The internet changed my life
pointersgonewild.com
pointersgonewild.com
> I made the cold calculation that as painful as my life was, it was probably better than rolling the dice with the child protection services.
Yup. I too decided at age 11, choosing to live with the less bad parent.
And shortly thereafter, those decisions were made for me, resulting in the state putting me into foster care. Somehow I avoided the worst; while the 1st family was pretty much what you'd expect, I later lucked into a good family.
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I wonder how many of us there are. I've known so many runaways, beaten kids, sexually abused kids, kids with broken parents. And that's just in my wealthy, prosperous city. I can't imagine how much worse it is every where else.
I also marvel that somehow some of us find a way out, while seemingly most others get sucked into the abyss. So much human potential lost due to poor circumstances and stupid luck. It fills me with deep sadness.
And I wonder what the difference is. How are some able to escape their fate? If we can identify those success factors, maybe we can maximize chances for success. Could even be small measures, like how we now have suicide prevention hotlines, and resources for victims of human trafficking.
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I had many, many people help me over the years. People who had no reason to help, but did nonetheless. I call them my angels. People like a little league coach (who'd drive me to practice), a youth pastor (who mentored me), the foster family that raised me, etc, etc.
As society becomes harsher, more coarse, more dog-eat-dog, I worry that other lost kids won't have their own angels.
I don't have complete answers, but my capstone project in college involved interviewing a handful of people who volunteered in their communities to see if we could come up with some hypotheses about hooks to get more people to engage with their local communities.
My takeaway from the interviews was that people's reasons for volunteering were essentially intrinsic, not extrinsic. One guy had benefited from books donated to his prison so felt he should pay it forward after he was out. A mom volunteered in activities her kids were engaging in. Someone else volunteered as a way of staying socially active. There _were_ clear motivations, but not something you'd likely have much luck leveraging en masse without knowing someone's history and what they personally cared about.
However, you can maybe approach the problem preemptively by creating an environment that creates the sorts of people who will give back to their community (maybe being a good foster parent to a kid who decides it's important to be a good faster parent to someone else). It's not fool proof - even good parents can see their kids go bad - but it's a start.
With the modern design of communities with powerful governments, you will only find small pockets where people have chosen to come together for some higher purpose like religious communities. And yes of course small/random exceptions to these rules will exist, but this is how it works at scale.
Start to break down those personal interdependencies (and remove some of those self governing mechanisms at the same time too) by inserting shortcuts around them - like substituting resources from government - and you start to see things break down.
Just look at the effects of welfare on minority communities. Disincentives for young women from getting married and you have generations of kids, especially young males, without the influence of a father - and the results of that are pretty apparent. As others point out, even crappy parents are often way better than the alternatives.
The middle class of the black community in particular was rapidly expanding post WWII - until the "great society" welfare programs kicked in, with pretty devastating results - to them, anyway. It was a boon for politicians who now had power over an ever growing and dependent base.
Take Silicon Valley. Segregation was legal and often preferred there until 1964 so the growing Black middle class was systematically denied entry in the 1950s to the growing job potential there. How many Blacks worked at HP in 1960s, or Intel in 1970s? How many Blacks worked at a mechanic shop or a cleaning service or a coffee place or any auxiliary business in Silicon Valley in the post WWII era, so their children could gain a foothold in the schools and the massive wealth creation engine? How many Black dental hygienists were there in Santa Clara county? Secretaries? Schoolteachers? Firefighters?
How many Black friends did Steve Jobs have in grade school in the 1960s?
This is obviously not a post advocating for Jim Crowe. But it is a post that is asking for an explanation as to why blacks are doing so much worse compared to whites today than they were during Jim Crowe. Do you believe we've gotten more racist?
Also, none of your claimed income statistics are sufficiently granular to start a discussion since the average Black American worker may be something like 10 years younger than the average white American worker and also a weighted average by county of residence shows that Blacks live in places with lower wages compared to whites.
Edit: you're not wrong that social problems have changed and some could be due to government interventions but you paint a broad brush that is not accurate and sounds like a talking point blurb
In turn, does this mean we can extrapolate and figure out whether or not more social safety net containing countries, like say the nordic countries, do they have a lesser sense of community than somalia?
