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What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

drewdevault.com

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Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#101

Post by slx26 »

cyounkins wrote: post #63

Is extensibility really the Pandora's box the author makes it out to be? Just because something is extensible doesn't mean it has to be extended in monstrous ways.

It's interesting to think about this: a simple and ordered space is the most seductive platform to start messing with.

When something is complex and chaotic enough, we start losing the drive to make it even more complex, as it takes too much effort and it's too painful to do. But when a system is simple enough... you have ideas, you think them possible, you feel the opportunity, you want to experiment and explore and create; and it's hard to resist. Therefore, software systems (and many others, maybe we could spend a few thousand pages discussing this for societies as a whole) develop a tendency towards complexity. You could describe programmers as data manipulators or complexity managers. Don't make your first job harder, don't make your second one impossible.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#102

Post by Y_Y »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #19

This name is so overused that when I see it, I think I know the project in several different contexts. Choose another name… please.

Overloading names is frustrating. It's also disappointingly ubiquitous, and whether or not it's a problem depends strongly on your context and expectations. For example, the English dialect I learned growing up exclusively used "autumn" to refer to the season after summer and before winter. Every time I see a phrase like "we will complete this project after the fall" I end up parsing it as something like "after the fall [of civilization]" and have to manually correct.

Presumably when people give something a name that has conflicts, they themselves don't see it that way. This makes it an especially difficult kind of problem, since you have to then argue that a) people like you (but unlike them) have a problem and b) this problem is worth caring about and maybe even c) this isn't going to happen all over again when the new solution is troublesome for some other group.

I find that societal issues fitting this pattern are a real sticky wicket generally.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#103

Post by john-aj »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #7

"My disdain for web browsers is well documented1." Ha, I am not the only one. I do like links though, somewhere around 2.3pre2, with stunnel or haproxy for up-to-date TLS. Someone submitted an "improved" version of linenoise the other day, which added UTF-8 and ANSI codes by default. But I prefer to avoid Unicode in the console (cf. terminal, I do not use a graphics layer plus emulator). This is an example of enforci…

Could you elaborate (or share a configuration example) on how you use stunnel or haproxy to connect an old browser to encrypted websites? I usually use squid for that purpose, but I've been looking for alternatives.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#104

Post by Jetrel »

BrightGlow wrote: post #25
zchrykng wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Gemini being its own stand-alone thing that is different from everything is a serious hindrance for people to try it. I've read Drew's stuff for a while and even wanted to test out Gemini out of interest, but it is really annoying/frustrating to use in my experience. And that is even before you get to the fact that there is nearly nothing there and/or it is nearly impossible. to find.

According to some other blogs posted here (links are are elsewhere in this thread) the entire point of Gemini is that it's useless and annoying to use, so useless and annoying that it drives out any advertisers or businesses that would be potentially interested to use it. I understand the designer's reasons to dislike online advertising but the train of logic here seems to be "internet businesses like to make things…

Internet business got trapped in advertising due to the whole classic phenomenon of "bad money chases out good money". I.e. a similar example lies in businesses funded by VC runways for several years; even though those businesses may not be "actually profitable", because they're getting fake profits (VC money) for several years, they're able to compete against "organically funded" businesses that are actually earning real profits and are naturally solvent. More importantly though - they're often able to compete so well that they drive those other companies out of business. It leads to a churn scenario where, since the only businesses left are VC-funded, everything dies/gets-acquired within a 3-5 year time window (except the FAANG giants doing the acquiring).

Advertising did a really similar job.

It completely destroyed most web businesses trying to get their customers to "actually pay" in some form or another, and ... basically the only survivors have been a few giant media conglomerates (with their own ad divisions), and the FAANG companies (actually selling the ads). Everybody else is sharecropping on google/facebook's proverbial plantation, and like all similar historical situations of rentiership, the vast, vast majority of them have gone out of business and been acquired by the proverbial landlord (this is why, you know, something like 2/3 of the newspapers in the USA have gone out of business in the last few decades). What's even worse with the newspapers is that in many cases they weren't even acquired; they were just shuttered completely.

(The only other major survivor has been people selling actual physical products over the web.)

