jslabovitz

I don’t want to argue about magazines (or newspapers) in general, since it seems you have quite a cynical view there. I’d advise that you research common standards of journalism, including the concept of the editorial/advertising wall.

But I’ll tell you that the the existence of GNN itself, in 1993, was certainly not for the purpose of serving ads. Heck, as I explained, online advertising didn’t even exist at that time (besides a few misguided attempts on Usenet), so there was only conjecture that it might work at all, and lots of room to experiment.

Also, there was really no other economic revenue model accessible to us, other than sponsored content, as there were no online payment systems on the WWW of that era. Heck, there weren’t really any active websites at all — almost all sites (including GNN) were what we’d today call static sites. (As I mentioned, cookies came later, so there was also zero targeting of ads besides basic demographics of Internet users at the time.)

From the article:

> The very beginning of ad blocking is the 90s, just when the ads appeared. In 1993, GNN, the very first web advertising service, was launched. Then in 1994, the first-ever banner was sold. In the blink of an eye, the online ad industry was worth billions of dollars. Double Click emerged, Yahoo started to sell ads. And that's when the very first ad blocker was created.

GNN (Global Network Navigator) was not an advertising service. It was the first commercial online magazine. O’Reilly & Associates, the publisher of GNN, wanted to see if a website like GNN could be supported through commercial sponsorship. GNN’s ads were informational — much more like whitepapers than a display ads. (Wired’s HotWired site, which launched at almost exactly the same time as GNN in the fall of 1993, invented the banner ad, which of course is what most adblocking tech has targeted. Cookies for tracking didn’t come along until later.)

Source: I worked on GNN as technical director, and in fact my first job there, in the summer of 1993 about a month before we launched, was to assemble the first ‘ad’ — a set of articles about intellectual property law, sponsored by the now-defunct Bay area law firm Heller Ehrman.

Sony CDP-705ESD, Sony CDP-707ESD.

Ogle here: http://www.thevintageknob.org/sony-CDP-557ESD.html

> ... how choosing a song requires clicking stupid buttons, the delay after inserting CDs, the high pitched whine of the motor, the sound of the stepper motor as it moves the laser...

Some of the earliest CD players are superbly constructed — and have some of the best sound. I have a couple of Sony decks from the mid-1980s that are quiet, quick, and have excellent controls, complete with 20-odd direct buttons for individual songs. Playing a CD on these machines feels just as mechanically satisfying as playing a vinyl record. You have to spend some time & money finding them, but it’s not hard to pick up a top of the line 1980s player for a few hundred dollars. For me, it’s absolutely worth it.

Does no one here actually go out to see live music?

I’ve found much of my favorite music through going to shows of bands I liked, and discovering some amazing opening band.

I don’t know of any residencies/colonies that are specifically oriented towards programmers. Many (like VCCA & McDowell, mentioned in the article) are focused towards fine art, and often aren’t interested in technological projects. However, there are several hundred residencies just in the US, and definitely some that are more progressive towards welcoming artists working in new media, including programming.

I ran a small-scale residency (in West Virginia) for four years. I had a couple of more technically-oriented artists attend, including a music composer who was developing an interactive/generative system to be installed in NYC’s Highline park. She’d built a custom Arduino controller that interfaced with light sensors, and spent much of her three weeks at my place programming the algorithms (in Cycling74’s Max and C++, as I recall). We tested the installation one night in my woods with a bunch of friends exploring with flashlights.

Years before, I did a residency in San Diego (at a site now closed) where I spent a week developing some network software. I had to make some effort to explain to the folks running the residency why a programmer could use this sort of time, but it was definitely worth it.

One of my favorite tech-oriented residencies is Wave Farm, which encourages ‘new transmission works (artist works made with, about, and for the airwaves).’

