Poking fun at similar sites that plaster tech company logos on their splash pages to make it seem like they're important, when any real affiliation may be tenuous at best.
Don't get me wrong, I've loved to follow blogs through a feed reader (way better than a freaking email newsletter), but I pretty much stopped because a lot of the stuff I was reading started dropping support for it.
i've never run across a blog that i've wanted to follow that doesn't have an rss/atom feed - they are often hidden / in unexpected places though - these days i just ctrl+u (view source in firefox) and ctrl+f for "rss" or "atom" and 99% of the time, there's a hit.
> i've never run across a blog that i've wanted to follow that doesn't have an rss/atom feed
One time only for me. Don’t even remember the site as I couldn’t follow it ;)
> these days i just ctrl+u (view source in firefox) and ctrl+f for "rss" or "atom" and 99% of the time, there's a hit.
I tend to not even do that much, the vast majority of sites have their feeds properly marked up, so pasting the base URL into my reader gives me a list of available feeds.
If you are getting hits for this you are probably finding the auto-discovery <link> tag. You can get browser extensions that find this automatically and put up an icon that you can click to direct you to your favourite reader. Most readers also support just pasting the article URL and it will find the feed for you.
I've found nothing better for keeping track of infrequently updated blogs. You can follow a firehose of news on Twitter as missing a story or ten isn't a big deal. But things that are updated every six months doesn't work at all with social media if you're looking at the feed occasionally.
I mainly used RSS feeds at this point. The Reddit community has become pretty toxic so decided to move away from it and just follow websites I like and trust via RSS.
Depends on the sub. Some are definitely toxic cesspools, others are very friendly and cool. I've tried to quit Reddit several times, but unfortunately there's some good conversation and important troubleshooting that happens there of all places.
I think it'd be nice if certain subs could disable the karma system as they degenerate into posting pictures of what arrived in the mail today instead of discussing anything meaningful.
It depends on the size, and your opinions. I don’t like movies and enjoyed the Wheel of Time TV show, people like me are not wanted in /r/fantasy.
But it is a big subreddit (3 million), and that just comes with toxicity. I’d say anything with over 100k subs (probably even less) will have toxicity, it’s just that it tends to stay hidden until someone says the wrong thing (/r/selfhosted with 250k had some crazy drama a while ago).
Depends on the sub. If someone ever asks about joining reddit my first recommendation is to unsub from all the defaults. That's where most of the idiocy of the general public is
How else do you follow blogs, or follow webcomics?
I don't think I've ever seen a blog or webcomic that doesn't support RSS. If I ever do, then "oh, this author is interesting, but I guess I will never in my life see anything they do again. That's a shame".
I'm not going to poll someone's blog on the off chance that they posted something.
Webcomics are still fairly good at it. I don't really understand how else I would go about following a webcomic that has plot (i.e. I want to read each episode exactly once, in order).
I used to keep up to date with everything via google reader (especially as it meant I could get round work internet blocks) but when that went down, i switched to Feedly.
But then it just became overload, it was just too much to keep up to date with every blog I found interesting and every news site kept filling their site with ever more blog pieces in the name of "content"
I just gave up. It's much easier to let reddit subs sort the wheat from the chaff and read them instead.
If a site doesn't have a feed, and nobody else third-party generates a feed for it, then sometimes I just don't follow that site much. It depends. If you use a competent rss reader like FreshRSS then you can alternatively do web scraping even if there isn't an rss feed per se, if the site seems worth that much effort. Many aren't worth that effort.
Up until very recently my grandpa would use fax to send complaints to just about anything. It was about as stereotypical grumpy old man as you can imagine. He's a good person, just old-school formal when he writes. Comes of as a bit ... harsh.
I thought it was going to end when they dismantled the analog network, and his fax machine with it, but somehow it just got worse. You see, on fax machines you rarely got spam, but on email that's another story. It's hilarious to see the email exchanges he has with some spammers. They've met their worst enemy.
He is more than capable to identify spam, but he doesn't fully understand that, while sent to him, it's nothing personal. He takes it very personal. Very personal. Like, call me late in the evening or during work hours (unheard of for someone in his school) to discuss this outrageous claim that someone made about him. He, like a lot of senior citizen, has a lot of free time. So he naturally replies back. And we're talking full page replies, going into great detail about how they are bad people for doing this to someone like him.
When I entered the workforce I was surprised to see how much fax spam there was, usually a sheet or two every week. It's tapered off to ~ a couple of sheets per fortnight in recent times though. It is kind of amusing to see fax phishing with personalised cover notes attached to some spam about light furnishings etc.