I've long assumed that financial insecurity leads to all sorts of bad outcomes. Alcoholism, abuse, suicide, etc. The damage spanning generations and very hard to heal.
So I support any and all efforts to improve that security. Universal healthcare, universal childcare, affordable housing, living wages, parental leave, small business loans. Name it, I probably support it. In other words, Nordic style social democracy, or whatever it's called.
But in truth, I don't actually know that kids in Denmark and Norway do better than in my home state. Overall.
I feel like this is something I should know. I have friends who work on progressive policy issues. So I know tidbits. For instance, that generously investing in preschool greatly improves the lifetime outcomes of those kids.
But I don't even know where to look for population level comparisons. And my quick foraging online was fruitless.
Are you aware of any organizations or collections of individuals that are responsible for more child abuse and death than the governments of the world?
I see cultural variances, wealth correlations, etc. But never have I seen a program or simple set of programs that looks anything like a silver bullet on child abuse.
You could probably convince me of some programs that are beneficial (even if not a silver bullet), you are unlikely to be able to convince me that the benefits outweigh the costs of death and suffering to children from things like war, sanctions, food tariffs, etc. The state is always the biggest abuser.
Providing schools and health care is morally equivalent to waging war?
I confess that I'm struggling to follow your reasoning(s). Government is just coordinated action, no? So then what is the state? Just a coordination strategy you oppose?
All your objections are very confusing.
The state providing it's citizens a basic foundational safety net is a good thing. There are tons of things that have broken down social cohesion, but safety nets are not one of them. Have a look at the scandi countries.
Cherry picking a few of the wealthiest countries in the world that are racially and culturally homogeneous is not very helpful. One of those scandi countries just announced suicide pods where you can go kill yourself because so many people want to.
It's fine to say the social programs are worth the cost, but don't deny the cost.
Second: I googled this. Some inventor in Switzerland hires an independent consultant to see whether his euth booth is legal. Switzerland is not a scandi country. This is not legal approval by the government.
Third: Sweden has just as high percentage of foreign born population as the US. If anything I would argue american cultural identity is much stronger than Sweden's. Racial and cultural homogeneity is such a tired and lazy argument against safety nets I won't even bother to address it. It's a non sequitur at this point.
I chose this at 13, but due to his new spouse and her opinions about proper gendered behavior, it meant I had to move and lost all the adults who were supporting my programming. I was supposed to like clothes, make-up, and have feminine hobbies, so no more electronics gifts and no more access to the classes and meetings that the larger community had. (I moved from a metro area of 500k to a town of 2k).
I still worry if it would have been better for my career to stay and accept the greater abuse, which is fucked up. Am I deflecting responsibility and blaming others for my own failures? Etc.
> As society becomes harsher, more coarse, more dog-eat-dog, I worry that other lost kids won't have their own angels.
I'm hoping I can be one. I'm trying to be a good adult, and I want to work with foster teens eventually.
Wondering if growing up in a more supportive environment would have helped you advance more quickly is a perfectly reasonable question, that’s not “blaming others for your failures”.
Don’t be so hard on yourself, it sounds like you were placed into a very difficult set of circumstances.
> Am I deflecting responsibility and blaming others for my own failures?
No. You were forced to make a decision. You did the best you could.
You did not fail. You survived. You're still here. Fighting. Trying to become the person you were always meant to be.
Doubt, rumination, self-examination can all be helpful. Those of us without good role models have to work harder to figure out which way is up.
I only encourage you to not dwell too long on the past. Like I've done. There's only such much juice to squeeze from those turnips. After a time, you'll be better served by looking forward.
I think that is a big assumption to make for someone we don't know well. I do believe some unique experiences can have a huge effect on individuals and other experiences might not replicate the same results.
In fact, I'll concede it is even possible that you have to work not to isolate yourself when, after dipping your toe into the internet, you trip into the rabbit hole.
One of the big problems is that we do care for the conversation on these forums (see also the classic "somebody is WRONG on the internet" xkcd), but we don't really care for each other. Relatively few of us end up actually meeting offline or ever establishing real relationships. So you get the illusion of socialization, but when the chips are down, nobody is going to care in your hour of need - which means you're indeed alone shouting into the void.
