I think the current web is sick and will never get better.
I propose building a new stack, without ICANN and friends (Verisign is raising .com prices yet again). I'm planning to build it[1] at some point, just working on other foundational stuff at the moment.
Cozy corners, webrings, and Gemini/Gopher is where I see the spirit of the old web alive and well.
Truly, I think you’ve over the target here. I think it's more than just being young. It was the transition from an analog life to a 'cosmic' one. We are the bridge generation! I remember waiting for a Zine or a Phrack manifest, or for an image to waterfall down the screen. It wasn't 'inefficient'—it was a frontier.
People comparing the 'load times' and 'inconveniences' are kinda missing the point. I grew up with a telephone. Remembered my friends' phone numbers. Then the interenet exploded down those phone lines. And the world was changed forever. From my desk, I could touch the world. A world i Had never seen. And it could all come to me...And I was reading about other people having similar experiences, similar excitement. There was an excitement in the air, except it wasn't in the air - it was in the space we all shared - that space that came down those wires, over those modems, with that distinctive siren-like mating call. It was the fucking 90s and the Internet came online. You had to be there. It was incredible. You have no idea if you didn't live through it.
That feeling of connection. Somehow it's tied up in the aesthetics for me, too. The juxtaposition between that aesthetic combining poverty-of-content with the compared-to-modern "visually stunted" aesthetics, compared with the shocking immediate global access of the analog to "cosmic" transition, somehow symbolizes it precisely and strongly for me. But the part that isn't conveyed (tho I try), is how I felt at the time. The graphics are the finger pointing at the moon. You had to walk that path, you had to have been there.
I tried to recapture that specific 'gateway' feeling in a Win98 demo: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html. I used modern sound and RBI to try to recapture the feeling of using the web when it was 1999. It's evocative, if you were there. Playing with it, sometimes i get a sense boundless horizon again. But then it flashes and is gone. That fire that I felt of excitement and expanse at that time is an endless source of inspiration for me. I long to somehow recreate an experience that gives it form, so others can know.
The "sense of boundless horizon" you speak of is literally what I feel when I play the Megaman Battle Network series or listen to the internet music. That feeling drives me when nothing else does.
I love your Windows 98½ project, that dialup sounds so good to me haha!
I'm finally at a point where I can see a viable path towards a spatial internet ("metaverse" has been ruined by Facebook). I can't wait to start building it.
The Human Renaissance is something I've been thinking of too and I hope it comes to pass. Of course, I feel like societally, things are gonna get worse for a lot of folks. You already see it in entire towns losing water or their water becoming polluted.
You'd think these kickbacks leaders of these towns are getting for allowing data centers to be built would go towards improving infrastructure but hah, that's unrealistic.
The article tries to play sleight of hand with the specific instance that they cite but it seems that the loss of water is alleged to be caused by sediment from construction rather than water use.
It's not great that it happened and it is something local government should take action on, but it is also something that could have been caused by any form of industrial construction. I suspect there are already laws in place that cover this. If they are not being enforced that's another issue entirely.
Data center construction exposing weaknesses in local infrastructure is a double-edged sword; you wanna know if things need upgrading but you don't wanna be negatively affected by it.
Maybe there should be some clause in these contracts that mandate tech companies foot the bill for local infrastructure improvements.
In my experience, you couldn’t just setup an account and start selling, you had to contact their sales team and they let you know if they want your business.
Last I checked, Polar was using Stripe under the hood.
EDIT: Yup. Via their pricing page:
Polar is currently built on Stripe, and we cover their 2.9% + 30¢ fee from ours. However, they impose a few additional fees for certain transactions that we need to pass on.
Before figuring out how to tackle this project, I needed to know whether it would even be possible. According to a 2021 Reddit comment:
There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening.
Feeling encouraged, I started with the basics: what hardware is in the Wii, and how does it compare to the hardware used in real Macs from the era.
I almost think such projects are worth it just to immortalize comments like these. There's a whole psychology of wrongness that centers on declaring that not-quite-impossible things will definitely never happen, because it feels like principled skepticism.
That used to be my thing: wherever our ops manager declared something was impossible, I’d put my mind to proving her wrong. Even though we both knew she might declare something impossible prematurely to motivate me.
My favorite was “it’s impossible to know which DB is failing from a stack trace”. I created STAIN (stack traces and instance names): a ruby library that would wrap an object in a viral proxy (all returns from all methods are themselves proxies) that would intercept all exceptions and annotate the call stack with the “stain”ed tag.
I've seen more than one half-joke-half-serious chunk of code that would "encode" arbitrary info into stack traces simply by recursively calling `fn_a`, then `fn_s`, `fn_d`, and `fn_f` before continuing with the actual intended call, giving you a stack trace with (effectively) "asdf" in it.
They've also been useful more than once, e.g. you can do that to know what iteration of a loop failed. There are of course other ways to do this, but it's hard to beat "stupid, simple, and works everywhere" when normal options (e.g. logs) stop working.
Well you're doing gods work as far as I'm concerned. Conflating difficulty in practice with impossibility in principle is, to my mind, a source of so much unnecessary cognitive error.
Similarly, one of the great things about Python (less so JS with the ecosystem's habit of shipping minified bundles) is that you can just edit source files in your site_packages once you know where they are. I've done things like add print statements around obscure Django errors as a poor imitation of instrumentation. Gets the job done!
I'm remindded of my favorite immortalized comment, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Rob Malda of Slashdot, 2001, dunking on the iPod when it debuted.
Funny enough about the Dropbox comment, it caught so much flak that it’s gone full circle and I’ve often found people defending it saying what the guy said made sense at the time etc
They're kinda like high-effort shitposts. Which are my absolute favorite kind. The worse the effort/reward payoff, and the more it makes you ask "WHY??!!?", the better.
Wasn't the old Linux joke, don't ask "how do I do X with Linux" (because you'd get ridiculed for not reading the docs) but instead, just state "X isn't possible with Linux" and then someone would show you how it's done?
Its a great motivator, happened with me too, I once asked a question about getting the original camera on custom rom and got this as a response [1].
This lead to 2 year long project [2] and an awesome time full of learnings and collaboration
I got the idea of writing an emulator in JavaScript in the pre-Chrome era, circa 2007. I remember searching around trying to find whether somebody had done it before. It seemed not, and somebody on a forum declared “that’s not possible”.
To me, it was obviously possible, and I was determined to prove them wrong.
Plus the internet basically equates cynicism with intelligence
This is a generally known phenomenon in psychology. If you leave a book review saying that you liked a book, people are biased to believe you are stupid. If you criticize a book negatively people are biased to believe you are smart.
This is dope af. I love concrete (was just gifted a book about concrete buildings for my birthday last week). I see things like this and remind myself that I have free will.
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