Tag: published on gemini
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Internet Services^H Provider
When you signed up with an ISP, you used to get Web space, email, shared FTP access, a nearby IRC node, newsgroups, and a software bundle. Nowadays you get a shit router, a voucher for a free month of a streaming service you didn't want, and crap customer service. Where did we go wrong?
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Some time in the last 25 years, ISPs stopped saying they made you "part of" the Internet, just that they'd help you "connect to" the Internet.
Most people don't need a static IP, sure. But when ISPs stopped offering FTP and WWW hosting as a standard feature (shit though it often was), they became part of the tragic process by which the Internet became centralised, and commoditised, and corporate, and just generally watered-down.
The amount of effort to "put something online" didn't increase by a lot, but it increased by enough that millions probably missed-out on the opportunity to create their first homepage.
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Lock All The Computers
I wanted a button on my desk that, when I pressed it, would simultaneously lock every computer connected to my KVM system. Here's what I came up with.
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The Huge Grey Area in the Anthropic Ruling
The court ruling that declares Anthropic's use of (purchased) books as training material leaves a curious sorites paradox. If we assume that an LLM trained on only one book (and so only capable of producing content directly inspired by that book) would necessarily be copyright-infringing, at what number of books does that cease to be the case?
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Bored Gay Werewolf by Tony Santorella
I recently read Bored Gay Werewolf by Tony Santorella. I guess it's got a 'werewolf'. It barely feels 'gay'. It certainly left me 'bored', at times. Turns out that it's a very middle-of-the-road story about Gen Z folks growing into their identities, using sexuality and lycanthropy as loosely-fitting framing devices.
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I Wrote the Same Code Six Times!
Could I rock an interview tech-test in a programming language I haven't touched in a decade? I wanted to know, so I found a tech-test... then solved it in six different programming languages in a single sitting.
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Google Shared My Phone Number!
When people started calling my personal mobile number with questions about a voluntary organisation I'm involved with, I was confused: we weren't sharing that number. It turns out that Google had decided to take the number I used to verify my identity for Google Business some years prior and start putting it in Google Search results. WTF, Google?
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Delivery Songs
In the UK, ice cream vans are perhaps the only delivery service with their own jingle. Turkey and India are WAY ahead of us in this regard, and I've got a few ideas about how we fix that...
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Feed Readers Beat Doomscrolling
If you're dodging news media because the alternative is catastrophic doomscrolling... perhaps you ought to be using a feed reader? It's a much healthier way to keep up with the Web.
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WebDX: Does More Mean Better?
I like the work that the WebDX Community Group have been doing, but I find myself asking: are we at risk of implying that giving the Web 'more' features invariably makes it 'better'?
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Work Slippers
Last month, the dog ate my slippers, and in the week it took me to replace them my work productivity took a dip. Coincidence? Nope! They were my 'work slippers', and it turns out I needed them!
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
While I've been ill I read A Psalm for the Wild-built by Becky Chambers, which had been on my reading list for a while. It's a comforting and compelling story about purpose and identity in an environmentally-conscious utopia, and it's flipping awesome.
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WordPress to ClassicPress
A few weeks ago I switched this blog to ClassicPress, a fork of WordPress. Here's a deep dive into how (and why) I did it, as well as a look into what my experience so-far has been with this (mostly-)cut-down version of the world's most popular CMS.
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Large companies find HTML & CSS frustrating “at scale” because the web is a fundamentally anti-capitalist mashup art experiment, designed to give consumers all the power.
- Mia, 2019
This is what I needed to be reminded, today. -
Queers make the world a safer place
Cat shares the experience of his friend who semi-independently discovered that queer-friendly online spaces are an antidote to patriarchal toxic masculinity. Because duh. A delightful tale.