@tomw@mastodon.social
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

tomw

@tomw@mastodon.social

Web developer. Sometimes designer. I like code, words and mass movements. Jag lär mig #svenska.

Interested in/may post about #html #css #wordpress #openweb #decentralisation #socialism #protest

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tomw, to random
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Why has no one made "Slack but free and simple"? Have I missed it? Every proprietary alternative seems to be a featuritis nightmare (eg. Discord) while the open source ones are too busy fretting about perfect encryption and decentralisation to be simple/friendly.

tomw, to random
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I miss the days when the RIAA was public enemy number one and someone was inventing a new peer-to-peer protocol every week

tomw,
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I used to speak Napster protocol well enough to fix bugs in other people's clients with a hex editor

(It was interesting but crude, basically some kid's hacked up IRC with search bolted on)

tomw,
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The end of that period (Gnutella, Kazaa and all the also-rans - shout out to the eMule and DC++ users) was the release of Bittorrent, which is an incredibly elegant and basically unsurpassed p2p design, so everyone else pretty much stopped trying.

(I wish we'd ended up somewhere that doesn't rely on websites as indexes but ho hum)

tomw,
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Come on Mastodon, I expected someone to reply by now with "actually I still use eMule"

tomw,
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@mahryekuh Yeah definitely! Some of these things were borderline viruses in themselves, full of bonzi buddies and comet cursors. I installed way too many...

interfluidity, to random
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the practice many browsers have adopted of truncating URLs in the address bar to the hostname is emblematic of the decline and commercially driven infantilization of the web.

understanding URLs — their roles and the ways and whys of how they are constructed — was an elementary skill of the original view-source web.

hiding complete URLs encourages people to become ignorant consumers of mysterious information services, rather than informed participants in a public forum.

tomw,
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@interfluidity Meh, seems like an unpopular opinion here but it's good to stop people getting fooled by stuff like login.mybank.com.example.com

Being able to parse a URL is good, but should not be required for safe web use.

tomw, to random
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I wonder if the AI pin will burst the AI bubble

mcc, to random
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I have literally implemented SRP at both the client and server side but I am still unable to figure out, if I were to purchase or set up a "Passkey", what exactly I would have, or how it would work, or which computers, web browsers or web sites I should expect it to work with

tomw,
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@mcc Yeah, I have swerved passkeys so far because I do not understand the failure modes or how to recover at all. And they're asking 'normal' people to use this!

tomw, to random
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Substack has not solved the problem of "paying for journalism", it has just paywalled things that otherwise would have mostly been blogs

tomw, to random
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All my emails go something like:

"Yes that's all good. Happy with Wednesday or Thursday.

Tom"

People either appreciate this brevity or find it weird, there's not really an in-between

tomw,
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@onnob Yeah, I'd maybe add something about time of day, though people I'm emailing tend to either expect office hours as obvious or evening as obvious, depending on who they are!

tomw, to random
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Please read my paywalled article about why paywalls are bad for democracy

tomw, to random
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In :

A clock = klocka
A watch = klocka
A bell = klocka

One upside of this is that you never have to worry about whether Big Ben is the name of the clock or the name of the bell.

tomw, to random
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Windows people, please understand this. Sometimes people need to run Linux.

They’re allowed to complain about printers not working, or sound issues, or any other hardware compatibility problems, without you saying “use Windows” every time.

tomw,
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I like the idea of this group of annoying Windows evangelists going around replying to every post about operating systems. They tell you to please call it by its correct name, "Microsoft Windows"

tomw,
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I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Windows, is in fact, Microsoft Windows, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Microsoft plus Windows. Windows is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another component of a fully functioning Microsoft system made useful by Microsoft Office, Microsoft Edge and vital system components comprising a full OS. Many computer users run a modified version of the Microsoft system every day, without realizing it. Through a p

tomw, to random
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Today I realised that I can put a CDN in front of other people's (read-only, public) APIs so that they don't rate limit my stuff.

Is this obvious? Commonly done? Kind of rude? No idea...

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@TraitorJoe Set a pull zone (basically just a caching proxy) to point from a subdomain you control to their https://api.example.com

But a few caveats... you'd only want to go this for public and quite unchanging data, the sort of API where the same URL is going to give you the same thing each time. Putting anything private anywhere near this is a Bad Time recipe

tomw, to random
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Why does every single search engine focus on making a search engine for a little while and then get distracted and launch 100 other projects?

Why does no one ever just work really hard on their search engine to make it the best one and keep it the best one, and that's it?

tomw, to random
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"I have to assume a lot of people don't understand how deep the AI rabbithole for Kagi goes, because I have seen people recommend Kagi to people frustrated with Google's own AI bullshit.

As it turns out, Kagi was founded originally as an AI company, who later pivoted to search. And going by their comments in their Discord, AI tools seem to be what they spend most of their time on these days."

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

j0, to random
@j0@wetdry.world avatar

Hi, if you use Discord and feel bad about it for some reason, don’t. Don’t let the people on here try and convince you that matrix is secretly very easy to use and better and all it needs is adoption and just host this and etc. Same with any chat app or service or whatever. Discord is popular because it is a well made, usable service. People on here play the Privacy Game and switch browsers/search engines performatively. Switching which Product you use will have next to zero implications in your daily life, just use the one that is least annoying. Most “privacy” companies are just grifting (eg DDG funding right wing media, Kagi using AI, Brave doing crypto and AI, Mozilla doing AI, Proton baselessly shitting on other services in press releases, various companies doing VPNs, Element providing services to Police, Arc doing AI, I could go on forever…)

I’m not saying to go “doomer” and just use Chrome and Google, but people need to acknowledge that these services you use exist within capitalism, and evaluate whether they really Care about your privacy, or the Monthly Active Users metric. Don’t be shocked when your Private Service gets sold to a not-so-private company. You are being marketed to.

tomw,
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@j0 I think 99% of the rage about Discord on here is caused by open source projects treating it is a replacement for documentation. Couldn't care less if people use Discord, but don't make me use it!

Big agree about Kagi/DDG and it pains me that they take up all the space in the "alternatives to Google" discussion

tomw, to random
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Do you need a database, or could you make do with 3,000 ~1KB json files filled with regexes?

(The database probably would have been easier but this is definitely cheaper to host.)

tomw,
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If anyone asks, I'm going to call this a "cached compressed key-value store"

tomw,
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Wait, maybe I can call my directory full of json files a "microservice"

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