Post Acy7H8IFqTdXC2b476 by wolfpld@mastodon.gamedev.place
(DIR) More posts by wolfpld@mastodon.gamedev.place
(DIR) Post #AcxpR2uiu2YoEJAS3s by kravietz@agora.echelon.pl
2023-12-19T10:06:44.792058Z
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The joke that kind of inaugurated #Russia participation in the Internet:From: Vadim G. AntonovTo: eunet.jokesDate: Sep 10, 1990, 9:41:05 PM> I've heard a quite similar anecdot:Capitalism and Communism are waiting for Socialism. --Time passes. -- Socialism comes to the place.Socialism: "Sorry, guys; I was standing in queue for meat!"Capitalism: "What's a queue?"Communism: "What's a meat?"In the same vein:Capitalism is standing at the brink of a deep chasm! [K. Marx]-- And looking what socialism is doing at the bottom.Vadim AntonovDEMOS, Moscow, USSR(It is NOT a joke!)Also demonstrates a practitioner’s view on Soviet implementation #socialism and #communism as of 1990.Source: https://groups.google.com/g/eunet.jokes/c/WRbjGhjcYp4/m/9HizLe8PHbkJInspired by @vicki article, where the joke is mentioned but the link is broken so I decided to quote it in whole:https://vicki.substack.com/p/whats-up-with-russias-internet
(DIR) Post #AcxpzxSDC79vQpTkhM by kravietz@agora.echelon.pl
2023-12-19T10:13:05.285384Z
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But Antonov was following up on another joke which also involved #Poland who since August 1989 technically had a new government elected in democratic elections and food shortages have disappeared literally days after private trade was allowed, but Soviet troops were still there and nobody was really 100% certain what happens next (they left in 1993):From: Karl-Christian HansenTo: eunet.jokesDate: Sep 8, 1990, 6:24:06 PMOnce upon a time, the Poles wanted to find out, why there wassuch a shortage of meat in Poland. So they asked their bestcomputer, why there was a shortage of meat in Poland."Why is there a shortage of meat in Poland?", they asked it.The computer thought for a little while, and then halted withthe message:** ERROR ** Unknown identifier : meat **Well, it seamed they would never get an answer from anycomputer built and manufactured in Poland. So they decided toask for help in the United States, where they build soooo manygood computers. So they went to an American company and askedtheir best computer:"Why is ther a shortage of meat in Poland?". As you may alreadyhave guessed, the American computer could not answer this vitalquestion; it halted immidiately with the message:** ERROR ** Unknown identifier : shortage **Now, the poor Poles didn't know what to do. But a brightAmerican suggested, that they should use a Russian computer,since a Russian computer should know of both meat andshortages. So they tried on a Russian computer, asking it thequestion: "Why is there a shortage of meat in Poland?". TheRussian computer immidiately halted, issuing the message:**ERROR ** Unknown identifier : why **KarlSource: https://groups.google.com/g/eunet.jokes/c/WRbjGhjcYp4/m/N6OpkgXVsCoJ
(DIR) Post #AcxqImmn5A1zqb5AIK by kravietz@agora.echelon.pl
2023-12-19T10:16:29.896837Z
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(also, nobody knows when Google archive of Usenet will disappear)
(DIR) Post #Acy3FL2r44DKLVHaTY by UT3UMS@mastodon.radio
2023-12-19T12:01:12Z
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@kravietz are you aware of any initiatives for archiving it separately?
(DIR) Post #Acy3FM1TQghfNVdzxg by kravietz@agora.echelon.pl
2023-12-19T12:41:26.671313Z
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@UT3UMS @wolfpld has this project https://github.com/wolfpld/usenetarchive/ but it serves making an archive, not sure about existing archives.
(DIR) Post #Acy5psIF7rQBnS1ume by wolfpld@mastodon.gamedev.place
2023-12-19T13:02:58Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@kravietz @UT3UMS My biggest gripe with other archives out there was that they were just dumps of raw data.There have been efforts such as https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Usenet, which redirects you to https://github.com/ZoeB/arcmesg for the tools, and there you can read that, uh oh, charsets are hard, let's just treat everything as ASCII and hope it works!Which is basically a giant WTF, especially obvious if you've ever had to deal with the myriad of coding standards combined with a multitude of broken readers.
(DIR) Post #Acy5rFdRpHtATpbY8W by wolfpld@mastodon.gamedev.place
2023-12-19T13:09:50Z
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@kravietz @UT3UMS What's out there is a random garbage pile of messages that no one has ever looked at. For example, you download a zip with a group, but some of the messages in it are from some unrelated groups.These are random scraping runs that someone did, they'll have holes at random times, and there's a high chance that they'll be garbled, in some cases multiple times.
(DIR) Post #Acy5ybnTpMrREzo05A by kravietz@agora.echelon.pl
2023-12-19T13:12:06.610596Z
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@wolfpld Plus, from what I’ve seen on the same Usenet groups that in 1990 posted these historic jokes, today they’re 100% spam. So there’s going to be some arbitrary cut-off point where you need to stop archiving…@UT3UMS
(DIR) Post #Acy6EaA3g3A6nhz0im by wolfpld@mastodon.gamedev.place
2023-12-19T13:13:31Z
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@kravietz @UT3UMS A few years ago, I went to the archive team's IRC to tell them that my tools were out there, ready to be used, but they were only interested if I had some sort of new source of Usenet messages for them.FWIW, the Google Groups source is now useless because they have disabled the AJAX crawling endpoint that provided the original messages with headers and stuff. All you can get from them now is an HTML view of the message, not the raw data.
(DIR) Post #Acy7H8IFqTdXC2b476 by wolfpld@mastodon.gamedev.place
2023-12-19T13:21:20Z
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@kravietz @UT3UMS Spam is everywhere, but you won't see it in my archives because I am actively filtering it.There is some new Vietnamese (I think?) spam on pl.soc.polityka, and I had not caught it, so you can see how bad it can look. Note that this is already filtered against the usual "instruction manuals" or "pamela and brad sex tapes" crap.