Somehow, the (much less impressive) Star Trek fan site I created in 2000 when I was 13 is still online.
I’ve long since lost access to it but the freeservers mob I hosted it with have somehow kept the sites from way back then all around and online still to this day. It’s a little painful and factually incorrect (I called the movie Generations a series!) but gives me a good laugh:
http://stvoyager.iwarp.com/
Excellent work, ^-KewLGuY-^. I'd say that's the most "13-year-old in the 2000s" nick ever, but that honor probably goes to xXSephiroth666Xx. Yours is up there though.
Eric S. Raymond recently posted some xeets about how retrocomputing nostalgia is due, in part, to wistfulness for the Cambrian explosion in personal computers, where every little two-bit company comes up with their own wildly different design. The design space hadn't been fully explored yet, and the future seemed pregnant with endless possibility. Then as people figured out what worked and what didn't in the computer design space, the PC sorta won, and it made much more sense to build a PC clone and take advantage of the huge PC hardware and software ecosystem. Raymond predicts that a similar coalescing on proven designs will happen with 3D printers.
Of course, ESR believes in the need for government slightly less than he believes in the need for redemption through the blood of Christ the Saviour, so he overlooks a critical forcing factor in this cycle of exploring the solution space followed by settling on proven designs: regulation. Cars were much cooler before the 1970s because the Clean Air Act was passed in the 1970s. There was an initial struggle period during which American autos shipped with anemic engines and features designed to compensate for lack of performance, until technologies like fuel injection became the norm, but again the automakers coalesced into a set of a few designs that both worked and fulfilled the obligations imposed by regulatory bodies... to the point where it's awful hard to tell a Toyota RAV-4 from a Honda CR-V just by looking.
I think the internet has gone through a similar exploratory vs. coalescing phase. Back in the 90s and 2000s, HTML and PHP let you create anything, so people created everything. And threw it up on a server, and it was wonderful. So many individual corners of the web with their authors' own perspectives. Now... well, regulation is definitely coming but in the meantime there are things with the force of regulatory bodies you have to worry about. You HAVE to do https which means you need a certificate. You HAVE to have a CDN and CloudFlare protection or else you'll be slashdot-effected or DDoS'd to oblivion. You can't even run an email server anymore without jumping through the hoops it takes to convince major providers you're not a spam farm. These are things you have to either think about yourself or pay someone to think about them for you. So the web has coalesced on a few best-practice designs and service providers. And most people just set up Wix or Shopify pages or Facebook groups anyway.
And that's why the 90s/2000s web has such nostalgic power. We could do anything from our armchairs with a bit of HTML and maybe some programming and sysadmin skills. But those days are gone. Maybe we're better off for it.
> You HAVE to do https which means you need a certificate.
This is kind of true, but, getting a cert isn't a big deal anymore. If you're not a big company, a free cert works fine.
> You HAVE to have a CDN and CloudFlare protection or else you'll be slashdot-effected or DDoS'd to oblivion.
DDoS is hard to manage, but otherwise it shouldn't be too hard to handle a /. kind of event if your page is reasonable and you make use of the abundance of modern computing... 1G cheap hosting is out there.
> You can't even run an email server anymore without jumping through the hoops it takes to convince major providers you're not a spam farm.
Yeah, this one sucks a lot. But, email is dead, so...
My job, today, is dealing with a vast influx of various types of email that all need categorising and a range of different actions. Not very dead at all from where I'm standing.
Email will never die, no matter how much most people want it to do so. The protocol is arguably the best proof of "worse is better", which is why it's held out for so long.
Depending on if you work or not, I feel there's a bigly dissonance in the perceived prevalence of email, phone calls, and other such traditional(?) channels of communique.
Most of them have clearly died in private life, but in the professional life you will be literally worthless if you aren't reachable by email, telephone, snail mail, perhaps even the fax machine.
It's like claiming Skype is dead but my last job was at a small company with many international customers and Skype was still their daily driver for international calls.