Go here for a great directory of residencies: https://www.artistcommunities.org/residencies/directory

Most residencies are about making art in some way. That doesn’t mean you have to be a painter or writer, but it does mean that you need to be able to contextualize your work and consider how it might be socially useful or at least interesting. So if you decide to go this direction, spend some time understanding how other artists use this kind of experience, as well as what the residencies themselves are looking for.

I enjoy and appreciate Venkatesh’s Ribbonfarm writings, and other writings like his. While the cultural situations he’s writing about may be obvious, I appreciate his discovery and naming (‘jargon’) of the patterns he finds. You could look at it as developing an intellectual framework. I consider it a sort of contemporary philosophy, which tries to be both conceptual and actionable. Some of his essays have made me rethink major outlooks on my own life, and make important decisions. I think it’s important writing for our time.

Often his essays are essentially experiments in structures and definitions, a kind of ‘what if we looked at things this way?’ methodology. In answer to your question of jargon/jokes, yes, that’s his methodology. There’s a lot of serious stuff in there too, but he likes to have fun with the ideas, as well as try to integrate his words into modern (online) culture in useful ways.

Venkatesh wrote a related article a couple of years ago: ‘A Quick (Battle) Field Guide to the New Culture Wars’ (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/06/a-quick-battle-field-g...). He essentially proposes that the only way to understand the the culture wars is to see them as actual wars, fought using the logic of warfare, not of, say, diplomacy or social rationalism. This essay has been extraordinarily useful to me, and has helped me develop very different political stances and associated actions.

As this article itself suggests, I enjoy an information diet in moderation — some short, some medium, some long. Ribbonfarm is part of the medium/long diet, and I feel much better having read there.

EDIT: removed unnecessary criticism of parent]

What’s groundbreaking here is not really the technology but rather the marketing: Clearview is selling a relatively cheap product to law enforcement agencies who are desperate to solve cases at the lowest cost.

I think we (both here at HN and in the larger society) have this perception that police departments, etc., are part of a well-organized hierarchy of well-considered processes and technology that start at the FBI/NSA/etc and works its way down, all carefully vetted for technical and ethical standards, and disclosed to the public who is ostensibly their employer.

The reality that I’ve seen is quite different. As the article points out, individual police departments (and their officers!) often independently research and procure services, based on hearsay and questionable morals. Does the service help ‘get the bad guys’? Then it’s good. Does the service obviously violate copyright and ToS agreements? Not our problem.

I learned this when I built a scrappy little website for a one-man company who builds training kits for first responders. As low-tech as this site was (e.g., ordering the product entailed sending a purchase order by postal mail) I was struck by the apparent success of my client’s product: he had dozens of endorsements by apparently top-level influencers in the field, and didn’t have much competition. There were some certifications that he matched, but it didn’t seem all that hard to sell a few thousand dollars of technology to small/mid-level LEOs. (This isn’t a criticism of his product, which seemed fine and certainly didn’t involve privacy or surveillance technology.) The numbers in the article about Clearview’s services are in the same range — easy to justify if it’s only a few thousand a year and apparently produces good results.

What’s up with Git’s peculiar usage of ‘learned’ in their release notes? For example:

> Git learned the ability to execute a “partial” clone...

> ..In Git 2.25, --format learned the verb l/L...

I’ve never run across another piece of software that talked about itself this way. I’ve tried to research it in the past, to see if it’s part of some software engineering philosophy, but have always come up short.

Anyone have any insight?

No.

There were plenty of us there who were accidental visitors, curious kids who found ourselves in this interesting world. Kleinrock mentions this briefly in the original article, but there was a high degree of trust and optimism on the early internet, and if one was technically inclined and a little outgoing and generally a good egg, it wasn't hard to get an account somewhere.

When I first logged into MIT-ITS around 1982, coming in over dialup as a teenager calling a modem bank near the Pentagon, the login-failed message said something like, "Sorry, that username does not exist. Would you like an account?" It was RMS himself who gifted me (and a lot of others) a free account for the asking.

