Wait, a politician lied to push a narrative? I don't believe it!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23734442 (emphasis mine)

I see a lot of comments expressing that all we need is markdown plus this or that little bit. I think that's unreasonable. It might suit Joe developer just fine for reading blogs and news, but the world benefits enormously from the ability to build complex software applications at low cost. Imagine the alternative: Welcome to Mario's Pizza - you can order right from your own computer after we mail a disc* to your house (*requires Windows 8 or newer)!

Also, some of the CSS and JS hatred is piffle. Publishers absolutely abuse these languages and it gets pretty bad on news websites especially. But I do not find that most or even many of the sites I visit perform badly on my hardware (2016 iPhone SE and a 2017 MBP). They work fine. Moreover, I appreciate nicely designed and competently implemented experiences on the modern web.

I have no interest in trading the modern web - warts and all - for some spartan plaintext utopia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23043745 (emphasis still mine)

I see that they've specified both a transport protocol, to replace HTTPS, and a document format, to replace HTML. BLUF: They should have just run the text/gemini format on top of HTTPS 1.1, make a gemini --> HTML formatter, and maybe a restricted subset of HTTPS, and called it a day. Replacing HTTPS is a waste of time. Also, most of the benefits of the document format could be gotten with a sane subset of HTML. There are no mandatory bad parts to HTTP or HTML.

I've seen this "The Web is too complex, we need Gopher" sentiment on the Fediverse a few times and it looks like the same class of thinking as "C++ / Rust is too complex, we need C."

They are complaining about how bad parties use HTTP and HTML and concluding that good people should disavow HTTP and HTML as a result. It is like refusing to drive your pickup truck because someone else's truck has truck nuts on it.

But I've run websites with the "Motherfucking website" HTML style and it's fine.

All the complexity of the web is opt-in. Switching my site to Gemini wouldn't prevent, say, the New York Times from wanting a complex HTML website. All I'm doing is shooting myself in the foot to spite my enemy. The FAQ says they intend to co-exist with the web, so I'm sure they agree with me on this. They just want to lead by example. I also don't think it's a good example.

About extensibility, from Section 2.1.2 in the FAQ:

"Gemini is designed with an acute awareness that the modern web is a privacy disaster, and that the internet is not a safe place for plaintext. Things like browser fingerprinting and Etag-based "supercookies" are an important cautionary tale: user tracking can and will be snuck in via the backdoor using protocol features which were not designed to facilitate it. Thus, protocol designers must not only avoid designing in tracking features (which is easy), but also assume active malicious intent and avoid designing anything which could be subverted to provide effective tracking. This concern manifests as a deliberate non-extensibility in many parts of the Gemini protocol."

These claims are made:

• Privacy violations are inherent to HTTP/HTTPS/HTML - Making a protocol non-extensible is feasible

But if you're specifying a completely new client and server, you could also just refuse to send and accept the ETag and cookie headers that are known to allow privacy violation.

And no protocol is non-extensible. They seem to think that software and ideas are controlled and owned by the first people to think of them. But if Gemini catches on, then it can be forked. This should be obvious to people working in FLOSS. I seem to recall it happened to IRC. Designed simple, forked into incompatible competing versions, the official next version is in dev hell, and now it's also competing with XMPP and Matrix.

Perhaps that belief is why they chose to make a new spec instead of defining a subset of HTTP and HTML. They think that HTTP and HTML are atomic and we must not reuse any good ideas from them, they've been tainted with bad ideas, so we have to change everything all at once.

To this end they even made the status codes different from HTTP.

"Importantly, the first digit of Gemini status codes do not group codes into vague categories like "client error" and "server error" as per HTTP. Instead, the first digit alone provides enough information for a client to determine how to handle the response."

They could have just specified a subset of HTTP status codes, to make it easier to remember which codes are which. Personally I like having 4xx and 5xx separate. Maybe they were really happy to save 33% of status code bytes compared to HTTP.

Regarding performance, the spec says, "Connections are closed at the end of a single transaction and cannot be reused."

I believe there's also no inline media, so 1 document == 1 connection == 1 request.

Again, this is completely possible with a sane subset of HTML and HTTP - Just write a server that can't reuse connections, and write HTML that doesn't have inline media. Use a linter or transpiler (from text/gemini to HTML) to enforce that.

But if you do reuse connections, or use something like QUIC, then you can get better performance. So they are making that impossible. Again, until someone forks it and adds it anyway.

Just noticed that this isn't a picture, but a screenshot from the 2011 movie Hindenburg. Still looks pretty cool, though.

