I would definitely read a blog (or just follow up comments) about a technology orientated person jumping forward almost a decade in time and what they find really different.
Are you a professional developer? Has framework churn been an issue?
Are you a professional developer? Has framework churn been an issue?
Development, though, has been a bitch since I got out a couple of months ago. I want to use the latest frameworks, but I'm starting from zero again. None of the old frameworks even exist. I feel like I'm 5 years old again.
The code I've written in the last few weeks has all been very old fashioned! I just needed to get the job done.
I had zero access to the Internet in all that time. The biggest thing I found was TikTok. I fucking love TikTok. From the inside we would see the occasional video on the news, but it just looked like it was to make videos of people dancing, but it's actually fucking awesome for those of us with "neurodiversity".
One last thing - out of the, like, 1000 online account I had... only 2 were accessible once I got out. Wikipedia and eSnipe. Can't get into anything else. Don't have ready access to the email address used on a lot of them. The others have an email address on a domain I own, but I can't change the nameservers because I can't get into the account, but my friend paid the domain fees while I was locked up, so I still "own" the domain. I can't get anything back as the court owns all the identity documents that I have and won't let me have them. In fact, when I asked a couple of weeks ago they said they have no idea where they put them all.
Oh, and everything is SSL now. That wasn't a thing in 2013.
Any other questions, fire away. It's a fascinating topic. I do feel like I teleported 8 years into the future.
> it's actually fucking awesome for those of us with "neurodiversity".
Can you expand upon that a bit?
How engaged were you with social media before your sentence, and has that (or will that) change now that you've had some space from it?
> we would see the occasional video on the news
How does the picture that the media paints of the internet & social media compare to your observations now that you're able to use it hands-on?
The thing with TikTok is that there are tons of videos helping, supporting and bringing awareness to issues such as ADHD, OCD, Tourettes, differing sexualities, gender identity etc, that are really refreshing and have really helped me to understand myself and my neuro-problems that caused me to get locked up. No other social network has that type of content.
Facebook was huge in 2013 and still relevant. Now I barely use it at all. I think Facebook has some big problems. I don't want to say it will go the way of MySpace as Facebook has been much better at adapting than MySpace was, and Facebook has some way smarter people and more money. It might even come back into trend again in the future if their "Meta" projects take flight.
The media only really shows the goofiest or cutest videos from social media. Nothing of any real worth. So my view of TikTok was very fucked up. TikTok is different for every person that uses it since your For You page is based around how you interact with the videos it gives you. I get zero people dancing on my page, and a lot of really smart content.
Also, for the first five years I didn't have any access to the news, for security reasons, so I was very cut off.
What did they get you for?
I have an inkling of what you may mean, but I'd like to know more.
By moving the goalposts further and further away, we've made redemption effectively impossible & wiped out the strongest motivations for people to learn and improve from mistakes (penalized by justice systems).
This is perhaps not what you were expecting to be asked about, but I’m curious nonetheless. So when you reported to prison you had to hand in your passport, driver’s license etc? And now when you were released they claimed that they have misplaced them? How do you get new documents, family members vouching for you or something like that?
It's interesting thinking of the changes. I guess many of the current trends were well underway by 2013 so the current state would be different but not too different to you. At any rate, I'm glad you're out and hope you can sort the ID mess.
Design is much more responsive now, I'll give it that. Lots and lots of huge photographic headers. Hamburger menus? I'm guessing that is the name for the 3-line icon? They were pretty new in 2013 on mobile sites on my iPhone 5. And the 3-dot thing for "extra" options ... I don't remember that existing back then.
There is a reduction in information density.. some of it is warranted by an increase in white space which is good. A lot of sites now have super-intrusive advertising posted all the way through the copy, which wasn't common in 2013.
The sheer amount of data I burn through just browsing the Web.. that's a huge change. Even my mobile plan with 100GB of data gets burned in no time just browsing around. Sites are so, so heavy now. I saw that post yesterday about Discord having an enormous favicon file and so I can see that people just gave up trying to trim their code. I look at some HTML source now and I lose my shit because it is literally megabytes of bullshit. People were more careful with their code in my time.
One weird thing is that my brain doesn't know it is 2021 yet. I saw a show the other day where a woman said her son was born in 2011 and I did the maths and my brain said her son was two years old. This happens to me constantly. It's like my brain stopped counting time as soon as I entered the jail.
Other options include the Brave or Duck Duck Go browsers - similar features built in, but possibly less bookmark portability, etc
I just found out about Brave this week. It looks promising. I didn't know DuckDuckGo had a browser. I've been using the search occasionally. People say they can't switch from Google, but honestly their search quality is over-rated. They are really sanitizing their results more than the others recently. Even Bing is bringing back more results from really useful obscure sites than Google is.