It's a hard thing to explain to people who weren't there -- I think this is why so many people in this thread see Kleinrock as naive or worse. My girlfriend never believes me when I try to explain the early internet; it seems an impossibility to her, as if I was talking about some pre-historic hunter/gatherer culture.

Bandcamp heartily seconded.

I like listening to their Bandcamp Weekly, a pseudo-radio show that highlights new releases. It's not as diverse as Bandcamp itself, as the DJ seems to be mostly into hybrid jazz/ambient/hiphop/world, but if you like that sort of thing, you should definitely take a listen.

I also try to go see live music as much as I can, as I often find favorite artists who are opening for the band I went to see.

Still using mine. It's great. I'm gonna be really sad when it falls out of the supported lineup.

Not everyone.

I've always had a horrible sense of direction. I can follow a road or a map, but if I take a wrong turn or otherwise get off track, I get completely disoriented, and it's extremely stressful to me. I also seem to have a poor working memory that makes it hard to remember many steps at a time. I often need many drives over many months along the same route to finally etch it into my brain.

With GPS, I'm much calmer and less anxious, and more willing to take risks with alternate routes.

I did a little research, and it doesn't appear that the complex is owned by either Whole Foods or Amazon, but rather a Colorado-based developer (non-local, haha).

https://www.statepress.com/article/2019/02/newwholefoodscomi...

Your neighbors are apparently upset enough to spend the time creating an entire faux-site critical of the project! I'm impressed.

http://thelocaltempe.co

> There’s actually an amazon owned apartment complex being built almost across the street from my house (in Tempe, Az), and I had been wondering if they’d do stuff like this.

What? Are you serious? It's one thing for Amazon to partner with builders & landlords, but another for them to actually start building themselves. I tried to research this, but came up with nothing except that Tempe does have an Amazon research center. Do you have any other links that would be helpful?

The USPS likely would charge you more, if they weren't already in the business of selling both address lists and access (carrier route deliveries of bulk mail). So they might not be sniffing your mail, but from what it seems the postal service needs your data to survive.

It's also a common tool for non-designers who maintain their own websites. I heard about Canva through my girlfriend who used it on her Android phone to build banners, buttons, and other graphics for her Wordpress site.

You can't make them safe, any more than you can give them a car and make them safe on, say, a freeway. I think a better attitude is to teach them that the internet is a dangerous place, and they should 'drive' defensively.

Get them the simplest device possible. A cheap iPad is great. Preconfigure it to be even simpler (maybe using parental controls), and tell them not to mess with anything. Keep notes for yourself, and be prepared to restore from factory defaults every once in a while when things go weird.

Install as many layers of ad-blocking as possible, whether DNS blacklists, browser filters, etc. Some sites/apps won't function correctly, but rather than try to open holes, just say, 'Sorry, that doesn't work.' Trust me, your folks will just move on to something that does (maybe with your suggestions), and is likely safer.

Buy them a few subscriptions to reputable news sources (a good discussion itself) so they don't have an excuse that they can't pay for decent journalism and so have to pick it up from a Facebook/Youtube algorithm.

If you're up for it, be explicit and direct about them asking you for advice. For example, teach them how to forward an email to you -- or a screenshot or image from another camera -- so you can give them an idea of whether its safe or not.

If they're willing, teach them to use a password manager that creates/saves random passwords. If you can't, at least make sure their important accounts (email, bank, etc.) are adequately secured. I've (mostly) convinced my mom to write down all her passwords on pieces of paper, which are stored in an envelope in a known place in her apartment. It's not perfect, but way better than discovering every password is 'hello123'.

Try to teach them a little about the technology. I don't mean system architecture or code, but the basics of how online economics work (e.g., advertising vs personal data) and what algorithms are (use the analogy of meal recipes). If you discover accessible journalism that is critical of problematic technology (like privacy issues with Facebook), share it with them. I've done this a lot with older/non-tech folks and I've ever met someone who couldn't understand at least the basics.

