Ughhh long story…
It was the height of the Desktop era. Everything ran locally, and that meant Windows. OS X just got started. Everyone was predicting smartphones, but they were a decade out (note time travellers: drop the fucking stylus). Linux was unbelievably shit. Very few drivers, you had to carefully pick your hardware. External devices were a luxury. Printing mostly didn’t work, USB printing was bragging rights. You had to buy modems with a hardware DAC, else it was done in the driver which worked only on Windows. GTK kinda just went from v1 to v2, everything looked 10 years outdated, and even Firefox had glitchy UI on Linux. If you could insert a CD and get it to show up without manually mounting, you were staring into the future.
The Web was on hold, Microsoft having won the browsers wars pt. 1, and proceeding to stall with Internet Explorer 6, correctly predicting that browsers would compete with their hegemony in the client space. There were no services: GMail and Youtube were just getting started. You ran local programs, and there were barely any for Linux. The choice was between booting Windows and dicking with cracks from Astalavista, and booting Linux to rice your E16, then staring at it. General productivity software was almost non-existent — you had a dozen compilers and interpreters instead. Where I’m from, banking required desktop software which required windows, not to mention smart cards, which also required windows.
This was made worse by the proprietary formats, which were the key to maintaining stranglehold. Everyone was emailing .doc
s around, which you could sometimes open with Abiword or maybe dump just the text and Antiword. Even the PDF viewers were a bit crap. Had to submit a report? You probably booted Windows in a virtual machine to use Office, and the CPU was yet to add instructions helping with that. Media was even worse; everything was MPEG and required royalties. LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder because it wasn’t allowed to be. RIAA/MPAA were fighting hard to keep you buying physical shit. Meanwhile, you could only play Tux Racer and Nethack.
Around that time, Microsoft was about to introduce Palladium, an attestation chain rooted in hardware. Everyone was despairing about the same future: in 3-5 years, Microsoft would use it to pull in and segregate an increasing portion of the Internet, until the whole became their walled garden. Hope that sounds familiar.
Meanwhile, older penguins just didn’t give a fuck. They simply didn’t use the shit they couldn’t use, and missed none of it. They worked to extend what they had, the digital commons.
No one could stand TVs, so as an act of disobedience, we invented p2p piracy. Napster, DC, torrents — which are alive and kicking. Xiph gave no fucks and started working on free media codecs. Vorbis became CELT became OPUS. Tarkin became Daala became (merged into) AV1. Youtube is now serving OPUS and VP9 or AV1; our best codecs trace their lineage to DIY stuff done to avoid proprietary formats. H.266 can, and will, fuck off. PDF is everywhere. Jimbo started Wikipedia. Flash went away. The modern web happened. Linux grew up and I don’t even notice I’m using it. Free software ate nonfree in most domains; the gardens are now walled through access, not by being built on proprietary stacks. Massive progress happened.
Now that the digital world runs on services — which were a clever ruse to subvert old free software (Google runs on Linux, remember?) — someone is threatening to close a few pipes. So what? Just look at the fucking size of those commons that we have created. Someone will claw back some of that… and? Worst case, we lose a few ways to waste our time, of which we have hundreds. Retract from the mainstream a little, again. Have some difficulties using a few services. Be careful which hardware we buy. Oh noez.
Shit changes constantly. Companies battle relentlessly to undercut one another. We invent workarounds and grow our knowledge. Relax, get yourself LineageOS+MicroG or GrapheneOS or even a Fairphone; get a Framework; use Fediverse; get off those services and sail the high seas where needed; use Linux+Firefox if you aren’t already; touch grass; and if someone tries to force you into extracting rent — refuse it.
Persist.
It comes in cycles. 20 years ago, it was a struggle to maintain your digital freedom. 10 years ago, when everyone was basking in free software and low interest rates, it was quite easy. The industry is contracting again, so it’s going to be harder to do so while using commercial offerings. But we will find ways and the cycle will repeat.
Persist.
Comments on a self-professed tankie instance
“BuT wHy Is EvErYoNe RiDiNg TaNkS”
This is LEMMY.ML, mister. Also, everything everyone else is saying.
zsh
Occasionally oil for neovim.
To each their own.
I thought that the trick with exposing the raw hardware to a VM was the coolest thing ever, since it negates this entire “do their special tools support Linux” issue. And you do it once every 6 months, maybe 4 times in total, until releases taper off.
Have a ready Qemu image of a Windows install. Have a live distro that has (or can install to RAM) Qemu. Boot Windows using Qemu in the live environment, and VFIO-passthrough your NVME as a PCI device. Install and run the official Windows-based update tool, which now has raw access to the SSD.
At least that’s what I’m doing for my WD.
An elegy for a clockwork-smooth, labor of love, tit slip site? Well, the Internet is alive and kicking!
c/programmingcirclejerk when?
We’re just talking past each other.
People from the broader “west” look at the Internet, see a global network, and switch to English to maximize the reach.
(Certain) people from the anglosphere see the network is in English, and conclude it must be local to them.
Also this.
I’m arguing in good faith, since this is a new place and I’m (still) trying to foster discussion. Unfortunately, I could not find any published data on the visitors of the early Reddit.
So the best that I can do is offer first-hand account: cca 2006 Reddit was not US-centric. For that matter, almost no community on the Internet was, be it forums or IRC.
If a website is built in your country, isn’t it a safe assumption that the majority of users would be from your country?
This is complete nonsense. Why would it work like that? Are most of the Spotify users Swedish?
It’s good data, but we know it’s been overrun by Americans.
Early on, the number was even larger.
This is something that we don’t know.
Early on, it was about random programming links and stuff that such crowd cared about. Then a bunch of people poured in and confused the language with the locality.
I don’t think you understand. How do you know that the heavy majority of the users (of the early Reddit) were from the US? You are repeating the viewpoint that the place started out as US-centric — any concrete data here? Why do you think that the country where a web site was built in matters here?
I’ll reiterate: English is fundamentally different from Japanese because it is widely used as a second language.
No, it’s a consequence of normies.
The original Reddit, like Slashdot, and Dig to a lesser extent, defaulted to a global community. These places started out by attracting nerds from across the globe. Nerdy communities are internationalist, and fluent in English. So there was a tacit understanding that English was simply Esperanto and that anyone could be from anywhere.
Slowly getting mainstream, Reddit started attracting randos. And American randos apparently associate English with themselves, completely lost to the fact that something like half of the planet uses it as a common language. So I sat and watched as the overall tone of the place went from a spaceship, to Chick-fil-A, Podunk.
Sauce: English as a second language and been there from the start.
When you were shitposting, I lurked moar. When you were drowning in internet points, I got RSI hammering F5. While you wasted your days in pursuit of rare pepes, I cultivated inner strength.
And now that absolutely nothing has happened, you have the audacity to come to me for federation?
0.96k — and 15 years. I’m a pathological lurker, send help.
Posting to unlurk myself. It’s… haaard to kick the habit.
Do Yugoslav cartoons count?
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLL1eg8LgxXPN2kpmyxAuyhi_IYeIoaZc&cbrd=1
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XjrdLzV6r98