This was maybe less pronounced in the '90s, when internet groups were smaller and tighter. It's like sitting at some cafe on a small square talking to strangers - where in the past you'd be talking to the small cast of regulars, because the square was a bit hidden away from the main flow of people, but it has been since discovered by tourists, and now you're just chatting with passersby you'll never meet again, about topics you'll never do anything about.
I mean I don't think I'm that far out there, these activities cost a lot of mental energy and leaving my comfort zone, and I like to think that thanks to the pandemic, a lot more people have become OK with being at home.
Anyway yeah, the internet was my social life, it's where I met my live-in girlfriend, it's where I spend my spare time, it's fine for me.
It isn’t too late to hang up the phone.
I don't actually do that much for mental stimulation anymore. HN doesn't do it for me anymore since three quarters are about technology or industries I'm far removed from, plus I never liked the SV culture of overhyping and grinding out startups to fish for early retirement. It's that culture that gave us the gig economy and that encourages the sigma male grindset bullshit where if you don't work 16 hours a day maintaining a healthy daily balance of soylent, melatonin, LSD and meditation you're not cool enough.
HN is better because there are other internet olds here and more of the content is interesting, but as somebody with MS, the sigma male grindset thing gets under my skin because there's an undercurrent of 'If you do these things, you can ward off insecurity or poverty' and there are cases where that's just not true. Plus the ability to do those things often relies on external support, which for some reason just isn't mentioned when people talk about how they've worked to get where they are. (Which I'm not discounting; it's just that two people can put in the same effort and get drastically different results.)
It's a mindset for people in their 20s or people who can outsource most life activities.
Definitely; results come from: effort, ability, luck (or timing), choices and starting resources.
However, after begging my therapist for help with my doomscrolling, I deleted the Reddit app. We'll see if I end up resorting to blocking HN somehow.
HN is still a great place to understand the ideology of Silicon Valley and its industry. I’ve never left Europe and this forum seems to give me an edge about what’s happening here.
I've since matured to avoid citing HN when referencing anecdotes (instead saying "I read once that..."), being agnostic about where one works (as long as it fits your personal career goals), and trying to also develop my worldview through well-regarded classic books.
Reddit is a large wasteland, and comment interactions very often turn sour.
I recommend his lectures to all, especially if you don't want to take psychedelics. He mainly speaks about buddhism, altough he was connected to counter culture movements in the 60s and with LSD
I feel like it would be very interesting, and I would probably even be ready to pay for someone to carefully pick interesting content, as I often feel like scrolling for hours only to find one great article (like this one was for me) is a huge price to pay.
This could even go for books. I try reading as much as possible, but it seems like 98% of books I find randomly recommended to me could easily fit into 10 pages, but instead they get drawn out into infinite repetitions because that's the only way nowdays to sell books. If someone was willing to charge me for a well-curated list of books with well written synopsis and a good indication of "Is it worth reading the whole thing even when you know the overall idea", I'd be a happy customer.
Maybe there are people on Substack doing this?
YMMV but I honestly felt much better nearly immediately. My life didn’t change in any macro sense - same job, same relationships etc, but baseline mood improved.
Again YMMV, and I’m loathe to say Facebook or Reddit or Twitter or anything is bad or evil or even addictive. I’m not a crusader. But for me going on Facebook for an hour subjectively made me less happy than not going on Facebook.
Reddit is more about simple time-wasting and dopamine hits.
Yes, there are certainly aspects of computers, the internet and especially social networking and instant-texting that have a net negative impact on our lives.
But this argument strikes me as a "I'm such a victim" argument. Surely if you allow some device to have such a massive negative impact on your life then this would be the case even pre-90s before computers and the internet became mainstream?
- Maybe you might have spent too much time hanging out at your local bar? - Perhaps you'd have been addicted to television?
The one area, where I wholeheartedly agree and recognize the serious dangerous of the internet and computer devices is in children. The threat of cyber-bullying and indeed, rather more subtle, the attention-seeking culture of always producing content at a young age is IMO, very scary when thought of in the context that these will be future adults who didn't know better. We need to guard against these enabled social pressures like we protect kids from smoking, drugs, alcohol and even to a lesser extend (i.e. it's not illegal) addictions to things like TV, video games and other behaviors that they might fall prey to.
