Parrot Ass Club is a classic clip I like to return to when discussing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5lx-17OV8g
8,891 karma · joined December 9, 2008
https://neocities.org https://kyledrake.net
I worked on a Geocities archive restoration. There was a boat load of porn (including illegal porn), malicious domains, spamvertising, malware, predators, political extremists, etc on the 1999 web, and you can find all of it within the raw Geocities archive that was made before it shut down. The idea that the old web was some kind of pure place of innocence is a weird and factually inaccurate take. If anything, the late 90s web was more dark than it is now, perhaps in part because nobody had any idea of how to police anything on it and things like PhotoDNA didn't exist yet.
If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.
It's just as plausible to me that the general "misbehavior" of humans on the internet hasn't changed all that much, but that we have, frankly, adopted a more puritanical and intolerant approach towards it. Nobody was talking about getting rid of Section 230, carding people for 18+ before they could use IRC (or install an operating system, what the actual fuck is wrong with you California), and Congress wasn't dragging evil Geocities CEO David Bohnett into grilling sessions where they were accusing him of hooking kids on digital cigarettes. Perhaps it would be wise to have a little nostalgia for some of that too.
Given the history of their business model being licensing of important databases that are hard to switch off of, I've actually made a point to avoid using Oracle as much as possible (even so far as to leave MySQL when they acquired it, and I've never started a fresh project in Java, which they used to drive a lawsuit they had with Google).
From my chair, they make an expensive database they try to sell to golf executives. There are innumerable equal (better?), free alternatives, and most startups are founded by broke coders in bedrooms that choose those instead and stick with the devil they know. And they have an un-competitive cloud service? Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle for, I'm genuinely curious.
I'll get endless pushback for this, but the reality is that adoption isn't at 100%, it very closely needs to be, and there are still entire ISPs that only assign ipv4, to say nothing of routers people are buying and installing that don't have ipv6 enabled out of the box.
A much better solution here would have been an incredibly conservative "written on a napkin" change to ipv4 to expand the number of available address space. It still would have been difficult to adopt, but it would have the benefit of being a simple change to a system everyone already understands and on top of a stack that largely already exists.
I'm not proposing to abandon ipv6, but at this point I'm really not sure how we proceed here. The status quo is maintaining two separate competing protocols forever, which was not the ultimate intention.
You're literally describing any activity that someone enjoys generating natural dopamine, and then comparing it to a drug that crosses your blood-brain barrier and mimicks your brain's chemistry to give you a super-charged chemical version of that. The difference in dopamine levels is orders of magnitude. Your brain re-wires itself to handle the level of dopamine produced and you start only feeling normal if you're constantly using the drug. I would be surprised if Tiktok generated even 1/10th the dopamine level of using methamphetamine. It all honestly sounds quite fun, but my awareness of the consequences will prevent me from ever trying them.
Eating a good meal, having sex, finishing writing your first novel, winning a race, doing breath work, doing yoga, rock climbing, and an unlimited supply of examples generate dopamine in our brains the same way that Tiktok does. They can all ruin your life just as much, if you allow them to.
A much better comparison would be to describe Tiktok as a "digital slot machine", and indeed slot machine mechanics have been heavily studied by social media platforms to make usage more habitual. Nir Eyal's Hooked was an interesting and informative read on this topic. If he describes social media as heroin in the book I'll happily take the self-own.
I hate social media more than most people do, and I don't use tiktok and don't think anyone else should, but can we all please stop comparing a mobile phone app to using heroin? It's misinformed and dangerous to make rhetorical comparisons like that.
I'm sure they're talking about the 8 million dollar Porto Embargo or whatever, but I would love one day to hear a podcast discussing the genius of the Toyota Corolla. Safe, affordable, available, reliable. I've had friends with Toyotas that were about to fall off their base from road salt rust but the engine and transmission still worked perfectly.