I wish I could do the old "faxing sheets of black paper taped into a loop" trick but I'm sure the scammers are using e-fax now.
In the US, clinical medicine and law firms use it because it has an unusual legal status: it’s considered secure and positively delivered if some device at the other end acknowledges it.
In Japan many businesses are still wedded to a fax. It’s much easier to scribble a take out order on a piece of paper.
It's considered secure by the law (probably because historically the phone network was considered mostly secure). Doesn't matter if it isn't really until the law changes or some court overthrows it.
Again the threat vector is the people within physical vicinity. People who would then be subject to trespassing or theft charges. And likely caught on camera.
Versus the entire world on the internet.
Yeah, I'll take fax security over normal email security, thanks.
Somehow institutions are still pretending the emperor is wearing the nicest looking clothes, they're pretending fax is secure from "photoshopping"/data tampering.
Due to the GDPR (most regional regulators do not consider normal fax to be secure, and of course it creates otherwise unnecessary paper copies of data) medical systems in Europe are being slowly weaned off it. I gather a lot of doctors are putting up a fight.
I'm waiting for faxing to come back like cassettes:
Artists draw pictures and robodial a secret fan list (through a POTS modem and some 90s software) of fax machines where insiders can get exclusive limited physical copies of the art and the copies with the earliest timestamps become the most valued.
People will just be sitting around their house and they hear the fax machine starting to unexpectedly print something on a Saturday afternoon. Then, like some tactile version of a phone alert, they slowly watch the paper slide out of the machine with the latest artwork.
The lost joy of anticipation in the 30 or so seconds of waiting as you see the thing slowly form in front of you, recaptured once again.
Alternatively they hear from their friend that a new artwork is out and they anticipate going home and checking the tray of their fax machine to see their own copy.
I'm not really an artist but ok sure. I can certainly fax some doodles. I'll think about how to pitch and present it. I'll register artsyfax.com this week and throw something together. I even have a pnp modem and a pots line.
There's probably Linux fax software nobody has used in 15 years that can import vcards and be scripted with lua or something.
> Genuine question: why there are folks still using fax?
In healthcare, because despite the technical reality that it is electronic, it's not considered “electronic media” under HIPAA, so security and transaction & code sets standardization rules that apply to electronic transactions do not apply to transactions conducted by fax.
It's a giant compliance hole in HIPAA that entities in the healthcare space ruthlessly exploit. (Various incentives to move to mechanism that are considered electronic under HIPAA have chipped away at it, but the compliance hole still keeps people using it.)
It seems to be the same as cheques and magstrip-only cards - uniquely American thing that rest of the world hasn't seen in years.
I do remember not that long ago opening an apple developer account required filling out a form with your card details and faxing it to some US-based number. It was madness back then already.
Fax was a new technology. For the first time a signed document could be sent over the wire in minutes, instead of having a courier go via train and take days. This is 100 years before computers were common.
When computers became common fax was already well established so there was no good reason to add a second exception.
I realize the fax predates POTS. But to say "When computers became common fax was already well established" is not really accurate. If you mean the 1970s (personal/home computer revolution), then no one had a fax machine at home back then. They just were not around.
Few offices had them, too -- teletypes were more common than fax machines, even though teletypes didnt do graphics like fax. I've read that police departments had fax machines for mug shots or maybe fingerprints, but i have no first-hand knowledge.
Anyway, I'm just trying to relate history to you from someone who was there. Wikipedia articles or retrospectives don't always get the nature of things right, even if they do get the hard facts like dates right.
Another example: you could say television was invented in the first decade of the 1900s. But they weren't household items until the 1950s, maybe late 1940s if you want to count NYC specifically.
Faxes date from just after the civil war area. They were in common usage for transmitting contracts by the 1880s. Photographic material by the 1920s
This equipment would have typically been installed at a telegraph office, not at the end user site, but the basic technology is far older than most people assume.
I know how old the technology is. You completely missed my point. They were NOT in coomon use even in the 1970s, even if am article on the internet claims it. I was there. Were you?
All hail to fax, but only now in the time of COVID-19 has the Supreme Court Of The United States accepted that telephones exist -- let alone as a means of communication, but also as a matter of legal deliberation.
I wonder how long it shall take to have electronic communication to be accepted, legally, as normal and standard across the board.
The point I was trying to make is that you sending the fax could be pdf > email > fax service > pots > fax service > email > pdf. The end result is a lower quality replication compared to email > email. There's no way the law says either the fact that it looks worse than the email or that someone can point to a contract that says it took place over pots makes the transmission more valuable.
Legally admissible digital signatures do exist, and you can infinitely photocopy a digitally signed document, though. Not so with fax, where a photocopy would count as a different document.