Always happy to relieve a lady from weight-induced back problems

"I'm not saying that I'm funner than Robin Williams was. But I'm definitely funnier than he is now."

One of my favorite jokes.

Yes, that's Robin Williams.

But it's different this time, because of... uh... reasons.

What are the locations on them?

Shit I figured that out years ago when I realized that I wasn't watching youtube videos completely anymore and concentration became harder. Honestly the only thing that I can think of that has helped me get back to normal is cutting back on youtube videos and getting back into the stock market.

I never started using social media. I was one of the guys called a conspiracy theorist for years until Snowden revealed things. Nobody apologized for calling me that, either. It went from "the government has better things to do" to "of course they would do this, I don't care".

Host a Minecraft server.

Offer competitively priced web hosting to some acquaintances in the web design industry.

Host a new chan. See if you can register ___chan.com.

Isn't that closed source just like Opera was? I got burned using Opera once and then some cool feature was gone forever with no way to bring it back.

Faceberg complaining about other companies' privacy policies.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Yeah I did, mostly because my cousin got doxxed using it a while back. He was trolling people and someone got pissed off and got his info. Scary. All they have to do is ask and Sarahah rolls over.

Tor (unless someone has some new info for me)

Thanks for this. I only have experience with the Javaless version i2pd so I'll check this out.

If you can't't hold it, you don't own it.

May I recommend some Geiger 10oz stackers. My absolute favorite silver bar. APMEX makes some cheaper, less premium stackers too which are also great. American Silver Eagles and Canadian Maple 1oz coins are pretty cool too if you're just wanting a cheap way to get into silver. They make fractional bars too, like half ounce coins / bars which I never considered worth anything considering most my purchases were between $14-$18/oz.

Just hold that shit because you're going to get addicted to stacking silver and buying coins and bars from various mints from around the world.

Then you'll start buying small run hand poured silver bars and trinkets.

These tourism marketing videos are getting out of hand.

I know that economy fluctuates

I2P is pretty straight forward. You can either install the .deb, the java package from I2P's site or use I2P+ which is what I prefer ( https://i2pplus.com/ ). If using the .deb, just make sure you update it afterwards since the package is almost certainly outdated.

If using a VPS, you'll have to tunnel your localhost desktop traffic to it. I do something like:

ssh -fTNL 4444:127.0.0.1:4444 -L 7657:127.0.0.1:7657 -L 7667:127.0.0.1:7667 -L 7658:127.0.0.1:7658 -L 6668:127.0.0.1:6668 user@remote-ip -p XXXX

Port 4444 = local proxy settings (for browsing I2P network sites), 7657 and 7667 for the console UI in your browser (7667 is SSL, 7657 non-ssl), 7658 is the built in webserver and 6668 is IRC. "XXXX" would just be whatever your remote SSH port is if not 22.

Out of the box, stock I2P is... lacking. The system uses "subscription lists" and an "addressbook" to access network sites. ramble.i2p won't work out of the box, simply because it's not published on their stock subscription list, which is about 40 random network sites of which half of them work, half the time. You either have to add sites to your addressbook manually or by using their "address helper links" or using a published subscription list which contains a lot of sites that'll be added to your addressbook. Check out /f/i2p for more on that.

Yeah I was thinking of setting up my own pastebin or something, since Pastebin.com applies a lot of censorship nowadays with their "SMART" filter. How does setting up an I2P router work? I have experience with installing i2pd but I wouldn't know how to go from there to make it part of the I2P network.

give it to me lmao

You can always run an I2P router if you've not used the network before, or contribute to any other network that interests you. (I need to get a Yggdrasil peer up myself)

Depending on the specs you could run a SearX or YaCy search engine/crawler.

Can always use it as just a test/dev box to learn something new. Or can just setup something like a invidious instance or some other open source privacy related project to share with others.

If you're used to one type of OS, can do something you'd usually do on Debian but use CentOS instead, for example.

Or you can be like me and want to kick your screen through the wall dealing with Ubuntu's use of Netplan when you're used to things like ifconfig for networking. Spaces instead of tabs? Fucking really? I have limited experience with it since I primarily use Debian across the board on everything... From desktop OS at home to server-side stuff. But things I find trivial on Debian made me want to Chuck Norris my monitor into a new dimension doing things like trying to add IPV6 addresses to a box. Hard to teach an old dog new tricks I guess.

I also hate Docker but I just don't do well with change and hate that simple looking things like this site require a stupid amount of underlying components and dependencies.

You can do the opposite of what I do and embrace change and learn from it.

Even outside of the pandemic it's unethical. There's no actual limitation in place.

"Trust the vaccine"