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Comment by pmyjavec | Hacker News Reader

"Somewhere along the way, in the last OH GOD TWENTY YEARS, we – along with a bunch of vulture capitalists and wacky Valley libertarians and government spooks and whoever else – built this whole big crazy thing out of that 1990s Internet and…I don’t like it any more."

It was great fun before it all got so serious. Very funny and true ;)

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Only us engineers still see the internet as the internet.

To most of humanity, what it really is is the media, a communications medium, and a few other things. We sw engineers are the roofers, plumbers, and drywallers keeping this invaluable, rickety, incumbent-infested, ethically iffy edifice upright. Of course the work is grim, if you look at it in this (IMO correct) light.

Yup, I often joke about this, with colleagues too! Hack upon hack, paid for in chocolate bars and coffee, the internet is what it is.

I'm always tempted to classify the internet as a test network in our firewall documentation, because that can't be the production version.

I take your point. But I'm not at all convinced that the production version is going to be more fun.

All places have a test environment. Good places have a separate production environment.

Maybe it was when the Internet killed the newspaper that it was no longer fun and games.

It was the Snowden revelations that finally had a serious affect on me. I still enjoy creating things, but the internet has soured. Work is up and down, mostly down. A new job at the right place will fix that though.

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