I have gone so far as to have a digital copy of my analogue signature to drag-drop into an electronic document. And this has been accepted as legal. Courtroom legal. IRS legal. "Don't fuck with this" type of legal.
> digital copy of my analogue signature to drag-drop into an electronic document
This will not work in Europe. You need proper public-key cryptosigning here. That was what I meant when I wrote "legally admissible digital signature". What you wrote is called "digitised signature" here, and would only be useful as a decorative sign.
What type of middleman blesses a "legally admissible digital signature"? This sounds like the same, if not a similar, rabbit hole folks in the US conjure up against voting machines.
You bless maths, not the middlemen in digital signatures. Electronic signature infrastructures are usually based on strong public key infrastructures, which I call them legally admissible digital signatures. The primary problem with electronic voting is no possible enforcement of no coercive force rule, not tallying security.
> The primary problem with electronic voting is no possible enforcement of no coercive force rule, not tallying security.
How is this not "blessed by maths" as not in the previous problem?
Someone somewhere has to bless something, be it a valid vote or a valid digital signature. If there is a "Pope" for one, there should be a "Pope" for the other. Medical, government, religious ... someone somewhere must have a magic "I Bless This" magic wand and all henceforth below shall must be valid.
Why is the branch of "digital signature" considered "good" in this respect but "voting" not? "Medical" not"?
I viciously hate to say the term, yet ... this seems so "tri-cameral" ... and in terms of schizophrenia of illogic.
Coercive forces that cause vote buying cannot be stopped by mathematical axioms. Only way out is to adopt a permanent consensus-free self-stabilising social system, but that algorithm becomes the keystone of whole society then.
A lot of deaf people still use fax machines to do things like place orders (often older deaf folks that can't or won't use email... or when trying to deal with orgs that don't check their email). It's a very accessible technology (except for the blind I suppose). This was the case when I was working with some deaf people around 8 years ago, maybe things have changed since then as fax machines have become less common. But fax is still very popular in Japan IIRC.
For a while, it was handy to be able to fax forms to Studylink and WINZ (New Zealand social security/student loans orgs), but they have recently set up a website where you just scan or photograph documents and upload them.
I think this may be something that varies to region.
I lived in the UK for 32 years and never sent a fax or even saw a fax machine outside of a museum.
Couple of years ago I moved to Australia. Got a credit card for travel with Bankwest. In order to set up a direct debit to pay it off I had to fax them.
In the end I got them to fax themselves my details.
I'm not sure whether Bankwest is just incompetent, or if they deliberately make this difficult so that more people will miss their payments.
Weird. My experience with Australian banks has been the opposite. Sign up and ID verification online/in-app, and within a few minutes I have a new bank account I can transfer money in and out of.
Legacy procedures, some legally mandated I think. I'm thinking about the CA DMV, who had ancient and byzantine computer systems that were quite difficult to replace, both from a technical and from a bureaucratic stand point.
Jokes aside, shouldn't the page start with actually teaching how to quit vim?
The page is considerably popular to show up on a Google search. I imagine the frustration of a beginner actually trying the first examples and not getting the joke immediately.
This kind of advice confused me early on because I didn't realize the : was part of the command for way too long. For beginners, you might want to spell it out further as: "shift and the : key, then qa, then Enter"
You're only targetting old 1970s terminal users, there, though.
If you wanted to also help slightly more modern users who are used to CUA conventions from GUIs, you would have the [F1] key bring up some form of help screen, which said something like "Get out of Vim: Use :qa!" at the top.
You're only targeting old 1990s GUI users there, though.
If you wanted to also help silghtly more modern users who are used to discoverable-UI conventions from mobile apps, you would have it so shaking your device brings up some form of chat bot, which would suggest asking it how to quit Vim.
I'd bet that most people who get stuck don't start vim themselves though. I taught (the basics of) git to a bunch of students recently and the first time we did a commit I had to go around the room and show people how to operate vim. I bet the same happens when new people use visudo, etc
You get the same thing in vim, but only when you open it without a file. Chances are, you only do that when you're already a vim user, and most non-users will be confronted with any random program opening a file in vim for them to edit (visudo, git commit, etc.)
The best thing that can happen to a beginner is they continue being frustrated with vim, quit it before they get in too deep, and just use shitty idees like the rest of us trash.
My first go at vim was an accident. I was using git and ended up there. I later tried to change the editor invoked by git to something else, but have concluded that was dumb and the only real option is to learn vim. It's still on my todo list. As is the actual OSS work I want to contribute after climbing this hill. It should not be this way.