Don't be afraid to tell them that you feel some technology is bad for them. You'll discover it's actually a relief for them to hear, as mostly what they're going to hear is that all technology is great, and much less about being critical about tech.

Finally, don't push them into any more tech than they truly need. Most non-tech people aren't that interested in exploring tech; they probably aren't going to be the folks downloading apps or plugins and trying random websites just for fun. If they're comfortable walking into their bank and dealing with their accounts in person, let them continue to do that. Even if it costs a little, they're actually better off than you (or someone else) convincing them online banking is 'better.' Don't digitize their lives without a really good reason.

(I'm saying all of the above with the experience of being online for 40+ years, and helping other folks over that whole time. Sadly, it's gotten more difficult.)

I'll probably regret stirring the pot here, but I've never understood or been comfortable with group chats. I grew up in the era of Usenet groups and email (and later, forums & blogs), where conversations were slow and threaded. In the rare event I happen into a group chat today (whether IRC, Discord, SMS, FB, etc.), it feels incredibly stressful and overwhelming.

Sometimes I think of Vernor Vinge's book _True Names,_ where one of the characters is called the Mailman, and only deals with the world through email. That might be me by now...

For typical single-based pop/top-40 that could be true.

But for the long tail of most album-oriented music (including the fairly obscure stuff I listen to), its the producer and musician(s) working together to create a coherent artistic work.

Obviously that doesn't always result in an album of consistently great songs, but in my experience as as an occasional musician, recording engineer, and producer, there's always more material than will fit on the album. Part of the creative process is to build that into a form that best expresses the concept of the work as a whole. That usually involves selection & curation, not adding extra filling. My opinion, of course.

I've been collecting CDs for a few years now. I rip them for archiving and for easy playing (iPhone, etc.), but also enjoy handling the real object. I like the experience of simply listening to album the way it was originally intended by the artist, in the original order, with the production values intended at the time, not mixed up with other songs. Streaming, or even shuffling, often makes me tense and anxious (radio did too).

Because it's a bit of a pain to get music to the iPhone (with ALAC conversion, etc.), I recently experimented with matching albums with Apple Music and just using that version. However, I've been disappointed that many of those albums aren't actually the same ones as my CDs! (Again, this is Apple Music: other streaming services might be different.)

For example, tracks might be remastered (sometimes for good, sometimes not), and often the album is a 'deluxe' version with extra tracks. If there was a way to 'hide' those extra tracks, I'd be okay with it, but sadly it feels like the original intent of the artist has been corrupted by the record label to sell more content.

So I'm slowly returning to my first method, and only listening to ripped music, an album at a time, in its original order.

Ah, I did not explain clearly. My mistake. I wasn't talking about binary-only shareware distribution, but rather source code (primarily Unix/C-based on comp.sources.*). I'm thinking about the Usenet software itself (B News, C News, rn, tin, vnews), sendmail/bind, early Pine/Mutt/procmail (?), scripting languages like Perl/Python/Ruby, and so on. And a pile of early microcomputer code for Z80/8080/6500/6800/etc.

Perhaps...

But if you do that, it would also be interesting to trace free software back to the point where the GPL became popular. (GPL was published in 1983, but in my recollection it wasn't until the early/mid-90s that it surged into general usage.) Before that, 'free' software generally meant public domain: no licenses, no limitation on use -- at all. We had two or three decades of free software of that type, mostly distributed over Usenet, BBSes, FTP/Gopher, etc.

I'm probably being too oblique, but I believe it's short-sighted to believe free software must only be ideologically free. There was, in fact, an earlier period, where developers release software for free because, well, why not?

Okay, time for this retired grumpy programmer to retreat back to his hut in the forest now...

Apple TV is about 1000% better when you ditch the supplied remote and instead pair a normal querty-style Bluetooth keyboard. Nearly everything in the UI works with the combo of arrow keys + return key, and you can actually type text for searching instead of stabbing around with the crappy remote, or trying to make Siri work.

