Want your images back? That'll be $5

I had always thought that fixing outages was one of the least appealing parts of software engineering, but so many SWE blogs seem to have built blogs in ways where downtime is inevitable.

Unless there is an extremely good reason not to use one, a static site generator works perfectly well. Next, there are many 3p services which will display that site for free. GitHub pages, AWS free tier, I’m sure there are plenty of other ones.

Importantly, and relevant to this article, the files live on your computer. You can mirror them in any number of repos if you want, but it is not possible for any 3p service to hold them hostage.

I am thoroughly convinced that this is the right way that I’d even go so far as to say it is a best practice for roll-your-own blogs, and any sort of issue like the article describes is a direct result of not following that best practice.

Look through old email to figure out what email address they had.

Attempt to log in, no memory of password. Get reset link sent to my ancient Hotmail.

Hotmail doesn't recognize this device because I haven't logged in in a decade. Send an email to my hotmailspam@my-domain.com that I apparently set up at some point to confirm my identity. Have to enter multiple confirmation codes.

Log into Hotmail, click link to reset Photobucket password.

Create a new password, put it on my vault.

"Failed to reset password Firebase: Error (auth/the-service-is-currently-unavailable.)."

Perfect. No notes.

But as seen by the recent rejection of Stop Killing Games by the EU Commission, society has apparently decided that more money means you should have more say. So the corporations (who would absolutely go to the extremes in terms of ensuring that they don't plateau and instead make more money than last quarter) become the defacto government.

Corporations are not people in and of themselves. They are groups of people at best (and with the way generative AI is going, that's not even guaranteed long-term). There are certain benefits to counting corporations as people for certain parts of contract law, but there is zero benefit to conferring free speech rights on the actual corporations themselves.

Meanwhile, the current US administration is all about finding whatever grift they can attach to and enrich themselves at the cost of founding values.

The biggest thing that pushes me towards idealistic communism is the actions taken by Western society. Maybe that's where we need to use the blockchain and related technologies, to enact the principles of communism without having the state be a proxy for the people. A documented, nearly unfalsifiable share of the means of production means that they'd have to resort to the $5 wrench to be evil in that context, instead of the massive corruption that historic implementations of communism have suffered while the frogs slowly boil. At least it might be a start, I don't know. I just know I see the path the world is taking, and right now the entire Western world is devolving into a weird techno-fascism that locks out any free thought