I guess, summed up what I am saying is: It appears that there the internet has developed a predatory nature on one's attention that extends to threaten one's social status and reputation.
Where I disagree is that - as adults - we know better and can combat this with self-discipline and by choosing our friends/social circles wisely (I don't engage with friends who constantly text or post online. I'm happy to meet but they know not to expect my participation there).
Where I agree is that, children are vulnerable to this and must be protected AND TAUGHT how to treat / interact with the internet.
Unfortunately, since this is relatively a new thing in society. We have not yet developed a solid culture around what is acceptable and what is not. Just like it is inconceivable now to smoke inside a closed room, or someone's house, I do hope that in the future it would be inconceivable to upload compromising information/pictures to random servers in foreign countries. But alas, we are not there yet.
Yes, but we are not living in the pre-90's. The internet is the TV/bar/etc. for us now. Some of us recognize that we not only gained but lost something as well.
And we want what we lost back.
I guess my stance is more kind of to protect my mental sanity, to try and make this a "self-discipline" problem that I can control, and hence reduce my exposure/time online. That suits me but I do agree that to some degree there needs to be a wider societal change and I do agree that it can't all be placed on the individual to be super strong mentally when the internet is now literally a life necessity for operating in society in any dimension.
I think a lot of social validation once came easy by mere virtue that we lived so closely to one another, and suburbia flipped that on it's head. Once it was the case that social activity required a) transport, b) money, c) time, it has become increasingly devoid from weeknights. We could remedy this by changing physical structures, but we won't.
The DMV feels to me like the only place now where I share a seat with people not like me.
The mechanisms of addiction and socialization are definitely more complex than "it made me do it". I'm not saying that without the internet I would have become World President, but the technology definitely nudged me towards indulging some of the worst traits in my character. It also allowed me to tolerate situations that, probably, I should not have tolerated - which feels good in the immediate but can actually postpone a necessary reckoning. And it heavily influenced my career choices, with mixed results.
> Maybe you might have spent too much time hanging out at your local bar? - Perhaps you'd have been addicted to television?
Maybe, but those are well-known behaviors, fairly easy to spot and compensate for. Bars are actually hypersocial and promote local connections and some degree of personal expression. TV is very passive and boring, whereas on the internet there is always something new to read or do.
It wasn't until the '80s that we got a fairly solid (and popular) understanding of the mechanisms of broadcasting, some 60 years since it had become mainstream; as you said, there are a lot of things we don't know about the new world of 24h online access. Undoubtedly my life choices are ultimately my fault, but "no man is an island" cuts both ways - particularly because I see a lot of my (bad) experiences replicated in a lot of my friends.
I guess it's not as simple as boiling it down to the individual's own self-control. To some degree maybe my stance is also biased in that I want to empower myself to be the one to reduce my time online.
Curious what you mean by "the mechanisms of broadcasting" here--what discovery/formalization/legislation/else do you mean?
This is always an interesting discussion to me as one of the first kids to really grow up online. (It still weirds me out that my childhood is illegal now.)
> Unfortunately, since this is relatively a new thing in society. We have not yet developed a solid culture around what is acceptable and what is not.
Also unfortunately, I doubt we will until Gen Z and Gen Alpha grow up and start having their own kids. I didn't really start to reckon with the bad parts of growing up online and the ways that it may have shifted my development until I was in my 30s and starting to see the same behavior in current kids and realizing 'wow, that was f'ed up.' Right now, there just aren't many adults who can speak to spending a shit ton of time online as pre-teens, and kids can smell inexperienced bullshit a mile away.
The other possible outcome is that the curriculum/culture for this will be written by people in power who have no idea what being a child on the internet is actually like + it will be written as a political football, so it will be completely ineffectual.
All of which to say I have no idea how I ought to organize life around computers differently.
I'll give you an example of something I've done recently which has made a big difference. Although, I don't have ideas on how to apply this to other aspects of my computer use (but open to ideas).