--

There are thousands of articles about why local journalism going out of business (and not getting replaced by anything, typically) is bad, and I'll leave googling those as an exercise for the reader.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#105

Post by savolai »

BrightGlow wrote: post #94
savolai wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it laudable you're openly admitting making users unhappy. Of course, what's "added" and what's "simple" is a political value choice in an of itself. Using a mailing list for comments sounds like "returning to the golden days when we didn't need to take non-techies people seriously but could tell them what to use their cognitive capacity for" i.e. to learn arcane UI that never even tried to really take into acc…

I really don't think it's okay. I've noticed this type of "tech reactionarism" a lot recently in open source as a form of wishful thinking. This author in particular seems to write about it quite a lot. But it's misleading and not being fair to the users, who deserve to know that what they're doing is a waste of time. Unless someone wants to pull out the old teletype and modem connected to a phone line then we can't…

Yeah, depends on the direction from which you look at "okay" from.

Arguably there are worse things in society than techies making tech for themselves.

Ironically though ... , to me it seems that Gemini and Facebook, though culturally presented as opposites here, are really fruits of the same tree, just different gardens and different stages of growth.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#106

Post by prox »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #28
SilverRed wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People, or businesses, that you know in real life could exchange certificate hashes in person. This happens about as often as using PGP email. Approximately never.

This is the exact response that I tried to cover with the rest of my comment.

I actually think it’s an interesting idea that merits some investigation.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#107

Post by Semiapies »

This all seemed interesting at first, but the more I look at Gemini, the more I shrug and say, "Why not just build some text web sites without ads or trackers?" Literally millions of those exist, some dating back to the first eta of the web that every geek my age or older seems nostalgic for.

(Really, they're nostalgic for an era when almost everybody else they ran into on the internet shared the background of being a white, male American geek, very few people were online, and nobody cared about anything said online. Not anything technical.)

You don't want JavaScript, videos, images, styles, or fonts? Don't use them. Nobody is going to come and force your site to have them. On the other hand, your site will load so fast that it won't feel remotely retro. ;)

You can use a static builder (or slap one together that fits your needs) if you don't like hand-coding HTML. Though, really, basic HTML is dead simple for pages of text. If you want to go full 1994, set your robots.txt to block all search engines. Make it so people can only find your site by following links from the sites of the like-minded. Don't link out to anything that isn't a similar site. Boom, you've done everything Gemini does with off-the-shelf software, leaving you with more time to read and write.

(I've seen the counter-arguments from Gemini boosters, but none are very convincing. A Dogme 95-esque approach to the web accomplishes everything interesting about Gemini.)

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#109

Post by AstralStorm »

Semiapies wrote: post #107

This all seemed interesting at first, but the more I look at Gemini, the more I shrug and say, "Why not just build some text web sites without ads or trackers?" Literally millions of those exist, some dating back to the first eta of the web that every geek my age or older seems nostalgic for. (Really, they're nostalgic for an era when almost everybody else they ran into on the internet shared the background of being…

> Nobody is going to force you to use JavaScript.

But they sure try. Latest iteration of coercion is called Google AMP.

Images, videos and other embeds are fine, because they're clear siloes; it's easy to make sure the website degrades gracefully.

JS is not, and fonts are not. These do not degrade gracefully. Neither do complex styles in CSS. Canvas does not degrade either.

Gemini is a bit too simple to be really useful. What is needed is something closer to old HTML 2 before all the browser warfare, with a few small extras tossed in from later versions. Maybe with bit more of semantic format than representational.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#110

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

john-aj wrote: post #103
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #7

"My disdain for web browsers is well documented1." Ha, I am not the only one. I do like links though, somewhere around 2.3pre2, with stunnel or haproxy for up-to-date TLS. Someone submitted an "improved" version of linenoise the other day, which added UTF-8 and ANSI codes by default. But I prefer to avoid Unicode in the console (cf. terminal, I do not use a graphics layer plus emulator). This is an example of enforci…

Could you elaborate (or share a configuration example) on how you use stunnel or haproxy to connect an old browser to encrypted websites? I usually use squid for that purpose, but I've been looking for alternatives.

stunnel configuration is useful for a limited number of sites, since one has to specify every remote ip address in the configuration file. haproxy configuration doesnt have that limitation; it can do dns lookups, use maps, etc.

for example, one can force all http and https to connect to a backend as https with a specific tls version. this is much simpler than eff's "https everywhere", IMHO.

the problem with tls is it keeps changing. as users, we have to bet that every application will stay up-to-date with the changes, and that the software authors wont make mistakes when adding/updating tls support. IME, this has been a losing bet. by just focusing on haproxy and stunnel i only have to worry about a couple of applications staying up-to-date with tls and implementing support correctly.

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