Em Adespoton

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • As someone who pre-dates the public Internet and spent a lot of time dialling in to BBSes when most people thought personal computers were for nerds…

    The Internet will fracture, but not break down. What would happen is balkanization of the Internet, with physical areas running their own networks, and a bunch of poor “dark” areas. Some of those networks would likely have low bandwidth interconnections, such that digest data could still spread, much like the early days of usenet and fidonet.

    Local culture and tribalism would increase, and information would skyrocket in value. The rich would still have access to, and control, the information. The poor would be left out completely.


  • Agreed; after using various running and other gloves, I settled on a set of work gloves that are thin nylon weave on the back and dipped in nitrile on the front, similar to gardening gloves.

    They let the steam out while keeping my hands from getting too cold in -10 weather, AND I can use my phone with them on (although I don’t recommend doing that below freezing).

    I do 3 hour trail runs through the winter and they’ve worked better than my running gloves or my merino wool cutoffs. And they’re $3 a pair.



  • One part of this is history.

    Canada and the US were British colonies; Mexico was a Spanish colony.

    When some of the British colonies declared independence, they still had to trade with the colonies that hadn’t. People had relatives on both sides, the postal systems were integrated, indigenous people were mistreated in the same manner, and the list goes on. Culturally, the two remained very similar while the political systems differed.

    Stuff coming from England often ended up in Toronto or New York; both of these cities became hubs of publication.

    This is the way the relationship stayed pretty much up until NAFTA in the 1990s; books had already had over a century of being published in Toronto and New York for distribution across English North America.

    Mexico had a different history, and a different relationship with California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Instead of Mexico being a route for culture and European goods to enter the US, it was a source of cheap labor once slavery was abolished.

    Unlike Canada where the most influential Canadians lived right along the border, in Mexico the influential Mexicans lived further south, with itinerant workers living along the border.

    NAFTA changed the balance of trade somewhat, but it didn’t change the already established cultural norms or the places people lived.







  • The problem is, once the middlemen gain power, they’re never gonna give you up. Music producers are a great example of this, as are telecoms companies.

    All the current SaaS stuff is similar; the offerings LOOK similar, but they’re explicitly designed not to be a 1:1 match, so you can’t just take your business elsewhere, just like the mattress companies of old.

    We’re even seeing this play out in the streaming video market, where each player has its own differentiator, moreso than we ever saw with traditional cable TV.

    Standards are great, but middlemen have no incentives to not subvert them.


  • That means the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist, along with the .io domain and countless websites.

    What will happen is that the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove the country code “IO.” IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) which creates and assigns top-level domains, uses this code to determine which top-level country domains should exist. Once ‘IO’ is removed, IANA will start the process of retiring .io, which involves stopping new registrations and the expiration of existing ‘.io domains.‘

    I don’t get this: shouldn’t Mauritius gain ownership of .io? Russia has .su, and it’s been over 30 years since the Soviets existed.

    [edit] also, since there’s .whateveryouwant these days, why not just make .io a non-country TLD? That’s how it’s used anyway.





  • I feel your pain. I have maintainer roles for a few projects where things could be slowed down by a week or more if I didn’t have direct commit access. And I do use that access to make things run faster and smoother, and am able to step in and just get something fixed up and committed while everyone else is asleep. But. For security critical code paths, I’ve come to realize that much like Debian, sometimes slow and secure IS better, even if it doesn’t feel like it in the moment (like when you’re trying to commit and deploy a critical security patch already being exploited in the wild, and NOBODY is around to do the review, or there’s something upstream that needs to be fixed before your job can go out).