't tend to enjoy or be effective at complex classifications, especially when there's no visible benefit from it. All that microdata never really surfaced anywhere and there was no useful mechanism of discovery or sharing.
Eventually Google's natural language-esque search just got big enough that no other interface to the web really mattered anymore, and their speciality was in parsing unstructured text & messy HTML into simple phrases. Better semantics might've helped other spiders, but by that point nobody cared about other spiders anymore.
For things like social sharing, OpenGraph had the commercial support of Facebook and Twitter and was far simpler to implement. And other communities, like MediaWiki, used RDF only for the low-hanging fruit (Wikidata) while the most valuable info was still locked behind freeform blobs of text (Wikipedia).
The semantic web took more effort to implement than the crap it usually describes. Most humans just don't really want to waste time classifying stuff. The communities that do (science, pirate communities, libraries, etc.) already have their own classification schemes. There was just no need for another web-only classification scheme, no popular desire for it, no sufficient commercial interest behind it, no end-user advantage of using it over HTML... is it surprising that it failed? It tried to solve a problem nobody really had, using a solution that was quickly eclipsed by machine learning. And for the few actors (search engines, social networks) who actually wanted effective classifications, their own algorithms were both more effective and more private, not relying on/enabling their competitors. Open classification excites librarians and archivists, maybe, and nobody else.
I guess that'd be kinda a crossover between data integrity and marketing... in this case, an anomaly IS the data, where an unexpected increase/decrease in pageviews somewhere is something we'd love an alert on, but only after some threshold. As you pointed out, doing that manually just results in a bunch of false positives for those of us who aren't professional BI or statisticians.
Only if you remember to update your cert chains, and your web servers have to keep up with TLS etc. updates too
> cloudflare actually decreases performance (by adding an hop when serving dynamic content).
If your dynamic content doesn't require true real-time updates (like a forum or chat or something), but can be limited to once a minute updates or similar (like a reddit-style front page), caching and global CDNs can still drastically speed that up for users who aren't near your data center.
And that's just their static cache offering. If you build your site around their edge infrastructure (workers, workers KV, durable objects), you can entirely remove the last hop by handling client requests and sharing state across the CDN itself. Two of their demos show IRC-like chat and Doom (the game) running entirely on the edge: https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-chat-demo https://blog.cloudflare.com/doom-multiplayer-workers/
They also do other performance boosts, like auto-optimizing images, converting to webp, minifying stylesheets & scripts, dynamic loading, http QUIC, etc. And they offer a edge streaming solution for video (although Vimeo is probably much cheaper for most use cases).
> For most websites, DDoS attacks are a non-issue.
It can also help with things like Google Analytics bot spam, drive-by vulnerability scans against certain web servers or Wordpress, etc. It's not just a IP blacklist but does some degree of traffic analysis.
And all of that is available for free or cheap. It's very difficult to do all that yourself as a small-biz or solo web dev, even if you had full time dev-ops.
As for "the internet shouldn't be controlled by a single entity", sure, but it's always been a corporate network. Choose your nemesis: Cloudflare, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Verisign/network solutions (in the old days)... there's never been a truly free internet. At least Cloudflare is doing a darned good job of stewarding the internet.
As an end user, I agree they are annoying. These two things may or may not help (hCaptcha is the engine used by Cloudflare*):
1) You can set an accessibility cookie that should be good for a while: https://www.hcaptcha.com/accessibility
2) There is also the Privacy Pass beta, which lets you redeem CAPTCHA solves for "tokens" that can be used for later CAPTCHAs https://www.hcaptcha.com/privacy-pass
But yeah, hCaptcha is really annoying, especially compared to the auto-solve of reCAPTCHA when you're logged in to a Google account.
* Cloudflare switched to hCaptcha in 2020: https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptch...
The data center model relies on a glob of services that you manage yourself, and manage infrastructure & networking for. That's how a lot of the early AWS services were built. AWS still offers that paradigm, especially for bigger enterprises that want or need that level of control.