Probably not so true for tvOS games, but for the usual use case of Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, settings, etc., a keyboard works great.

No disrespect taken. Thanks for raising this point — one that I’m often frustrated by. (Yes, I’m over 50.) I’ve resorted to using Safari’s Reader mode on the vast majority of the sites I visit because the respective designer’s idea of type face, size, and contrast is so unreadable to me. Obviously this doesn’t work for interactive sites like maps, though.

I have an iPhone, so Apple Maps is right there as an alternative (and better, since it's more integrated into things like the Contacts app and auto-recognized addresses). I find its design to be much calmer and smoother, which makes me happier. And it doesn't keep asking me to login to the Googleverse...

There are many reasons I don't use Facebook, most of which are enumerated in countless HN posts, but a big reason is that I get totally frustrated with the interface. I don't know how to say this strongly enough, but the UI literally disgusts me, to the point where I just give up and close it down. True!

Maybe I'm weird this way. But I've been computing since about 1976, and using the web since '93, and I've got no patience anymore for crappy sites/apps.

> You don't use Google maps because it looks nice, you use it because it tells you where to go to get good tacos. You don't use Facebook because the UI is nice, you use it to talk to your friends and share photos.

I actually don't use Google Maps -- because it's a crazy mess of buttons and menus that get in my way of trying to navigate. I actually don't use Facebook -- because it's a horrible dog's breakfast of inscrutable icons and I can't figure out its mental model to save my life. And there are many more sites/apps that frustrate me so much that I abandon them for better-designed choices, or even for nothing at all, because at least doing nothing doesn't make me angry.

This function-over-form attitude bugs the hell out of me. People (especially designers) who think that design doesn't really matter as long as the function is okay may not notice the mass of former users who simply throw up their hands and refuse to use their product at all.

I like the spirit of this idea. I'm glad to see existing technologies being leveraged. However, it still seems quite a dog's breakfast of parts and pieces that don't all seem to be necessary.

I'd like to see this split out into several parts, which could then be used together if necessary.

The basic idea -- how to format and transfer short-form (chat-style) messages using existing email standards -- is brilliant. This seems similar to how AMP describes a limited set of HTML, and would be worth defining carefully.

The management of distributed contacts and group lists seems to be a different problem entirely. Personally, I don't need this: I'm fine with using my existing address/contact lists of trusted friends, along with time-tested tools like mailing lists.

The idea of editing/deleting messages seems superfluous and complicated. I've never knowingly used a chat system that provided this feature, nor have I ever wished I had it.

Maybe I missed something, but I didn't see anything about how SMTP would be used. It seems that by the time a short message is wrapped up into its attachments and headers, then sent to to the appropriate SMTP server (along with login & negotiation), I've probably sent over 20KB. That's a lot of data for one tiny message.

I would love to be able to use COI without a special client at all, just my current email client. However, the spec seems to require certain headers that would generally be difficult to configure in most email clients.

I'm concerned that the spec does not include any discussion of error handling. There are many things that can go wrong, especially with an asynchronous protocol like SMTP/IMAP. How are those problems going to be handled?

I'll go out on a personal limb here and say that I mostly failed in my guesses, with perhaps 80% incorrect.

I have some degree of faceblindness (often can't recognize someone I know well if they've changed something like makeup or hairstyle or clothing), as well as difficulty in picking up nonverbal cues. I wonder whether brain differences like this might affect image recognition?

Turns out this is actually documented in the manpage for wordexp()! (And refers to the mentioned fact that it now calls 'sh' directly.)

> BUGS

> Do not pass untrusted user data to wordexp(), regardless of whether the WRDE_NOCMD flag is set. The wordexp() function attempts to detect input that would cause commands to be executed before passing it to the shell but it does not use the same parser so it may be fooled.

> The current wordexp() implementation does not recognize multibyte characters, since the shell (which it invokes to perform expansions) does not.