I see the above discussion as a describing a process, very much like evolution, with web sites
bieng the species of interest, and how they are bieng shaped by, internal competition, for resouces (and prey), errr food, preditors, parisites, and environomental changes.
neat!
> Yeah, this one sucks a lot. But, email is dead, so...
Really? These days, can't even login to some services (like Steam) without them sending you an email to confirm the login (some services even do this even if you already have other 2FA...)
It appears the domain you used for your guestbook has been pass off to some sort of pharmaceutical information page in Scandinavia, I found that funny.
Medicate and try not to stop. Don’t avoid it, it’s life changing and the most effective intervention by far. None of the other stuff is nearly as effective. It is very likely turn their life around. As someone who was not medicated in his teenage years (Briefly in childhood and now all through adult hood. But was nissing all through school and it sucked). It’s a real life changer.
Look up Russ Barkley on YouTube. He’s a very well known and respected ADHD researcher and clinician that has some very engaging and informative videos. Here’s a taster:
https://youtu.be/_tpB-B8BXk0
human nature is such that one cannot ever stay on low dose of any drug that feels good… this is why drug dealers will always give you “a taste” for free - they know you will be calling for more and more
Yup, wormhole and portal are better in most aspects. Beam is helpful when you have novel constraints like not being able to install arbitrary binaries, or if you have the need to transfer streams and not just files, or maybe even pub key based white-listing of access.
It's getting hard to even take printing stuff for granted. It's getting harder and harder on iOS just to arbitrarily copy and paste text from many apps - can't even copy the title of a YouTube video last time I tried. This mostly just worked on PC.
It hurts me. Everything going so far backwards.
At least once a week I have to screenshot something on iOS and use the new Photo OCR feature to copy and paste it out of the image. I wish I was joking.
We have many more photos from RFLAN in Western Australia which ran 3-4x a year from 2002-2020. They are all on Facebook currently:
https://facebook.com/redflaglan
This looks awesome. As someone working in support for a wide array of Linux Apps, and data dumps from customers where I have no access to the system, plus I also write or backport bug fixes to all sorts of random software, I often want to do this kind of crazy stuff. With exactly these kinds of artefacts.
This is super interesting:
> sq aims to be safe by default. One way it achieves this is not by having good defaults, but by avoiding defaults when it is not absolutely clear that one option is and will remain much better than the alternatives. sq also avoids do-what-I-mean (DWIM) interfaces. At the beginning we feared that these design decisions would decrease usability. In practice, tab completion hides most of the additional typing, and being explicit appears to reduce confusion.
Noooooo. Equinix Metal was one of the only places I could get by-the-hour machines with actual HDDs, NVMe and High Speed Networking, in multiple on demand for a day at a time. I use this for example for performance testing or situational testing of Ceph for example, where I need realistic actual hardware especially including HDDs, to match real world environments.
They had a lot of problems though, which didn't matter for me as much, but probably hurt for other people. For example there were no security groups and thus it was somewhat painful to not just expose your entire machine to the internet, without setting up your own linux based router. This is partly because the idea was you would interconnect with an Equinix Fabric (their virtual networking product) which sortof makes sense except you can't just deploy that without a sales contract and the cost of that would outweigh the cost I spent on the machines.
This sucks for me. But that doesn't surprise me given that I'm obviously not a profitable use case in isolation, I was just riding on the coat tails of their other business, and that mostly they were likely largely competing with cloud providers at this point which are better developed/more advanced.
There are other cheap data centre hardware providers but usually not by the hour, if they are don't do L2-adjacent 10-40Gbe networking and almost universally no one has HDDs anymore. I know, I'm a weird use case :)
There is also a trap, which is that setting this in /etc/sysctl.conf or /etc/sysctl.d doesn't work, because the module isn't always yet loaded when those are set.
One fix is to load nf_conntrack at boot by adding it to the module load list
On a related note, the sosreport tool which collects outputs of a zillion different commands for diagnostics purposes, goes to great lengths and CI tests that no kernel modules are loaded by any of the plugins, for basically this same reason.
