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akkartikon Programming a GBA Game on an iPhone

Oh I love that. I program on my phone as well using LÖVE, though games aren't really my interest. My devlog at https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog is about recreating the feeling of typing in programs from magazines in the microcomputer/PC era. Only, you know, with copy/paste instead of typing in by hand.

akkartikon I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet

You're looking for Moss.

https://mastodon.social/@xmunch/115822364073874855

What protocols does your blog bridge to?

akkartikon HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago

HN has always had sucky bits, just like human nature. Everyone who thinks it's going downhill is just one of today's 10,000 [1] to discover some sucky corner of human nature.

I'd say the world has gone downhill much faster and is making HN look good in comparison.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053

akkartikon HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago

Found an older one, from 2011 :D

https://web.archive.org/web/20110225020957/http://al3x.net/2...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2252152

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Oh, oh, oh, 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=480831

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2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=259276

The birth of HN is lost in the mists of time, but our best guess is it happened about 3 months before it started going downhill.

akkartikon It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

Edit: thanks for toning it down. I will as well.

From the comment up above:

> I would imagine the Mac Neo is a sealed unit that you use as-is until it's e-waste.

So the "bar" is irrelevant to this conversation.

akkartikon It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

You're preaching to the choir, brother. But reread the comment I replied to. "Use as-is until e-waste" the Neo is not.

akkartikon It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

It's actually not bad. The rhetoric has had an effect over the years.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-r...

akkartikon GitHub bans security researcher who posted zero-day Windows exploits

Not to mention all the other people who find 0-days. Reputation matters a lot.

akkartikon Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS

Adtech isn't about showing ads. It's about targeting ads. And yes, if Gemini gets wildly popular maybe they'll think of something. Good problem to have! New mistakes instead of same old ones!

akkartikon Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS

Umm, see what problem this thread is trying to solve using markdown.

akkartikon Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS

You'll need to be more specific since there are many variants of Markdown and the original explicitly permits arbitrary html.

akkartikon Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS

Why is it that every criticism of gemini/gopher throws the baby out with the bathwater?

When you browse to a pristine html page containing zero adtech it contains links. Those links you might click on without first thoroughly vetting them for behavioral exhaust.

Hyperlinks are a vector for contagion. A new protocol creates isolation. What's wrong with both existing? Defense in depth at all levels, I say. You think https can't enshittify, maybe you just haven't waited long enough.

akkartikon Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS

You're right from the perspective of a website author, but the original comment I responded to is from the perspective of the protocol designer. There is no known way to design a protocol that can be used to create polished experiences without also letting some ingenious website suck up behavioral data.

> One can still be part of the solution without leaving the modern-standards-based mainstream altogether for the digital equivalent of an off-grid cabin in the woods.

So many judging words there. A new protocol is an off-grid cabin in the woods, but building a non-janky universally accessible website isn't? You'll have to prove you can get a random new website more traffic over https without doing nefarious shit and letting the big adtech companies crawl it.

akkartikon Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS

If you want to support cat pictures that show up without clicking a link, but prevent any behavioral exhaust from tracking pixels, that seems to be an open problem. Every new feature is like this: a risk surface until proven otherwise. So to reduce risk you have to limit features, i.e. jank.

akkartikon Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS

Wrt finger I want to point out https://plan.cat as a nice service in this spirit.

akkartikon Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS

You'd have to prove these things are possible in the face of the ingenuity of the entire adtech industry. The limitations you point out, on the other hand, have easy solutions:

* auth: Look at https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini#services Tons of services support some form of auth.

Edit: https://martinrue.com/station is another service I use that's missing in the above list.

* images: click to load

Janky but doable. Janky is the price you have to pay to avoid adtech.

akkartikon Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

That is an absolutely fascinating worldview. I don't know what country you're from and what pain and suffering you've been through that was caused by the US govt., but you've managed to get me to stop caring. Sparkling incompetence. While we're exchanging unenforceable opinions about what random people on the internet should do, you should go help your own country -- by leaving it.

Me, I'll continue doing what I want kthxbai.

akkartikon Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

Oh I agree so much.

akkartikon Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

Does it occur to you that we too are deeply affected? Stop piously telling a whole country of people how to live their lives.

akkartikon Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

That's a reasonable opinion for one to have, but it can coexist with humane timeframes for changing laws over time. Not grandfathering people already here for a change in policy of this magnitude -- this is inhumane.

akkartikon Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

As a naturalized American citizen, I hope the world extends Americans who leave the same hospitality the US extended for decades before the last year.

akkartikon The Letter S, by Donald Knuth (1980) [pdf]

I had a slightly different reaction, though I'm only going by what I read in this thread. It wasn't to replace art with technology for everyone, but to scratch a personal itch. He liked the artist-made typography just fine, but it was going away regardless and that was demotivating to him. I think this is in the finest tradition of hacks, even if it took decades.

akkartikon Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25

You mean the Endymion books, or Fall of Hyperion? I'm rereading the latter right now..

akkartikon Iran starts Bitcoin-backed ship insurance for Hormuz strait

Your first comment was good but here you're not responding to GP.

akkartikon They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker

"Did you watch The Matrix on cinema, without knowing anything about the movie?"

Yeah, that's what I mean. I went in not knowing anything, never having seen any trailers. And halfway through I went, "oh this is They Live, but the skeletons wear sunglasses."

akkartikon Google Search Is Down

What, people here still use it?

akkartikon They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker

I never found the Matrix very impressive, because I'd been inoculated by this movie.

akkartikon Unsigned sizes: A five year mistake

This article has been deeply influential for me: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

I used to imagine for someone in construction a wall must be some really simple thing. But it's only simple after millennia of building walls. So I now have lots of grace and patience for humanity to figure out numbers in computers, whether integers or reals.

Your explanation is possibly the same just in different words. It's a hard problem and probably needs a whole lifetime. But it's in no single person's economic interest to devote to it the time it needs (not to mention the diverse skills required; once one has a solution one has to pitch it to the world). And so it will happen over a hundred lifetimes.