Mozilla “sold their soul to Google”? What did I miss?

Sure, Patreon is great, but Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living, considering how hard it is to get people to commit to monthly subscriptions.

Would you put blame on doctors for contributing to the opioid?

I’m gonna assume by “contributing to the opioid” you mean over-prescribing pain medication for the commission? If so, that comparison is so far-fetched that it’s completely meaningless. You’re really going to compare that with independent creators having skippable ad reads that have to be clearly marked as such on content you get for free?

This is a bit unnecessarily tough on independent content creators… what exactly do you expect them to do? Make no money from their content? How would they be able to make a living?

Doomerism like this is fucking stupid and definitely leads to the wrong thing, which is to do nothing. If we’re already fucked, why even try? The truth is that IF we try, we very well might be able to avoid the worst. Which is worth fighting for.

I know. Just the “full-stack meta frameworks” part alone makes any ADHD person feel nausea.

But why? What’s bad about this?

I disagree. Geminispace is very usable without scripts

That’s great, I’m not saying that it’s impossible to make usable apps without JS. I’m saying that the capabilities of websites would be greatly reduced without JS being a thing. Sure, a forum can be served as fully static pages. But the web can support many more advanced use-cases than that.

If only one paradigm must remain, then naturally I pick mine. If not, then there’s no problem and I still shouldn’t care.

So you can see that other people have different needs to yours, but you think those shouldn’t be considered? We’re arguing about the internet. It’s a pretty diverse space.

For me it’s obvious that embeddable cross-platform applications as content inside hypertext are much better than turning a hypertext system into some overengineered crappy mess of a cross-platform application system.

Look, I’m not saying that the web is the most coherent platform to develop for or use, but it’s just where we’re at after decades of evolving needs needing to be met.

That said, embedded interactive content is absolutely not better than what we have now. For one, both Flash and Java Applets were mostly proprietary technologies, placing far too much trust in the corpos developing them. There were massive cross-platform compatibility problems, and neither were in any way designed for or even ready for a responsive web that displays well on different screen sizes. Accessibility was a big problem as well, given an entirely different accessibility paradigm was necessary within vs. the HTML+CSS shell around the embedded content.

Today, the web can do everything Flash + Java Applets could do and more, except in a way that’s not proprietary but based on shared standards, one that’s backwards-compatible, builds on top of foundational technologies like HTML rather than around, and can actually keep up with the plethora of different client devices we have today. And speaking of security — sure, maybe web browsers were pretty insecure back then generally, but I don’t see how you can argue that a system requiring third-party browser plug-ins that have to be updated separately from the browser can ever be a better basis for security than just relying entirely on the (open-source!) JS engine of the browser for all interactivity.

I ask you for links and how many clicks and fucks it would take to make one with these, as opposed to back then. These are measurable, scientific things. Ergonomics is not a religion.

The idea that any old website builder back in the day was more “ergonomic” while even approaching the result quality and capabilities of any no-code homepage builder solution you can use today is just laughable. Sorry, but I don’t really feel the burden of proof here. And I’m not even a fan of site builders, I would almost prefer building my own site, but I recognize that they’re the only (viable) solution for the majority of people just looking for a casual website.

Besides — there’s nothing really preventing those old-school solutions from working today. If they’re so much better than modern offerings, why didn’t they survive?

So what does it say about us diverting from purely server-side scripted message boards with pure HTML and tables, and not a line of JS? Yes, let’s get back there please.

Ironically, proper SSR that has the server render the page as pure HTML & CSS is becoming more and more popular lately thanks to full-stack meta frameworks that make it super easy. Of course, wanting to go back to having no JS is crazy — websites would lose almost all ability to make pages interactive, and that would be a huge step backwards, no matter how much nostalgia you feel for a time before widespread JS. Also tables for layout fucking sucked in every possible way; for the dev, for the user, and for accessibility.

people want nice, dynamic, usable websites with lots of cool new features, people are social

That’s right, they do and they are.

By the way, we already had that with Flash and Java applets, some things of what I remember were still cooler than modern websites of the “web application” paradigm are now.

Flash and Java Applets were a disaster and a horrible attempt at interactivity, and everything we have today is miles ahead of them. I don’t even want to get into making arguments as to why because it’s so widely documented.

And we had personal webpages with real names and contacts and photos. And there were tools allowing to make them easily.

There are vastly more usable and simple tools for making your own personal websites today!

There’s no reason your clients can’t have public, world routeable IPs as well as security.

There are a lot of valid reasons, other than security, for why you wouldn’t want that though. You don’t necessarily want to allow any client’s activity to be traceable on an individual level, nor do you want to allow people to do things like count the number of clients at a particular location. Information like that is just unnecessary to expose, even if hiding it doesn’t make anything more secure per se.

Is there some story I missed about his family being assholes?

They sell AirTag location data? I honestly find that hard to believe. What’s your source on this other than big tech bad?

Oof, that quote is the exact brand of nerd bullshit that makes my blood boil. “Sure, it may be horribly designed, complicated, hard to understand, unnecessarily dangerous and / or extremely misleading, but you have nOT rEAd ThE dOCUmeNtATiON, therefore it’s your fault and I’m immune to your criticism”. Except this instance is even worse than that, because the documentation for that command sounds just as innocent as the command itself. But I guess obviously something called “tmpfiles” is responsible for your home folder, how couldn’t you know that?

Smoke is easy to add in post. Muzzle flash is a little bit harder but also of course very possible.

That’s some dense whataboutism

That happens literally every night though and wind also doesn’t blow 100% of the time.

Very true, but the fact that wind blows often and there’s also varying amounts of direct sunlight during the day already massively decreases the amount of storage required for a grid. You don’t need the capacity to cover 100% of energy usage, sustained, like you suggested earlier. Especially as grids become (geographically) larger and smarter — we need wind and sun somewhere to cover energy needed elsewhere — it doesn’t have to be localized. Plus solar output obviously peaks during the day, when demand is also highest.

Renewables make up a trivial* amount

The percentage is absolutely not trivial today. Especially considering there are multiple large grids today that can easily sustain 50%+ renewable energy over sustained periods. And 30% by 2030 is a lot, though of course it could be a lot better.

and as we phase out fossil fuels, the requirement for energy storage is going up drastically.

Yes, no-one is arguing otherwise.

You’re glossing over the fact that the battery is a backup to kick in only when renewable production doesn’t meet demand, and that much more space-efficient energy storage solutions exist, even if they lose more power to inefficiency.

Why do you keep asking this? How is this specific number relevant to the discussion?

If you have a dynamic pricing contract of course you get a discount… If you don’t, you chose not to in return for price stability 🤷

Though yeah, last time prices went negative in Germany I was still paying 10ct/kWh in just taxes and fees. Would be pretty cool if they’d have paid me for using electricity during that time, but of course that’s not how that works.

They won’t go to jail, period. No company owners never go to jail, kinda ever.

That’s absolutely not true. Sure, there are lots of cases where individuals have limited personal liability under their company, but this doesn’t mean no-one goes to jail for illegal business activity. In fact it happens all the time.

Sorry but “they could slip in a chip that enabled a wavelength their satellites can access” is ridiculous. Sending a real-time video stream to a satellite would require a large and very power hungry transmitter on the drone. It’d be super obvious.

People won’t do that at scale.

It’d take only one person to recognize a sudden large traffic spike caused by the app and post about it online to ruin such a setup. As soon as it’s confirmed by a few more people, it’d immediately be a major news story. And it’s not like it’s particularly hard to spot unusual traffic; especially on a phone where the OS monitors per-app data usage both on mobile and WiFi.

They definitely do not send video though. That would be super obvious.