"Brave of you to arrive here directly from nowhere like a digital hermit, flexing 16 CPU cores just to run Edge 132.0.0.0 like it’s a beta-testing crisis hotline—enjoying Wisconsin’s -40° wind chills so much you’ve even got your browser set to "arctic Blink engine." At least your 2560x1440 screen lets you see exactly how lonely that empty referrer field looks."
This is the most fun post/link I've interacted with across social media all week, haha. I'm going to test this from all of me and my SO's personal devices of various form factors. Thanks OP!
## Edit:
Here's the roast from my iPhone SE 3 device on 5G cellular (thinks I'm in Atlanta for some reason, lol):
"Roast: Oh, an iOS 18 beta user in Atlanta—how bold of you to test Apple’s unfinished bugs while flexing that three-core “supercomputer” like Georgia’s tech scene peaked with a fax machine. Your screen’s so tiny (375x667) it makes Hacker News look like a MySpace page, which tracks, since you clearly clicked here mid-procrastination scroll to avoid finishing your side hustle. Congrats on being the NPC who still uses “Mobile Safari” unironically—your cookie-enabled loyalty to Apple is almost as tragic as your referral from a site where everyone’s arguing about TypeScript."
Deeper research pointed to Apple's "Displays" kb page for UIKit Size, and it tracks with my device type, as SE 3 is based on iPhone 8 [0]
Well things have already been a tad rough around this square, so if we follow the trend, the next square might turn bad even sooner. So maybe around, I dunno, 2101?
1225: ten years earlier, Magna Carta starting to limit monarchs and the seed of individual freedom
1681: eight years later was glorious revolution with a bill of rights, marking individual freedoms
1764: ten years later, beginning of American Revolution and being free of monarchs
1849: ten years-ish later, start of US civil war; was the time of an attempt by the British to end slavery around the world
1936: ten years later, colonial empires were being dismantled, UN established to attempt global cooperation, US in the ascendancy with a seed of ties being established more by economics than military force, great economic upswing lifting people out of poverty (60% in poverty then, 10% now) while the global population blossoms
2035: Majority of the global population in middle class or better, triumph of individuals over technocrats, bureaucrats, and corporatists :)
US Central Time here, so still a couple hours to go, but HAPPY NEW YEAR to y'all fellow HN-ers -- HN is probably the least guilt-ridden procrastination I do on the whole wide internet. Thank you to every one of you who has made HN among the most intellectually dense places on the web -- I wouldn't be where I'm today without reading all the insightful comments, submitted links and perspectives of all the HN-ers over the last 7 years.
My wish for the new year: hopefully, AI singularity is still a few years away and doesn't happen in 2025!
My wish for the new year is to have a body so jacked and ripped that when I commit a crime the media posts my shirtless pictures everywhere and everyone goes "wow".
I agree. A good chunk of the tech trends in the last decade were indeed rent seeking, but silent revolution was happening in the transformers and the neural network architecture domain, which made today's products possible.
And I'd wager that there are silent revolutions happening all across colossus that's the tech industry that will become apparent in the next decade.
Jeff Bezos put it best during his recent interview at the 2024 NYTimes Dealbook Summit, "We're living in multiple golden ages at the same time." There's never been a better time to be alive.
That's easy for a billionaire to say, isn't it? Jeff Bezos is not exactly a reliable narrator here. His business practices are built on exploitation and externalising his costs (such as the massive environmental damage).
Student here, and this has to be the most satisfying 20 minutes I spent cloning a GitHub repo in a while.
Here are a few things I encountered which might probably help others:
# Version mismatch:
The install version of node.js I had (v12.22.9) was too old to meet the project's requirements (>= 18.13).
To fix that, I used nvm to install the right Node.js version (>18.0)
# Version check before install: Used the following to check version to verify before proceeding ahead with building it:
node -v
npm -v
It ran successfully, and I've been playing around with built-in Python3 and C scripts and pushed the modified repo to my personal GitHub. Thank you, dev!
I clicked on this thread to type that exact thing, holy smokes.
You're referring to Hooli's streaming of UFC fight that goes awry and Gavin Belson totally loses it, lol. Great scene and totally relevant to what's happening with Netflix rn.
Commercialization and infiltration of advertising-dollars-seeking "influencers" ruins social media sites.
