demifiend

I've only been doing government-related web dev for a decade, but what about WCAG 2? Are accessibility guidelines not a design standard? They seem to cover issues like contrast, at least.

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

Is it really that hard to run your website through WAVE and fix the issues it identifies?

https://wave.webaim.org/

You don't even need the WAVE website; they provide add-ons for Firefox and Chrome.

> If you can't tell if something is sentient or not after an extensive interaction with it, then for all intents and purposes it's sentient.

I'm pretty sure my cat is sentient, but I don't take that to imply that it can consent to sex, since its spoken vocabulary appears to be limited to "meow".

Websites, RSS feeds, and email. Anybody who can't figure out how to run their own website can just do without. Social networking was a mistake. Human relationships and identity are not things that can be reduced to third normal form and stored in a database.

I feel the same, and TBH this site really isn't much better. It's a groupthink incubator just like Twitter and Facebook, and though I've only been here less than 12 hours I regret signing up.

I got into better shape during lockdown by buying secondhand kettlebells and working with them with my laptop mic muted during conference calls where I'm expected to listen without saying anything.

I'm already there and don't need this article. If hard work was enough, single parents with jobs would be billionaires.

Right, and people can't figure out how to do this by reading? Medium alone seems to have at least a dozen articles on how to build your own website, though I haven't bothered to read them and thus can't say whether they just suggesting using Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace (none of which actually count).

And what, exactly, is a "trained Marxist"? Can they quote chapter and verse of Capital and The Communist Manifesto from memory?

Having spent a few years on the Fediverse, I've found that "the left" in the US consists mainly of book clubs and struggle sessions.

The book clubs just read and debate theory ad nauseum. They're a joke, and if you gave most of them an AR-15 they'd shoot themselves in the foot.

The struggle sessions look for people slightly less poorly off than themselves to bully. If they can't find a right-winger, they'll happily go after somebody who's only 99.999% on board with their program. Failing that, they'll pick one of their own at random, accuse them of insufficient ideological purity, and bully them. They're a joke, too, only not quite as funny as the book clubbers.

I tend to look at things from an individual scale because I don't have the tools to do otherwise. Methodological individualism is my hammer, and so everything looks like a nail.

Why should the nmap developers change their license for IBM's convenience, since Fedora is a Red Hat product and Red Hat is now part of IBM? One might suggest that IBM needs nmap more than nmap needs IBM.

> Political parties should have to earn your vote every election rather than relying on a "force of habit".

That would be nice, but I've practiced "sucks less" voting since I was old enough to cast a ballot. I vote for the party that sucks less. I don't care for the Democrats, but I don't loathe them quite as much as I do the Republicans.

I'd rather not vote at all; I'm not convinced it does anything but rubber-stamp the continued existence of a government that neither represents the people nor serves the general welfare particularly well, but I continue to vote despite my doubts because I could be wrong about its futility.

> I mean we just got done watching Trump get labeled a terrorist merely for having a political rally.

I've been to political rallies. They don't typically involve storming government buildings and forcing elected officials to evacuate. If people are going to try to overthrow the government, it really ought to be for better reason than that a washed-up reality TV host can't accept the fact that he must settle for only getting one term as President of the United States.

I think you're this close to making an argument for publicly owned infrastructure or for regulating DNS providers and ISPs as public utilities obligated to serve as common carriers. Was that what you had in mind?

I see no need to cry for Josh Hawley when Regnery Publishing will most likely be happy to publish his book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regnery_Publishing

What if streaming multimedia on the web was a mistake?

What's wrong with downloading media and viewing it in an external player, like VLC?

First: good riddance. Let the neo-Nazis, fascists, and white supremacists make do with Stormfront or 4chan.

Second: regardless of your politics/beliefs, this is what people get for not self-hosting.

1. Putting your site on AWS is not self-hosting.

2. Putting your site on Github Pages is not self-hosting.

3. Putting your site on Cloudflare is not self-hosting.

4. Putting your site on shared hosting or a VPS like Dreamhost, DigitalOcean, Linode, or Vultr is not self-hosting.

Self-hosting means you pay for your own pipe, your own hardware, and your own space in which to keep the hardware, whether it's on your own premises or in a co-location facility owned by individuals sympathetic to your views.

Corporations don't exist to provide you with a platform for your views, especially if they're as repugnant as those frequently aired on sites like Parler. They exist to make a profit for their owners/stockholders, and if you hamper that mission they will throw you under a bus.

Whether this is right or wrong is irrelevant; corporations will do as they please unless the state governments that issue their charters (which in the US is mostly Delaware) start revoking them and dissolving corporations that abuse their power.

