Hilariously, the New York times tries both: you get five or so article reads (with shitloads of tracking), and then you have to pay to read more per month. But if you're paying, the pages don't load any different. You're paying to be mined.
This is why I've never subscribed to cable TV. I'm not going to pay for the privilege of watching 20 mins of commercials an hour.
That's not what you are paying for with basic cable; you get that with broadcast for free.
What you are paying for is a broader choice in the filler between the commercials.
Strictly speaking, most individual business isn't needed. If the NY Times folds tomorrow due to bankruptcy, there are dozens of other papers where we can get the news. Their reporting is good, and I choose them over their competitors but losing them wouldn't be the end of news as we know it. That's the case with most businesses---the marketing and sales are only needed to compete , whereas without them the product wo…
Your choice of journalism as an example is unsettling. If the New York Times goes out of business, there is no guarantee that another news publisher will break the same stories. Some things will just not be investigated anymore and some important stories will just not be told.
But doesn't that hold true regardless? The presence of the New York Times means there are certain stories not being investigated or told. And we aren't even fully aware. We have no idea if those stories would be of more worth to us or not.
> "You actually don't need all that crap to serve adverts, or really even to do tracking: people managed without it in the 90s. It's just that it's more work to get the same effect without a buttload of JS in this day and age" While I sympathize with this sentiment, this is also the entire history of computing in a nutshell. Moore's Law has driven us orders of magnitude beyond where we were when personal computers fi…
(All that being said, I'm also fairly salty about having 8 GB of RAM and a mechanical hard drive rendering my computer incredibly painful to use as technology has marched on. Discord - which I use almost exclusively as an IRC chatroom with persistent while-you-were-gone chat history, embedded media, and fun custom emotes - is an entire Electron app that eats over 100 MB minimum; Firefox is eating 750 MB just keeping…
Why do you hate spinning disks so much? And no they are not considered "deprecated", they're really the only way to affordably store large volumes of data. It's an old, venerable, and still-very-useful tech
The web was intended to be a free exchange of knowledge, not ad driven, regardless of how JS was abused in the late 90s, early 2000s. A scripting language was added to the web because of Netscape’s commercial interests in Creating an alternative to MS products.
> The web was intended to be I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. You cannot say what the web was intended to be because you had no hand in inventing it. You do not know the mind of Tim Berners-Lee. In fact, I argue the opposite - he had a vision of a global hyperlinked information system. While he wanted the protocol itself to be free (a move away from gopher), the information itself had no such protections. And that…
You write as if Tim Berners-Lee died in 1990.
I think it's quite possible to know what TBL thinks about privacy-invasive javascript, given that he's very much alive and writing about such things to this day.
People’s/companies’ own websites aren’t commons. The protocols that make up the web itself haven’t degraded through use; this is no more a tragedy of the commons than if every shop in your town made you wait a few seconds before you could go inside.
Temporal literally said that the internet is the "commons" and your counter is that companies and protocols aren't the commons. You're just being purposefully obtuse, this is not hard to understand, assuming ones paycheck doesn't depend on not understanding it.
I think his point is that the protocols are the internet.
I mean, the "internet" is just the word we give to the interconnected network of computers spanning the globe. It doesn't exist as a thing per se, but as an idea. The internet can never be slow. Your connection to a certain site can be slow. Whether that site is a particular web page or the internet service provider's router that provides you with access to the greater network.
My i3wm environment doesn't randomly start anything I don't ask it to start and runs very comfortably with 8gb of ram heck it would run fine with 4gb and no swap. Maybe you are running the wrong os.
Oh, no, I'm aware these are very much Win10 specific problems and I look at Linux people with a not insignificant degree of envy. Unfortunately, I do quite like PC gaming.
Modern gnome is a pig, some of this could be tracked back to gnome-shell's use of javascript and css styling if you were so inclined. Most linux users don't really notice it due to the fact that most x86 machines are crazy fast.
OTOH, try starting a modern full blown distro on something like an rpi instead of raspian and you will quickly discover that you _NEED_ more than 4G of ram and a lot of CPU just to start firefox. Its even worse if you don't have hardware GL acceleration.
OTOH, the lightweight desktops (lxqt, lxdt, xfce) really are..
My i3wm environment doesn't randomly start anything I don't ask it to start and runs very comfortably with 8gb of ram heck it would run fine with 4gb and no swap. Maybe you are running the wrong os.
Can you run recent versions of Photoshop? How about Premiere, or Final Cut? SolidWorks? CATIA? Matlab?
Those are commercial apps for people with real money. OTOH, there are a number of unbeatable free apps that don't have linux ports. Fusion360 comes to mind, its not solidworks level , but its light years ahead of freecad.
>Thousands of cpu hours, megabytes and dollars wasted on some user spying turdheap the marketing guys NEEDED to put in an app, 'to track user behaviour'. I understand that somewhere in a perfect universe, tech guys just make things right and money just flow in without those pesky marketing people ever involved. Unfortunately, in our universe if you don't do marketing and don't analyze user behavior your business is t…
In the pre-monetized web, yes the tech guys made things right without money extracted from the web. Standards & many applications that implemented them (including commercial) were attempted to be designed to make online computer use possible and beneficial. This is the domain of academics, committees, and concerned individuals creating the means of useful computing & communication, outside of parasitic desperation to…
> In the pre-monetized web, yes the tech guys made things right without money extracted from the web.
It was extracted from tuition paid by undergraduate students and taxes paid by taxpayers.
And that money all eventually came from dirty capitalism.
>Thousands of cpu hours, megabytes and dollars wasted on some user spying turdheap the marketing guys NEEDED to put in an app, 'to track user behaviour'. I understand that somewhere in a perfect universe, tech guys just make things right and money just flow in without those pesky marketing people ever involved. Unfortunately, in our universe if you don't do marketing and don't analyze user behavior your business is t…
Sure, if your content sucks. If you need all that bullshit to stay profitable then perhaps the business isn't really needed at all. "but that is the industry competition for you, everyone does it." To that, all I can say is perhaps some regulation is required to level the playing field.
I see your point. If you make great content/product users should somehow learn about it in order for your business model to work, because no users means no money. You can assume that people will just get so excited about your product that they will just tell other people about it, share links, post social stuff, so that the growth happens organically without all that "marketing bullshit". And it does happen organically. The problem is that even for very good products such organic growth is way too slow because it has exponential nature (very slow in the beginning, quickly accelerating only at the end), so you run out of money before hitting profitability. There are outstanding examples of products that quickly became viral, but these are extremely rare cases. Hoping for this luck is like hoping to accidentally build next Twitter. In other words, you shouldn't hope for it if you're serious about your business. You would need something that propagates awareness about your product in a more manageable way than pure luck. It's called marketing.
People’s/companies’ own websites aren’t commons. The protocols that make up the web itself haven’t degraded through use; this is no more a tragedy of the commons than if every shop in your town made you wait a few seconds before you could go inside.
Temporal literally said that the internet is the "commons" and your counter is that companies and protocols aren't the commons. You're just being purposefully obtuse, this is not hard to understand, assuming ones paycheck doesn't depend on not understanding it.
There’s no need to be so rude. I’m not being obtuse; I understand their point, I just disagree with it.
The internet itself is not degraded by some major news sites being slow. Their misuse of their part of the internet doesn’t affect it overall, thus it is not tragedy of the commons. Most of the websites I use on a day to day basis (GitHub, Stack Exchange, HN, most smaller blogs that I find through HN, etc.) do not have this problem. The experience of those sites isn’t made worse by other companies’ sites being bad so, again, it’s not a tragedy of the commons.