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Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

drewdevault.com

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Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#151

Post by ganzuul »

cwyers wrote: post #139
ganzuul wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been on IRC for maybe two decades now, I find the impermanence to be part of IRC's charm. People engage with you when you ask them what has been going on; just like in real life. It's a social protocol.

Certain use cases that Slack et al cater to, you might not get to choose impermanence. There might be compliance/regulatory issues that require you to have document retention policies.

And if you have retention you need retrieval, and backups, and audit trails for access, and pretty soon you're a SAP customer suffering the Curse of Greyface.

I did change careers to escape that...

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#152

Post by phicoh »

nxrabl wrote: post #142
phicoh wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then lots of people have bouncers to be there 24x7.

Which makes for an interesting dynamic, since it's the people with the most experience for whom the chat is least ephemeral, and the people who would benefit most from having scrollback who are least likely to have it set up properly.

One of the nice things about the IRC bridges between Matrix and big IRC networks is that you can experience IRC from the comfort of Matrix.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#153

Post by dmitriid »

simias wrote: post #132
abstractbeliefs wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An example of how this could work is that a client could support receiving an image. When this happens, it could upload it to an image host of choice, get the url, and send that. It's what users already do, but without having to pop a new tab, head to imgur, upload the image, and copy paste it back etc.

I've scripted things like that in irssi the past (although using scp and one server I own, not imgur, but that shouldn't be massively harder). Most IRC clients are trivially scriptable. I'm always baffled when I see that the Signal client package is like 80MB on desktop and lacks basic functionality and configurability while irssi is barely 1MB, extremely lightweight and effectively endlessly configurable. Let's not…

> I've scripted things... Most IRC clients are trivially scriptable.

Because all people find it valuable to find out how IRC clients are scriptable, figuring out all the moving parts to the clients' scripting interface, to a third-party API (if it exists), etc. etc.

Or, you know, use Slack or Discord :)

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#154

Post by zapzupnz »

ganzuul wrote: post #150
asveikau wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the lack of reliability I described a few comments up is not just a problem for 24/7 archiving. You will see it in everyday use: your connection will drop, it will take a while for a timeout to notice, and you will miss messages for that period. Now in a real life situation you can mishear or fail to hear. But technology can make this better.

I meant to address the second issue you bring up; that you ask if you missed anything during the period. I might not want a 24/7 archive. Especially not for all the silly things I said in my teens.

> you ask if you missed anything during the period

For high-volume, fast-paced channels this may not be appropriate. For slower channels where people rarely post anything, you constantly asking "did I miss anything while I disconnected" might be considered spam.

> I might not want a 24/7 archive

What you may or may not want has no bearing on what the technology should be capable of providing when others may require it.

Technology can, and already has, solved these problems. If that's not your cup of tea, fine, but don't impose your own use cases on others through "but it works fine for me"-ism.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#155

Post by jandrese »

693471 wrote: post #51

IRC is forever tainted by graybeards that won't give up their terminal clients. People who want to get work done have moved on. The next generation of developers have no interest in IRC. It's a dead end.

Heaven forbid the simple chat application isn't some damn Electron app that needs 2GB of memory and burns CPU constantly.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#156

Post by gridlockd »

> "Remember that not everyone is like you."

Of course they aren't, but most people aren't like Drew Devault either. Most people don't use ancient hardware to prove some sort of point. The "Drew Devault will approve of it"-argument generally doesn't show up in a business case.

In a perverse way, I am glad that programmers come up with better and better ways to waste hardware resources. In doing so, they ensure the continued progress of the semiconductor (and battery) industry through mass market demand.

I do not believe it is a coincidence that Moore's law has slowed significantly right at the time when computers became "good enough" for the everyday user. If it wasn't for gamers spending hundreds of dollars on pushing more pixels on-screen, we'd be way behind on deep learning.

Buy a new computer, Drew.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#157

Post by ryanlol »

deadbunny wrote: post #60
nayuki wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In exchange, you have gut-wrenching systemwide outages of Slack once in a while. The CAP theorem says you can't have it both ways. News from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303479

Are you living in a world without netsplits?

Netsplits are pretty rare these days.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#158

Post by ircdrone »

Pigo wrote: post #15
ircdrone wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too miss the good old days of Undernet, where Romanian criminals would show off hacked systems, or DDOS other IRC users.

I miss the wild west, sue me. My entire life wasn't on whatever system I was using, so it wouldn't have mattered if someone messed it up. I don't miss the hardware of the time, but at least the web wasn't sterilized and owned by a few companies.

Correct, today’s internet has been taken over by companies and search engines by seo spam. But if there was anyone left enjoying tue good ole days of lawlessness, irc would still be a thing.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#159

Post by mixologic »

danmg wrote: post #85
693471 wrote: post #51

IRC is forever tainted by graybeards that won't give up their terminal clients. People who want to get work done have moved on. The next generation of developers have no interest in IRC. It's a dead end.

Why should text chat need more than a 'terminal client'?

The bigger point is that 'text chat' is antiquated and unnecessarily limited, and that the advent of "richer" text chat is a gigantic improvement in communications efficiency.

As one of these greybeards who started with 300 baud modems and text chats in the 80's, and moved onto IRC because the internet was better than BBS's, I wholeheartedly endorse the idea that the only people clinging to the UX garbagefire that is IRC are the people who are either unwilling or unable to adapt to the new reality that modern services offer so much more value than IRC will ever be capable of.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#160

Post by ganzuul »

zapzupnz wrote: post #154
ganzuul wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant to address the second issue you bring up; that you ask if you missed anything during the period. I might not want a 24/7 archive. Especially not for all the silly things I said in my teens.

> you ask if you missed anything during the period For high-volume, fast-paced channels this may not be appropriate. For slower channels where people rarely post anything, you constantly asking "did I miss anything while I disconnected" might be considered spam. > I might not want a 24/7 archive What you may or may not want has no bearing on what the technology should be capable of providing when others may require i…

The social structure in those two examples will be very different. You would not want to do what you suggest.

IRC remains popular, so same to you buddy.

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