People keep forgetting that "the cloud" is just somebody else's computer, and that somebody else is NOT your friend or ally.

I don't see the value proposition here, and I certainly wouldn't use this even for my "professional" presence under my "real" name.

1. How is this different from https://about.me?

2. What advantages does this offer over a single-page website on one's own domain hand-coded in $EDITOR?

> Of course, it also mean, people have the right to criticize what someone else says, too, that is also important to have.

The right to criticize is part of the right to freedom of speech. However, you are not obligated to listen to your critics. You still have the right to ignore them, regardless of the merits of their criticism.

Give the kid a secondhand Thinkpad running OpenBSD, teach him basic shell, and tell him about the man command. He ought to be able to figure the rest out on his own.

> Why I must opt-out from selling my data?

Opt-out is more profitable than opt-in. If adtech had to make do with opt-in, it would starve to death for lack of data because most people make do with the default option and—as you pointed out—most people don't want to be stalked or to have their data rented out to every corporation that wants to send them an unsolicited sales pitch.

Also, opt-in is the advertising equivalent of self-reporting in polling. You're not getting a representative sample of the population.

Nazis, fascists, and white supremacists already have a safe space that nobody seems to care about knocking offline. It's called Stormfront, and it's not Mozilla's fault if a web forum running since the 1990s isn't good enough for ignorant hitlerjugend who mistake corporate-owned social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter for "the internet".

This reads like a paraphrase of David Graeber's "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" but with chan-speak loan words like 'brainlet' mixed in for flavor. Is the author trying to suggest that software development is a skilled trade but that most jobs in the trade are bullshit jobs best outsourced to Elbonia?

My idea of "meaningful work" is work that doesn't enrich anybody but me and the people I cherish. I'm not convinced this is something your product can help me find. Instead, it reminds me of a lot of the touchy-feely engagement stuff management pushed at Deloitte when I used to work there, stuff like "business chemistry" and their "strengths inventory".

This isn't a bad product, but it's not for techies like me. I just want to do the job and get paid. Meaning and emotional fulfillment are too important to trust to my employer.

I don't care if contact@ gets spam. That's what it's for. If I reply, it'll come from a different address on that domain.

I hope it helps. A woman I worked with a decade ago impressed upon me the importance of accessibility and sometimes I try to pay it forward.

I'm tempted to argue the value of SEO when to me it has come to mean catering to Google and trying to game its algorithms, but no. You're not wrong.

I can't and won't speak for anybody else, but if I wanted to provide random strangers with a free soapbox I wouldn't bother with a static blog. I'd just fire up a new Fediverse instance.

IMO, there's no need for comments. If people can't either send you an email or quote your blog with a link in their own blog, then they probably don't have much of value to say.

Whenever people do stuff like this, alternative text protocols like Gemini make more sense.

> The question is how do we go back to the old more free internet, or if anything how do we free ourselves from the yolk of the likes of Zuckerberg?

I'm already free from Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and their coterie of techbros nostalgic for the dominance of AOL over the internet ordinary people used. I have my own website, that I built myself on a domain I've registered, and my own email at my own domain. It's my HN username dot org, if you care.

The free internet is still here. There's nothing stopping you from building your own website, registering a domain, and renting a VPS to host it. Nor is there anything to stop you from rejecting GMail and Outlook for personal email and going with a provider that will let you use your domain. There's nothing stopping you from using RSS feeds to keep up with other people's blogs, or just bookmarking your favorites and visiting people's website's periodically.

All of the old tech is still here, waiting to be used. The only thing stopping you from taking advantage is you.

After all, Alex Jones still has infowars dot com. stormfront dot org is still online, offering a safe space for fascists. There's nothing stopping 45 from giving his kid a couple hundred a week in exchange for registering a domain and firing up a blog where he can say whatever he likes and nobody has to listen if the don't want to.

The problem is that the free/open internet isn't "good enough" for people who aren't content with free speech but think they're entitled to an audience. That's why the culture war has consumed social media. Right-wingers think they're entitled to an audience, and left-wingers think they have the right to set themselves as arbiters of who deserves to have their message distributed.

What neither side can agree on is that EVERYBODY has the right to speak and NOBODY is entitled to an audience. They don't understand that an individual's right to speak ends where everybody else's right to ignore him begins.

Yeah, it looks like somebody at Roku didn't think this through to me, too. Don't they have enough better-quality content that they don't particularly need Quibi's library? If Quibi themselves couldn't profit from these 10-minute episodes after spending $2 billion to make them, why do the people at Roku think they'll recoup their $100 million? Is there a tax angle we're not seeing?