I listen to a lot of music. My teenage years/20's revolved completely around music. But I've gotten to a point where Apple Music/Spotify have become like Netflix to me - I have so much choice I don't know what to choose. I like to buy vinyl but it's expensive and not practical for most of my daily listening. I thought about it and realised that, for me, the time when music and technology merged for the best overall experience was the iPod (pre-Touch). I would mostly listen to albums I bought via iTunes (i.e. I cared enough about them to spend money and would listen to them a lot) and I checked out new music via Spotify (which was available in the UK in maybe 06/07) and then bought the stuff I liked on iTunes so I could take it with me on my iPod.
So I bought an iPod Classic on eBay. I deleted all the music I'd 'added' to Apple Music over the years leaving only my pre-streaming purchases (I also signed up for iTunes Match to backup and sync all my Bandcamp purchases + vinyl download card tracks). I've went back to my system of Spotify for new stuff, purchasing new stuff on iTunes, and syncing it to my iPod. It weirdly feels like a burden has been lifted having so much unnecessary choice removed. It's giving me a chance to get obsessed with the stuff I like again instead of quickly moving on to the next thing the algorithm throws at me. I highly recommend it. Currently thinking of ways I can apply this elsewhere in my life (e.g. purchasing TV/movies on iTunes instead of using streaming services but this could get very expensive very quickly).
My only purchases now are through bandcamp or at concerts.
counterpoint: my entire social scene, and all of my best friends, came from a subculture that I found on an internet mailing list, on a listserv run by the guy who made the Apache webserver. A bunch of my other friends came from IRC.
If it weren't for the 'net, I'm not sure I'd have any good people in my life at all.
I immediately found it exciting and grasped how transformative it would be, and quickly got to work learning web development and finding material and communities related to my interests (mostly obscure Australian rock bands). It's been the platform for my career ever since, and has also enabled me to go deep learning about some unusual health and emotional challenges that had afflicted me since early life, and enabled me to make profound changes to my health and wellbeing, leading to the place I'm at now, with a solid career, great relationship and a wonderful young son.
When I think about the person I was and the path I was on when I finished high school, it's hard to imagine how it would have turned out well had I come of age in a different era.
Which is not to say life has been easy or simple; quite the opposite, and the internet has no doubt made life more complicated and challenging in many ways, My life has had several major ups and downs that probably wouldn't have been as pronounced without the internet. But I still have no doubt at all I'm in a much better place than I'd have been without it.
Since I moved to a smaller town here in northern Finland from the heart of Germany, thanks to the internet I feel no less connected to communities, teachers (MIT, Harvard, etc. as I’m doing my masters degree) and friends than before.
You have to balance the negative and positive sides and control yourself. I think it’s a huge net positive though as becomes obvious from this thread.
Besides all the talks, I will never forget what he told me. Something in the lines of — anyone from anywhere can do anything they want for anyone anywhere. I would spend hours reading the magazines he bought, and tinkering with his computer.
It wasn’t until 1999 that I was introduced to the Internet and (maybe) another 5-7 years for him. Well, I felt right at home on day-zero, and I knew that changed everything for me.
- Specific websites for Half-Life mods run by a group of people from different parts of the world with a creative name (now you have to go to a subreddit or discord with a generic name, because of SEO?) - Specific website to follow all the news about my favourite soccer team, visiting every hour or two hours to see if they updated something. Now Twitter (Instagram later) has stolen that urgent sense. - Am I waiting for a new movie? Let's update the forum that I regular visit to see if the studio released a new trailer in .mov format and different resolutions. When it's done, send the link to my friends over MSN. Now it's on YouTube and I get a notification.
Those dumb websites were the best and I am glad people like us spent their teen years creating them. Not only because I learnt a lot (and now I am a professinal thanks to them), but also because I think we give enjoyment to a lot of people around the world just because of it.
What would I bring from 2022 back to 1999?
Our robust Wikipedia. archive.org. Stackoverflow. YouTube. Github.
Maybe just those?
Can we take HN instead?
I'm sure there was plenty, judging from ancient IRC logs that drift by occasionally. But maybe those were saved because they were still the exception.
The kids from back then were also raised in a directly-connected environment (the only non-direct communication was via snail mail, or "mail" as it was called), so they'd get corrected much sooner for violating the social contract in some way. Most children quickly learned to keep their unkind thoughts to themselves. The kids today are growing up with all manner of indirect connections, which both have fewer opportunities to correct behaviour and even if those corrections do happen, they're unlikely to have as much effect (if any) as real-life direct feedback.