I miss the early days of the internet (and especially YouTube) so fucking much. I'm 28 now, and I've been online since 2009. I think 2009-2014 was the GOLDEN AGE of the internet for me, especially on YouTube.
Wikipedia didn't exist. It was possible to run out of websites to visit. People were, in general, super friendly, aside from the trolls on AIM trying to crash other people's clients. (IRC was a separate place though, I mostly spent time on websites.)
Forums had horrible UIs, the latency was awful. Compared to dial up BBSs that came before the user experience was much worse.
Everything was authentic. People just doing stuff, posting about what they loved. Uploading art they made and photos they took. The barrier to entry was high (you needed to own a scanner and be able to figure out how to set it up!), but not so high that determined non-technical users couldn't muddle through and still make great things.
Same. For me, usenet was "social media", long before social media was a thing. I remember in college hanging out in a newsgroup for people looking for a pen pal, and later exchanging letters with someone on the other side of the country whom I never met in person.
Pretty crude by today's standards, but also a lot more genuine and less risky. At that time there were a lot of people on the internet like me, college kids discovering it for the first time.
I've been on the Internet since 1999, and I feel a strong sense of nostalgia for those early years. For me, the period from 1999 to 2010 was the "golden age" of the Internet. It was a time of exploration, creativity, and genuine connection. I imagine that people who joined even earlier might feel a similar nostalgia for their own era on the web.
I also wrote about my experiences and why I consider this time the golden age in a blog post here: <https://susam.net/web-golden.html>.
Yeah, the ubiquity of smartphones and the rise of Facebook and Instagram (post-acquisition) as an open platform for advertisers versus mostly for early adopters/enthusiasts really killed the "fun" of the internet.
Also, I remember how many different frameworks and "rich internet application" technologies existed back then (Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Apple QuickTime, etc.). In many ways, the internet was a much more diverse and a much more 'unpredictable' place back then.
Yeah, I'm of the same vintage. Never really felt eternal september impacted the newsgroups I frequented as they didn't appeal to AOLers, and felt it was exaggerated. But it feels real now with engagement metric following content creators and influencers, and the way platforms enable it now.
I'm a couple of years older, and I generally agree with you. But even up until 2016 it was generally tolerable. There was a point in time when every single social media changed from "you and your friends" to "you and the world". Which opened the hellscape of influencer and branding world. I'm not sure what exactly accelerated it - Facebook/IG going algo-view first, TikTok starting to get traction even when it was just a dancing app, or the entire A/B science. Oh well...
What happened right around 2016 was a combination of the internet being weaponized in the political space and the destruction of of revenue for legacy media because of Facebook and Google and other walled systems which ingested their IP and served it to their users. This effectively made people paranoid of data that didn't immediately fit into their world view because the concept of any shared truth was shattered and at the same time it felt like everything and everyone on the internet was targeted to misinform you.
The 'mainstream media' was never taken seriously by people savvy in the early tech spaces, so the loss of it didn't really hit us as particularly impactful. But that loss made it so that the 'mainstream' no longer had any 'ground truth' they could all fall back on that would be the arbiter of correct and incorrect information, and so truth became whatever felt most right to a person at the time.
This of course has more to do with the people and culture you most identify with, rather than any kind of objective comparison of data, so groups looked more inwards and became ossified in dogma and refused to look at any other perspective in good faith. And here we are.
IMO we need to move past the follower/following model on social media.
Having followers is the best way to get followers, which creates a fame snowball.
The result is that a few uploads get a bunch of attention, and most uploads get very little attention. The typical user feels lonely, isolated, neglected. Jealously means the attention-rich users, the ones with lots of followers, become targets for bullies -- and that leaves them miserable too. No one is happy.
Platforms with a more equal distribution of attention, such as IRC, didn't have these problems.
It's a Geocities archive containing websites hosted on the platform from the 90s/00s. I really like the creativity and authenticity in the archived sites, it's like looking at a mirror into the past.
For me it was 2003 to 2010. I said this multiple times, and it is that I'm working on a essay about qhy Internet was more enjoyable back then.
But sometimes I think the only reason (or the main reason) is that I was a teenager. It isn't about internet, it is about the user and how they saw the worldwide at that time...