Pretty amazing that you can be of modest or lavish means and still own a really solid car that everyone can fix. A lot funner than hanging out in the repair shop waiting for a specialist to fix a blown turbo headgasket.
Recommendation threads on Reddit usually begin with "anything but Samsung". They seem designed to be made cheap and hit the lowest price point with consumers that don't want to spend a lot more on something they don't really care about, so I'm not surprised to learn that ads are a part of their strategy.
But also, why do fridges need to connect to the internet?
You knew exactly when it was going to fail and you could put it on your calendar to schedule the work, which consisted of an email validation process and running a command to issue the certificate request from your generated key.
The only moving part was the issued certificate, which you copied and pasted over and reloaded the server. There are a lot less things to go wrong on this process, which at one point I could do once every two years, than in a really complicated automated background task that has to happen within 15 days.
I love short duration automated free certs, but I think we really need to have a conversation about how short we can make them before we make it so humans no longer have the time required to fix problems anymore.
This is a living organism with moving parts and a time limit - you update nginx with a change that breaks .well-known by accident, or upgrade to a new version of Ubuntu and suddenly some dependency isn't loading correctly, or that UUID generator you depended on to generate the name for the challenge doesn't get loaded, or certbot becomes obsolete because of some API change and you can't upgrade to the latest because the OS is older and you installed it from the package manager.
You eventually see it in your exception monitoring or when an ssl monitor detects the cert is about to expire. Then you have to drop that other urgent thing you needed to get done, come in and debug it, fix it, and re-issue all the certs at the rate limit allowed. That's assuming you have that monitoring - most sites probably don't.
If you detect that issue with 1/3 of the cert left, you will now have 15 days to figure that out instead of 30. If you can't finish it in time, or you don't learn about it in time, the site(s) hard fail on every web browser that visits and you've effectively got a full site outage until you repair it.
So you discover it's because of certbot not working with a new API change, and you can't upgrade with the package manager. Now you need to figure out how to compile it from source, but it doesn't like the python that is currently installed and now you need to install that from source, but that version of python breaks your python web app so you have to figure out how to migrate your app to that version of python before you can do that, and the programmer that can do that is on a week long whitewater rafting trip in Idaho.
Aside from all that, what happens if a hacker manages to wreck the let's encrypt infra so badly they need 2 weeks to get it back online? The internet archive was offline for weeks after a ddos attack. The cloudflare outage took one site of mine down for less than 10 minutes, it's not hard to imagine a much worse outage for the web here.
A lot of the aversion towards ruby I've gotten from people that have worked with it before mainly stems from complaints I share with the philosophy of Rails (making big changes to it when needed is like driving a freight ship instead of a small boat) and the complexity that can go with that, or with horror stories around poorly implemented metaprogramming, which are both valid points to me because I honestly share them. But Rails is not Ruby, and the community in general has been a lot more responsible with using metaprogramming carefully than it was in the early days.
Ruby becoming successful through Rails was a boon for it in the short term but I think also detracted from it's future growth at the same time as it became hard to untether developers' bad experiences with huge Rails apps with their experience using Ruby itself.
Personally, I love using Ruby so much for my own needs that if it ever was to fall into obscurity to the point of being unusable for modern tasks, I have decided that will be the point that I probably retire from programming and move on to other things in my life. It's not that I can't learn a new language for my daily driving, it's that I... don't really want to at this point.
Not sure what I would tell my young self back in the 90s first. Self driving cars, LLMs that can fix bugs I've been trying to fix for 12 years. Maybe I would start with "Linux distros where you don't have to manually compile 15 random dependencies to run a single piece of software".
"Mydora is a continuous streaming player that gives you a deep dive into the lost archives of Myspace Music, based on some recovered data called the Dragon Hoard, with some additional metadata (most notably the locations and genres) from a different scan of Myspace conducted back in 2009.
The archived collection contains 490,273 songs, which represents a tiny fraction of tens of millions of songs that were destroyed, many of which had no copies and are lost forever."