Also, the Internet wasn't "popular" back then so if people were bored, they'd hang out and troll somewhere else, like a mall or a parking lot. The Internet was mainly inhabited by serious people back then, I guess.
That's my two cents, at least. In today's currency, not inflation-adjusted.
The more things change…
We’ve recreated that online. There was a brief golden age when only the early adopters were online with visions of a digital utopia and now it’s just like real life but crazier.
The same thing will happen if we go to mars. It will just be the same stuff just on another planet.
Wherever you go, there you are.
If there are genetic propensities to whatever would make someone healthy enough to travel to Mars, intelligent enough to run the machines, yet disconnect enough from Earthbound society that they wouldn't mind leaving the planet, that is what Martians would generally be like.
All sorts of cultures, online and off, involve members policing the ingroup for transgressions against the internal culture.
Language isn't "questionable", its usage is. There's no such thing as a bad word.
The culture of the internet (and, as a subset, that of 2022 mass social media in the english-speaking world, which is itself a subset of internet mass social media) is mostly not because of the internet, but because of the participants and the state of the wider world. The internet isn't responsible for wokeness, it's just the medium through which this particular human culture phenomenon travels.
I don't think you hate it, otherwise you'd do something else.
It would be really cool if it were somehow possible to pin down the time this was aired on TV and identify the full bulletin.
I wonder if the author remembers the rough time period this happened within. Even a span of months to years doesn't produce an intractably-sized search space.
I grew up in an extremely rural area of the Midwest. Town so small it didn't even have a stoplight. One school served three villages, grades K-12. You were considered rich if you didn't buy your groceries with food stamps. As a teen, if you didn't have a job (which was impossible to get if your parents didn't give you a car), the only things to do with your free time were watch TV or hope one of your friends was willing to pick you up and hang out. Nobody from there went to college. The brightest ones went to trade school.
The best thing my mother ever did for us was buy a computer we could barely afford, and then eventually subscribe us to dial-up Internet once it came to our town. I always liked computers and electronics but reading about things in books and magazines only takes you so far. It was until I could actually _look things up_ and see what others were doing that I became halfway proficient at computer hardware, operating systems, and programming. My crowning achievement while I was still living at home was downloading two dozen floppies worth of Slackware Linux and managing to make it dual-boot with Windows 98.
Today I live in a decent-sized city, have two decades of tech career under my belt, a very solid financial situation, and a great family. My parents did their best but the mid-90's Internet (and beyond) is what got me here and I'm forever thankful for that.
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I just want to add that Maxime is the genius who wrote Turing Drawings, one of my personal all-time favorite uses of the computer ever.
https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/
https://pointersgonewild.com/2012/12/31/turing-drawings/
It's worth looking at the code too, IMO. It made me realize that JS could be beautiful.
https://github.com/maximecb/Turing-Drawings
- - - -
You rock Maxime!
The internet now is a double edged sword. You can learn a lot from it, you can give or get help, you can do things that you couldn't just a few years ago. But you can also get helplessly addicted to things you find there, spending years looking for a dopamine hit that you perhaps thought was on the other side of the sword.
Currently I'm leaning towards adopting a much more rigorous attitude towards time spent online. My short list is : (1) have specific goals for each online session, (2) don't get sucked down distracting rabbit holes, (3) spend at least as much time reading books as reading online content, (4) try to spend as much time on physical activity as on mental activity, (5) don't just be a passive absorber of information, try to create things as well.
As far as online social interaction as a substitute for offline human interaction, I don't think it's that great of an idea, particularly for children and young adults, but some people do appear to benefit greatly from it in some circumstances, so I remain neutral on the topic.
Today's Internet is whatever you want make of it. And to me at least, that's what makes it so exciting.
At the risk of oversharing this has so many similarities to my own story, only time shifted a little earlier, pre-web. Most things were telnet,ftp,uucp,netnews.
I had read an article in Byte Magazine about the Transputer, so wrote an email, I think this was literally the Unix mail command, I wrote this email to the author and we chatted a bit about the Transputer. I'd stay up late at night, calling into a long distance Unix machine on the internet. It only lasted a couple months until I was busted for the phone charges.
