Live data from Hacker News

A retrospective of my time on the internet

cleberg.net

291–300 of 317 posts

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC should support emoji, it's just text and emoji are pretty much just text transformed in software the same way your computer turns the unicode of the text into into whatever glyph it represents

I meant emoji reactions

No. You meant provisions for simplified automated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis

That aside, does it really matter if one can attach reactions to one text, spanning just one, or several lines, instead of 'reacting' sequentially in the following lines?

Discord, Slack etc. are just conveniences for lazy smombies which find IRC too hardcore, or smth. Like irremovable training wheels on a bicycle. Or mistaking a 'bumper car' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_cars ) for something highway capable.

All of that complaining is equal to the ppl moving into so called gentrified places, only to mourn that the character which made that place interesting has been lost. By too much uptight twats moving in there.

Use it, or lose it!

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#292
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked into Gemini (the protocol)? Lots of people are expressing themselves there through text alone. And there’s a great culture of response-by-email that’s very reminiscent of the early (pre-blog) web. Regardless, not all writers will write forever, not all writers have previously considered themselves as such. It’s good to reinvent yourself. As for AI, the fear of bot scraping is something people are goin…

In the heyday of blogging, it was pretty common when interacting IRL with someone interested in a particular hobby or interest, to hear that they followed certain blogs that served as a locus for the community. I have never heard anyone IRL bring up Gemini the protocol. Not even once. So, again, someone posting on Gemini will probably find almost no audience compared to the old blogosphere.

I don’t think most of them are concerned about “audience”. There’s not even really a good way to get metrics on anything except page views. It’s very insular, kind of like the Bearblog community (although posts there occasionally leak into the broader world).

Not even sure what the point of linking to a Gemini post from the web is, since no major web browser can view Gemini.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#293
post #7

It looks like it starts with: >I was born in the late 1990s >2001: The Family Computer I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to…

Usenet is coming back through the cracks. Google finally graveyarded support and all the spammers went with them. It's pretty low traffic except for some select groups, though. comp.lang.c and talk.origins will never die. :)

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't disagree, but Quake already had a competitive scene before counterstrike with prize pools + tournaments too.

also leaving out that real competitive gaming at that time was probably in Korea and involved Starcraft and others

This still ignores the FPS scene that fully existed before SK. Not saying BW wasn't important (I still watch the ASL and watching Soulkey play) or not on another level (any other esports tournament had the finalists arrived both on separate jets?), but there was already a thriving large esports scene in NA with prize pools in the thousands.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#295
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont understand fastination of gopher... its inferior protocol compared to HTTP. Yes, today HTTP2/0 and up is bloated crap. But hey, you know there is good old HTTP1/1 that still can be used? Why bother with gopher when you can setup nice and lean webpage? Okey. there is one valid point for that, AI scrappers..

Text only means limited opportunity for vulnerabilities (new HTML/CSS parser bugs all the time), and it’s trivial to roll your own client if you want. Text only also means your value has to stand on words alone. No memes, no flashy design. Some of us value that and feel that it’s been lost over time.

Sure, I love text. But I also like HTTP flexibility and ability to embed pics. JavaScript itself is also nice additionion.

Take a look at this: http://borg.uu3.net/~borg/

This is my homepage. Not possible to replicate on gopher from 2 reasons. First, I use JS to render stuff so it looks nice. Second, page is not hosted on IP you are reaching...

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant emoji reactions

No. You meant provisions for simplified automated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis That aside, does it really matter if one can attach reactions to one text, spanning just one, or several lines, instead of 'reacting' sequentially in the following lines? Discord, Slack etc. are just conveniences for lazy smombies which find IRC too hardcore, or smth. Like irremovable training wheels on a bicycle. Or mi…

It doesn't matter what I think about the feature. People clearly enjoy the feature and IRC will never have it because IRC cannot acquire new features like that. Even if the IRCv3 group write a specification, it won't be widely adopted.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#297
post #12

It might be that we just have to accept that the internet and us simply grew apart. But right now, we still seem to be lacking the imagination to engineer new spaces beyond it. And the stamina, probably. Convenience bred laziness. It might change though. Change through disruption. Disruption that will not be without collateral. As always. I for one am curious how hostile of a place the internet will become before the…

Reticulum uses AES-256 encryption, which is considered quantum safe due to the sheer number of extra combinations adding 128 bits to AES 128 creates, including by NIST[1].

It uses AES because AES is extremely well tested and vulnerabilities have not been found.

The new quantum safe algorithms are still mostly in beta and a few have already been broken. They also have extremely large key lengths which breaks the fundamental idea of Reticulum being able to run over any almost any connection, including LoRa. See what the creator of Reticulum said on the topic [2].

[1] https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography/faq... "To protect against the threat of quantum computers, should we double the key length for AES now? (added 11/18/18)"

[2] https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/181#discu...

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#298
post #31
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing. I dream of these things, too. Could you recommend a solid summary of why Reticulum is broken by design? I've only viewed it from a distance, and the idea looks great. But I see a lot of comments like y…

I am by no means an expert, so please someone correct me if I'm wrong. But the problem is that the whole core identity mechanism is built on asymmetric crypto, that is safe now but will not be safe in the future. And because it's in that core layer, you cannot just "upgrade" your crypto. The network collapses permanently and very much un-gracefully once that cryptography is no longer secure. This.. apparently(?) was…

> share a single secret to become that specific closed network

No? Pretty sure that isn't true.

You get an address by creating a random private key public key combination (no collisions are ensured by entropy).

You then send an announce packet over all the connections to other nodes you have. This packet tells everyone else how to reach you and that you exist. To send packets to you they send to the connection they got your announce came from, then the node on the other end of that connection sends to where it got the announce from and so on until it reaches the origin node where the destination must be.

The manual at https://reticulum.network/manual/index.html is the best source of information on Reticulum but it isn't very beginner friendly.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#299
post #7

It looks like it starts with: >I was born in the late 1990s >2001: The Family Computer I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to…

> I think everything changed when Eternal September happened. The original Eternal September is about a specific year, but it has become an evergreen concept for each younger generation: The Internet was really cool when I started using it and everything felt new or novel, but it started going downhill later. That’s why this topic produces so much agreement when spoken of generically, but when the date of decline bec…

This is just life in general. Every generation thinks it is unique in growing older and thinking how much worse things have got since when they were young (or their parents were young). You can find examples of this in very old literature.

You can also see this in many threads here on hn.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#300
post #7

It looks like it starts with: >I was born in the late 1990s >2001: The Family Computer I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to…

This is me too. First access to the internet was through a dial-up to a "bulletin board" (via a girlfriend's fathers account). From there you could launch a shell and get (I will get things wrong here) lynx, gopher, usenet, telnet (muds), etc.

Then I went to university and we got access to the internet directly there, but in the country I grew up in, it was pretty much only university students on IRC etc at the the time. Within a couple of years the commercial providers sprung up and "everything went downhill" (the sentiment being expressed here).

Post reply on HN