• 0 Posts
  • 59 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 15th, 2024

help-circle
  • I’ve thought of all these, but what I’m describing should be a comprehensive system in itself and at the same time have global identities and addressing of all content, so that data model could be applied, for example, for a sneakernet or for some situation where you’d have to synchronize data over delay-tolerant networks.

    Most of all like Briar or Usenet or something else.



  • The business customer who actually pays for the development.

    Then it’s my duty as a responsible customer to not make it profitable for them, as much as I can.

    Maybe if you can’t use the web without disabling JS, you shouldn’t?

    Suppose I can use the Web with JS disabled. Just that page won’t be part of my Web.

    Yes, of course when the optimization work has been done for you, it’s the easiest.

    It’s an old discussion about monopolies, monocultures, standards, anti-monopoly regulations, where implicit consent is a thing and where it isn’t, and how to make free market stable.


  • That can’t be fixed. We can’t wait for a different kind of human (what if it’ll be an artificial psychopath anyway) to fix our current thing.

    So hard to disrupt means of organizing (for associations, unions and such, unofficial) and building electoral systems (for Internet communities even, why not) are needed ; social media gave people a taste of that to lure them before subverting it all, but the idea is good.

    Some sort of a global system. When it’s in place, improvement around will follow.


  • It’s also pleasant for the brain, to think of a website in terms of resources/locations and variables. Only what a GET request needs.

    All those complaints - they are in essence about herds of web developers who get paid to do roughly the same work again and again, and use frameworks upon frameworks to not get depressed from that. And complain that if they’d do that stupid work thoroughly, they’d kill themselves.

    Gemini protocol taken as it is probably isn’t enough for commercial purposes, but the part about simple markdown-like pages and only determining semantics of style by the page creator, not how it will be displayed, - it’s correct IMHO. Let the user pick the theme or the CSS stylesheet they prefer to display text, like with e-books. Let the service present structure.

    (Except I think gemtext not allowing tables is a mistake.)

    That also means that all kinds of validation and blinking buttons and such won’t have to be implemented by web developers.


  • It’s encouraged to use things with a supply chain easily poisoned.

    There’s the issue of a Heisenberg effect here - when a spectator is present, like a huge audit of something, nothing happens, and when a spectator isn’t present, there’s nobody to look every day in piles of constantly changed crap to detect if something happens.

    Also not even easily poisoned, but easily denied. It’s about control. The militaries and producers of complex industrial equipment were the first to start doing this, however nuts that may seem. It’s useful to sell your allies a system they can use, but only when allowed. Or sell industrial equipment that can’t be smuggled to a third country without your permission.

    These things - they are legal even morally, but at some point in discussion of them common good might arise as a thing in itself, separate from morality. For the common good such systems of control are clear poison.


  • So - the situation is understood, but the question arises, what does this have in common with a global hypertext system for communication.

    Maybe all this functionality should be removed into a kind of plugin, similarly to how it was done with Flash and Java applets and other ancient history. Maybe sandboxed, yes.

    Maybe the parts of that kind of plugin relating to DOM, to execution, to interfaces should be standardized.

    Maybe such a page should look more like a LabView control model or like a Hypercard application, than what there is now.

    One huge benefit would be that Google goes out of business.


  • The business customer or the visitor?

    The visitor doesn’t exactly have a way to give feedback on whether they’d use a static page.

    Stuff like file uploads, validated forms and drag and drop are just not worth the effort of providing them without JS.

    Honestly many of today’s frameworks allow you to compile the same thing for the Web, for Java for Android, for Java for main desktop OS’es and whatever else.

    Maybe if it can’t work like a hypertext page, it shouldn’t be one.



  • I would say the future is in pooling resources.

    Like it happens with torrents. As one p2p protocol very successful.

    Self-hosting not applications, but storage and uniform services. Let different user applications use the same pooled storage and services.

    All services are ultimately storage, computation, relays, search&indexing and trackers. So if there’s a way to contribute storage, computing resources, search and relay nodes by announcing them via trackers (suppose), then one can make any global networked application using that.

    But I’m still thinking how can that even work. What I’m dreaming of is just year 2000 Internet (with FTP, e-mail, IRC, search engines), except simplified and made for machines, with the end result being represented to user by a local application. There should be some way to pay for resources in a uniform way, and reputation of resources (not too good if someone can make a storage service, collect payment, get a “store” request and then just take it offline), or it won’t work.

    And global cryptographic identities.

    Not like Fediverse in the end, more like NOSTR.


  • There’s a counterpoint to that. In real hard truth, nobody is anonymous and creative handles can be traced back to a name easily.

    But having pseudonyms affects human psychology. And makes people post things they wouldn’t want to be traced to them. And do things.

    There was a time when it seemed that everything is insecure. That time didn’t end. Just with HTTPS everywhere and encrypted everything and with glossy appearances people have genuinely lost all understanding of the real world.

    They think, metaphorically, that if there’s no name written on their door, everyone who asks can’t learn who they are.





  • Eh, my dad wanted me to not be teased because of clothes or whatever. Except I saw through the bullshit and didn’t ask anything. So he basically forced me to wear the ugly shit he thought would look good. When all you can wear is ugly shit picked by your well-meaning parents, ya knaw.

    “Demonstrative consumption” is the word. It hurt my social ties with those I’d want to talk to, but was ashamed of this, much more than fucking poverty probably would.

    He had sort of a trauma from his own childhood, but that’s frankly no excuse because he didn’t even try to talk to me about this. I’d tell him it’s a school half-stacked with children of thieves (aka government workers, it’s not USA so I won’t take any bullshit about “hard-working administrators”, a different part of the world), so, first, I’d prefer to have clear cultural separation from them, second, I didn’t want to be there. The dumb fat pig moron wouldn’t listen, he thought me complaining is the problem so he should find some way for me to waste my resistance energy.

    Well, those little jerks played a prank on him, which I did try to prevent, but as you’ve probably guessed, he thought my resistance to his good wise decisions to be the main threat, so they succeeded. He tried to blame it on me later. I do feel bad for him, but he deserved every bit.

    OK, so much for memories.




  • Something like a one-party political system with dear respected leader, concentration camps, surveillance, social rating system, GFW?

    Note how I don’t say anything about propaganda from every crack. That’s because western propaganda has successfully evolved in the conditions of outright censorship not being allowed. Like killing cockroaches in a building again and again you make them evolve for the poisons used in the past.

    If you are going to pick the “all this is not credible” line, then don’t bother. Also credible is a synonym for “believable”, and nobody can make you believe things you don’t want to believe.


  • You didn’t, somebody else did. Or maybe you didn’t know it. Or maybe you have such a metabolism. Whatever.

    But I always put an effort into separating my clean clothes from my room stink, and making sure I always showered before I left the house.

    There is a huge space called depression, in some parts of it people can shower, in some other parts of it people can’t leave the bed.

    But I also have the high masking flavor of autism, so maybe that’s why that level of effort has come naturally.

    “Masking” and “natural” kinda contradict each other.