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I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

justinjackson.ca

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Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#121

Post by jerf »

fartcannon wrote: post #84
SkipperCat wrote: post #71

Back in the early 2000's, I taught "computers" to a bunch of kids in DC. I first started off with how a computer work; IO, CPU, storage and their eyes glazed over. I quickly ditched that topic and went right to building a web page. Taught them a few HTML tags and they instantly became "webmasters". They were so thrilled. They could create blinking text, could make all the fonts pink. All just by moving around some si…

You can still just use HTML.

This does indeed work fine. The major problem is still finding somewhere to host it, and incurring the still non-trivial risks thereto, since among the many things students want to do with free web space, hosting warez and other things that will get you in trouble quickly is still pretty far up the list. Plus someone has to pay for a domain name or something.

If you can get a modern text editor that can use SSH or something to mount a remote directory you can easily have an HTML party like it's 1999. That's easier than ever. But the surrounding issues are worse than they were in 1999, unfortunately.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#122

Post by c0wb0yc0d3r »

layer8 wrote: post #114
smoldesu wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That too, but I get the feeling those kinds of operations aren't in Javascript's standard library...

`my_number & 1 == 0` works.

JavaScript does have bitwise operators. Something I was surprised by was that numbers are stored as 64 bit while all of the bitwise operators operate on 32 but numbers. This means that every operation results in a number conversion first.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#123

Post by Clubber »

abrookewood wrote: post #68
scandox wrote: post #9

I know this is kind of negative: but I don't like nostalgia much and I think I like tech-nostalgia least. Don't get me wrong I like old tech, but just for what it is. Text based, simple, fast etc...but I don't like wallowing in a warm, fuzzy feeling about how it was. I mean I personally do recall 5.25" disks. I liked their look and feel as a kid. Fine. But making a big deal out of it feels retrograde...

5.25" disks? I can remember waiting ~30 minutes for a game to load on my Commodore 64 from tape, only to have it crash at the last minute. Disks were amazing.

The first program I ever got I typed in from a book. It made a spinning pyramid on a VIC-20. It took hours and hours only for it to disappear when I shut off the computer. Tapes were amazing!

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#124

Post by jraph »

JohnWhigham wrote: post #120
dgb23 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be a joke right?

Yes, JavaScript is a joke for having such a barren standard library that the community has to do it for them.

Ok, which programming languages actually have an isOdd or an isEven function in their standard library?

Anyway, Javascript, like virtually every programming language, has "& 1".

Yes, the standard library is lacking and yes, that's a big issue, partly responsible for the huge mess that is NPM. No, it does not matter one bit here so this is off topic.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#125

Post by falcolas »

legutierr wrote: post #117
blueflow wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of opaqueness: Many people hail it as the next big thing since sliced bread, but when you actually spend the effort digging in you realize its barely good for anything except money laundering and tax evasion. Give me some bitcoin and i would not know what to do with them except changing them back into money.

> its barely good for anything except money laundering and tax evasion You can’t think of any situation where you would want to share access to and control of data with multiple untrusted third parties, where you would need to guarantee not only that data modifications are only executed in an authorized fashion, but also that no previous modifications have been reversed? The list of use cases for that capability is n…

> You can’t think of any situation where you would want to share access and control of data with multiple untrusted third parties, where you would need to guarantee not only that data modifications are only executed in an authorized fasion, but also that no previous modifications have been reversed?

Do you mean a cryptographic signature? Been doing those for decades back in email chains and newsgroups. Each message could contain the prior messages and their signatures. What’s new was assigning a currency to it.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#126

Post by jerf »

soco wrote: post #38
tomhoward wrote: post #20

My 1996 self feels very seen. I think a lot about the way the web was back in the mid 90s, compared to the bleeding-edge technologies of today, particularly blockchain and cryptocurrency. And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfo…

Erm, no, many understand very well what blockchain is and it's definitely not opaqueness what they accuse it of. But everybody can choose their own strawman to fight, can't they.

Blockchains are fairly simple technologically. Securing them is substantially more difficult, so creating one is difficult, but to simply understand what they do you don't have to understand all those fiddly details.