But Cloudflare fast-forwards all that by a few generations, which makes their edge computing MUCH easier, faster, and cheaper to use than Lambda or similar services. Instead of worrying about specific data centers, interconnect, firewalls, bandwidth, etc., on Cloudflare the topology is mostly invisible (unless you have to deal with the Chinese Firewall). You just upload your stateless Javascript code into a worker, and it gets replicated everywhere nearly instantly. Replication and caching are handled invisibly by Cloudflare and you never really have to think about it. If you need state or durable storage, their edge storage products (Workers KV, Durable Objects) function similarly... a few lines of code and you've got a globally scaled auto-replicating data store that you never have to manage the infrastructure for.
The benefit is that it's way easier than having to manage network infrastructure, and Cloudflare's offering is far superior to anything a small business could easily set up or maintain on their own. If you're a huge enterprise, maybe there's more concern about how much control you have over the topology, caching details, etc.
But for simpler websites and apps, the Cloudflare stack is tremendously easier to work with than anything AWS offers, waaaaaaay faster (especially for cold starts), and usually much cheaper.
Workers isn't a 1:1 replacement for Lambda, but it's probably the better choice for simpler functions.
As for this database connector, it goes against their edge-native offerings, but it's probably just there as a compatibility layer for people who aren't able to rearchitect their whole stack yet. Like their other CDN products, this lets you connect legacy stacks (single host or single data center) to a global CDN with little work.
You can get similar caching by making a bunch of distributed read-only database shards and/or caching your HTTP proxy output, but in this case Cloudflare manages all that for you. You do have to set up a tunnel and apparently some sort of daemon, though, so I guess you're just running Cloudflare's proxy to their edge.
It's not as clean as an edge-native key-value store (like their Durable Objects or Workers KV), but if your existing code requires a relational DB at scale, this might be one way to tackle it rather than dealing with DB sharding and clustering yourself -- which can get real ugly, real fast.
In the last decade or so, we've seen Apple flip-flop their designs and priorities between content creators and content consumers. If you can remember back to the 2000s, with the first-gen Mac(book) Pros, those were actually pretty remarkable computers, albeit very expensive and arguably overpriced from a performance per dollar standpoint. They were proper workstations -- if you could afford them. They also ran Windows via Boot Camp, with first-party drivers. Apple recognized the incremental value of supporting "advanced users" then, even if it was just a small niche.
Then the iPhone and iPad came on the scene, and quickly overtook not only the Mac market but the computing market in general. Content consumption, and App Store profits, thus became most of Apple's revenue, and their priorities shifted accordingly. Once Jobs died and Jony Ive took over, they tried to refactor their computing devices to be more like their consumption devices, changing the Macs from workstations to, I don't know what, designer furniture with screens? The Mac Pro (trash can) was obsolete within a year, the Macbook Pros went from fantastic workstations to experimental art featuring terrible keyboards and no ports and broken-by-design cooling.
Enter the present day. Jony Ive left (good riddance!) and they are again free to pursue the content creator market and cater to user demands, not the holier-than-thou vision of their annoying designer. The Macbook Pro is back with a vengeance (hopefully the desktop Pro soon), now featuring a vastly superior chipset, with a powerful & efficient CPU/GPU, ML chips, hardware encoders, etc. If only it had a USB-A port. Anyway, those are all signals Apple is starting to take the workstation market more seriously again.
The market has also changed in the intervening years. Any ol' laptop will suffice for most users. For some, iPads with a keyboard or Chromebooks are more than enough. For the remaining power users, what are their options? Surface, ThinkPad, Latitude, and now Macbooks again, finally. But that requires accommodations for "pro" workflows and tooling, and these early signs are encouraging, or they wouldn't have bothered much past the Macbook Air.
If Apple was able to support Boot Camp for Windows, there's no reason they can't provide similar support for other ARM operating systems, whether that's Linux or Windows for ARM. Parallels can already run Windows on a M1. Adobe has ported much of their stuff over to M1, Unity is halfway there, Unreal is thinking about it, Docker works... which is to say, the industry is excited about the possibility that Apple is going to start caring again. Hopefully. Maybe.
Personally, I'm also intrigued by the possibility of M1 in data centers, in rack mounts, with amazing performance/watt metrics. If that happens, surely Linux development on M1 will pick up alongside, and that may trickle back down to desktop users? One can hope. I don't think Apple has ever been in this situation before: where its own chips (as opposed to integration and design) risk disrupting the status quo. It's an exciting time. We'll see if it lasts...