You can still basically email/chat with anyone in the world.
I had a similar experience. I watched a YouTube talk about using stacked k-means to do deep learning without artificial neurons (deep learning without neural networks). I found that super fascinating and I had a bunch of questions, so I managed to find the author's email (public because he was an academic) and we chatted about his research for a while. It was amazing being able to talk directly to the researcher.
Continue to make the world a better place by just being you.
*edit, We really should foster a better culture of making these kinds of contacts. Even if occasionally we get snubbed I have found most people to be delighted that someone is interestin their work.
"1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."
Maturity can be a real bitch. We'll be seeing a lot more guardrails and walled gardens. People that have become accustomed to (and thrived in) the "Wild West" nature of early Internet, will throw tantrums, but it will be for naught.
I definitely couldn't do my work, without the Internet, a persistent, high-speed connection, and a whole lot of folks that contribute to various sites out there. I often have to google even the most basic stuff. Because of the Internet, these sidebars seldom take more than about five minutes. I do it several times a day.
I have a Facebook account that I barely use. The place is a cesspool. I just keep it, because I need to help support a technical initiative that has a fairly prominent Facebook presence.
What struck me most about her story, is how little help her mother got. Sadly, I am familiar with exactly that type of mental disease, and know how destructive it can be, and how treatable it is, nowadays.
It would probably not be here, without the Internet. It would certainly not be as lucrative, or as easy.
In the end, I decided that I do have a story to tell, and I don't care about the judgment. These things shouldn't be stigmatized, the stigma is what prevents people from getting help, and the only way to remove the stigma is to talk. So I wrote the story up one evening two weeks ago. Then I had a few friends proofread it by sharing with them on Google Doc. Then I finally decided to post it.
Because my blog is focused on tech, I focused more on the tech angle when telling the story. I knew that would appeal to my audience more, but I think it's only fair, because tech has been a huge part of my life. It's a huge part of what makes me get up in the morning.
I know it can be difficult as a child to see through the flaws of a troubled parent, it's difficult to feel more than resent when you have to live through it night and day - an occasional glimmer of their vulnerability might open your eyes as child, that they are just another human struggling like you, but it can be fleeting.
I've been in a similar but far less extreme situation. With time it's possible to appreciate what was essentially a dysfunctional yet supportive parent, she was clearly a well intentioned, good person trying to do the right thing. As much as her mental health troubled her, she clearly cared far more than many better positioned parents out there.
"His"?
I hold much more sympathy for the author. Hopefully all involved have gotten the help they need, but in perspective this person did little to change it sounds like and deprived the author of a loving household. Those who survived violent upbringings from parents understand.
I went to school in canada and I'm not sure I'd call it "low" (especially when you're a broke student) but I don't have any number to compare it to. I went to uni in the 2010's and I remember it being like 8-10K/year or so for engineering.
What's the average price elsewhere? I think in the UK it's mostly paid for through taxes?
The Network is the Computer.
For some like me it's the Memex, for many it's the Panopticon.
Today there's a lot of negative discourse about the internet and the post-truth world it creates, but people have to keep in mind on the other hand it had and has an incredibly liberating effect for a lot of people.
I think people forget the incredibly huge role internet has in terms of openly available knowledge.
In my opinion the majority of negativity around internet is from the general public and about the websites that the general public uses aka. facebook, twitter, instagram, ...
This has became even more apparent when I started teaching computer science to students and adults. The most noticeable was their inability to use Google, actually being able to find information online.
Techy people quite often forget that, since we're so used to solving problems.
Imagine programming without internet... <insert stackoverflow joke here>
I remember how (thanks to the internet) in the late 90's, I started listening to English music and playing video games without knowing any English.
A few years forward I had much better English than all of my classmates, but without putting any work in.
Then, I learned Spanish also online and moved to the Central America.
Anyway, I still wonder if my old classmates aren't better off in that small village since they don't really know about the huge and complicated world that's outside of their country. Having a few friends that live a few hundred meters from your house and working as a plumber seems liberating in a way.
Maybe ignorance is bliss?
It also has a pretty nice design too.