What is opaque are all the various bizarre schemes to try to turn them into something useful and profitable, because they really aren't good for that much. (Non-zero. Definitely non-zero. But not really that much.) You either have to stretch them into a space they aren't really good for, or all but create a problem they can solve, but essentially doesn't otherwise exist as a problem. This is where a lot of the complication lies. NFTs, for instance. Drop-dead simple technologically, really. The confusing part has always been, why would anyone spend that much on a fairly crappy picture of a monkey? There's multiple layers of "wtf" to unpack in that question. But the technology itself permitting it isn't that complicated.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#127

Post by david_allison »

brightball wrote: post #53
f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #49

His description of what web dev felt like in those early days captures how I feel about VR now. Back then it was obvious to me that was the coolest thing you could possibly learn. Still to me it is outrageously cool that I can think something up and then in not that much time it can be a website. So whats the new magic? To me it's the idea of being able to think something up and conjour it into the virtual world too.

I’m curious if you could elaborate on that some. VR just seems like another type of game design to me, as someone who isn’t active in the space. Yours is the first perspective I’ve seen that actually made me curious.

* More innovations with passthrough (combination of a VR headset and AR). Currently you can get "X-Ray Vision" to see where your controllers are in a room. In the future, this could be expanded to other peripherals such as keyboards. It allows you to have a cooking video playing while cooking (hands-free control) [1] or place/design furniture in your room [2]

* Once the resolution is a little better - virtual offices[3] and cinemas[4] allow for significantly more screen real estate than a traditional setup, requiring less space and capital investment.

* Live/pre-recorded virtual concerts and sports games[5] are already occurring (where you can invite friends to watch in real time). The current 'experiences' (wingsuit flying, virtual tourism, etc..) are far more immersive than watching the equivalent 360° Video

* VR fitness is a reasonable method of cardio, burning ~9 calories a minute. It can also augment other training methods, such as a stationary bike[6]

* Haptic suits[7], gloves and treadmills[8] - not really my thing, but allowing 360° running and feeling the interactions with your environment.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keufFXiO1_M&t=3m45s

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZFiaILqQng

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_bVkbG1ZCo

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh9n0bZcprk&t=1m7s

[5] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/duMowUK6tk4

[6] https://www.holodia.com/vr-fitness-blog/holofit-vr-works-wit...

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4UdbYrqa2A

[8] https://omni.virtuix.com/

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#128

Post by nradov »

blueflow wrote: post #40
soco wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm, no, many understand very well what blockchain is and it's definitely not opaqueness what they accuse it of. But everybody can choose their own strawman to fight, can't they.

This sort of opaqueness: Many people hail it as the next big thing since sliced bread, but when you actually spend the effort digging in you realize its barely good for anything except money laundering and tax evasion. Give me some bitcoin and i would not know what to do with them except changing them back into money.

Cryptocurrency is also good for evading national capital controls. Wealthy Chinese can purchase mining hardware and electricity using the local "funny money" currency, generate coins, and then sell those in another country for real money.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#129

Post by JohnWhigham »

blowski wrote: post #29
scandox wrote: post #9

I know this is kind of negative: but I don't like nostalgia much and I think I like tech-nostalgia least. Don't get me wrong I like old tech, but just for what it is. Text based, simple, fast etc...but I don't like wallowing in a warm, fuzzy feeling about how it was. I mean I personally do recall 5.25" disks. I liked their look and feel as a kid. Fine. But making a big deal out of it feels retrograde...

Exactly. The problem with the 1993 web was that it was usable by and appealed to only a very small part of the population. When people say stuff like this, it sounds to me like they're saying "I wish the web could go back to being a more exclusive club of which I was a member".

They're right though. The Internet was better when it didn't have tons of people giving their unsolicited opinions and corporations coming in and having every single one of their actions be antithetical to the esprit of the WWW. It was better when people had to put in effort to find something and not take 30 seconds to select the first Google-approved search result.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#130

Post by layer8 »

The “webmaster” designation probably came from the “webmaster@domain” functional email addresses, which in turn were modeled after the existing “postmaster@domain” convention for contacting the email admin(s) of a domain. Does anyone know if there were other *masters?
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