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It is, and there's plenty of small communities built around them: https://tildeverse.org

And yes. Gopher is ususally included. :)

I'm neither a historian nor an economist, but as far as I know, there's been quite a few ups and downs like that throughout history, with Florence and Spain being the most prominent examples that comes to my mind. I'd guess that the major issue with going even further back is that there simply isn't enough detailed data.

Ah, that makes sense. I'm fortunate enough to live where we have unmetered SMS/calls/data so I've never had that issue (at least not while WhatApp's been around).

This. Some games would have a handful of different renderers for different setups, while other games would only support one specific card type (and if you were lucky, a software renderer).

Those days sucked. Bigtime. If we can avoid doing the same mistakes for machine learning then we should.

There was actually a scandal about that in Denmark recently. Some journalists managed to get new SIM cards for other people without proper authentication. Repeatedly and from different providers.

I just don't see the appeal. MMS works well for things like pictures, doesn't it?

That sounds like an excellent idea for a tiny project! :)

I sleep for 4-5 hours, get up for about an hour or so, and then try to sleep another 3-4 hours. Previously, I'd wake up after 4-5 hours and spend 2-3 hours trying to fall asleep again. An hour of activity during the night seem to be much more efficient as I get more sleep in total, and obviously feel rested afterwards.

Occasionally, I've stayed up, and while I've usually felt quite well for several hours without noticeable decreases in my cognitive abilities, I've been completely exhausted by lunchtime instead.

Perhaps it is an age thing?

Pretty much, yes. But the situation is even more messed up here in Europe and I am especially happy that I'm not a native German speaker.

It would cause a bunch of other problems, of course, but it would be nice if we could just have a bunch of languages with an EU flag next to them. At least from an UI perspective. :D

> Middle-class in developed countries, and largely specific to the United States

From what I've seen, it's a phenomena in most of the Western World, and not just in the States. But you are right, of course, and as I mentioned there are more people who are living under decent conditions now than 500 years ago and that applies world-wide. I have no doubt that we'll keep going in that direction for some time yet.

However, as save_ferris pointed out above, the groups that don't stand to gain from this won't care. They will be forced into a lifestyle that might not be terrible and which will be far better than their ancestors had 200 years ago, but which they cannot opt out from and which will still be far worse than their parents had.

But, considering the pandemic and the amount of war-mongering going on at the moment, I guess we should all consider ourselves lucky if we don't have to pay our food with bottle caps in 20 years...

> people care that it’s worse than it was 40 years ago

Agreed. And since we're currently in an unprecedentedly long period of prosperity it's only a matter of time before some people will be taking quite a few steps back.

My largest worry is that society will simply cease to have a purpose for some groups of people, while still preventing those people from trying another path. In the past such situations usually triggered large migrations of people, but at the moment, there isn't really anywhere for them to go. It's a situation that needs to be resolved within the next 10-20 years if we want to avoid civil unrest in the future.

I'd argue that the major change is that people often aren't allowed to benefit from their property the way they used to. That places us in a situations were we are limited in a manner that I guess could be compared to feudalism. I'd say it's a completely new thing though, humanity hasn't really done what we're currently doing before.

This time around it's the middle class that's taking the hit. Our consumption fuels the process that does result in a certain re-distribution of wealth, and yes, some of that does indeed reach the poorest. That's good. Most of the cash flows up though. The richer do become richer, and the middle class is probably going to be a thing of the past in 30-40 years. If we continue down the pre-COVID path then the middle class will be replaced by a consumption economy powered by debt, and where the richest own the debt and the rest will have to live a life constant work in order to pay their debt.

Mind you, this won't necessarily be a horrible existence; people will still have access to modern technology, will still have streaming services, phones and whatnot. Compared to how average people lived 500 years ago it will most likely be quite a step up.

The former middle class, on the other hand, will have much more limited freedom, and far less influence on their own situation compared to today.

Time to re-read "The Space Merchants" again.

Blogs aren't dead, but they've become a niche product the last 5 years. In 2006, pretty much every stay-at-home mom with an Internet connection would have a blog, but as social media gained more traction most of those with small reader numbers moved to those platforms instead, as they we're more efficient to reach small groups of acquaintances.

There are still a lot of blogs around, but they seem to be targeted at specific groups, with technically minded people and fashionistas being the two largest.

Yeah, it's annoying as hell. I especially despise when sites force me to manually select another country from a list, in order to get an interface in my native language.

The country selection itself is trivial, but often the content will be geo-specific as well, and you might end up with things like the wrong currency and so on.

In a very long-term perspective, this is pretty much it. Off-site backup -- we don't have any redundancy when it comes to our own environment.

There are also a bunch of other benefits but they pale in comparison to this one.

There's plenty of businesses selling business card web sites built on WordPress. They usually install it on whatever hosting the customer orders and then leaves the rest up to the customer.

For us techies, no, it doesn't really matter.

For average business owners who buy a WordPress template and some 5€ hosting in order to set up a business card web site on their own, on the other hand, it matters a lot. So if your project targets that group of people then PHP is pretty much the only option; anything more complicated than an FTP upload/MySQL import is pretty much to advanced for them and they generally aren't interested in learning new skills just to get a web site online.

This is the one thing that cannot be emphasized enough. Smart kids simply don't fit into modern society. Any kid who's ever tried to point out errors in the text book to their teachers can probably attest to that; teachers prefer silent and obedient kids and don't care much for that one odd-ball who whines about X or Y being wrong in the 10 year-old textbooks you need to use anyway.

Didn't that have an impact on the amount of listeners? Sounds like commercial stations must have taken a big hit.

Yes, and it will take weeks before we have decent numbers, so it's dangerous to draw any conclusions just yet.

The numbers aren't looking pretty, though: https://www.euromomo.eu/index.html

With luck, we'll find more Viking artifacts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greenland#Norse_set...