Post B1ILOaNKFNSmwHM7qi by codinghorror@infosec.exchange
(DIR) More posts by codinghorror@infosec.exchange
(DIR) Post #B1GJ2tXLjeZplxebRI by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-15T04:53:56Z
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The Internet is already dead.... I got to talk to a number of queer and/or punk young people (teens and 20s) who are fairly prodigious makers of media stuff, all print and music, are clever with phones and computers, but don't put their stuff on the net. Not only has it become difficult and expensive (shit hosting services, all of them) but once they put things up on the net, none of the promises come true -- none of its features work really at all. Search engines are dead. Absolutely no fucking human is gonna do the promotional bullshit that doesn't even work any more anyways. I had a world changing experience at this Pretty Gritty show. Sold/gave away 90 or so of the 100 anthologies (so didn't have to cart them home). But mostly networking or the human kind, preparing for the long haul in front of us. This Internet has been declining in relevance for me for some time. Soft nothing on my websites are searchable, and I know they're cleanly indexable. And I too find little of interest these days. Technology on and of itself is fucked fascist crap I've long lost interest in. So no loss there. My short term future is in print, and in computing machinery I can put my hands on, and put into the hands of others. The net has become a bag on the side. I still deeply love computing, the mechanization of thought, the rigor and experimentation, but this corporate shit im utterly done with.
(DIR) Post #B1GqQigL2hc5XlpJTs by timoj@mastodon.online
2025-12-15T11:07:53Z
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@tomjennings The Internet Archive should be a natural home for some of this stuff, but there needs to be some legitimate movement to redemocratize the Internet before it becomes another abandoned shopping mall you can’t skateboard in.
(DIR) Post #B1HNKNADQkdvYYNmoy by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-15T17:16:36Z
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@timoj It's not the purpose of the Archive to host new stuff, and it's all far too technically involved in any case. The Archive is amazing, but it's solving a different set of problems. It's simple fact: it's arbitrarily difficult to post new material on the net, and have your friends find it. It's expensive and doesn't work.
(DIR) Post #B1HNXfTsdfym89v7s8 by timoj@mastodon.online
2025-12-15T17:18:59Z
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@tomjennings I don’t think anyone will argue against the value of your archives and contributions to online communities. That it has never been formally curated by the Archive is just opportunity to correct.
(DIR) Post #B1HNdwtWoAdFsLubM8 by ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org
2025-12-15T17:20:03Z
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@tomjennings Some years back Google switched from surfacing "useful stuff that matches keywords" to "the most popular pages with some of those keywords", and that pretty much broke any new website or useful site getting found. Dunno if it's been fixed (don't use Google anymore because it AI summaries everything, even more useless).
(DIR) Post #B1HOKwrwmLSSFTfz1c by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-15T17:27:55Z
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@timoj Thanks! Yeah, lol, I'm the world's worst archivalist! I keep meaning to post urls to save but never get around to it. Historically the archive didn't save images so my oldest stuff never got saved. Haven't looked since. It's not my past I'm worried about. It's my future and my peers, and these kids (ok they're not children, but i think of them as the kids), they're less than 1/3rd my age) whose work I want to see and read! Im telling ya, it's not on the Internet and this will not be fixed. The readers of books don't fix bad presses or go make ink. The Internet broke a decade ago and this is the end result.
(DIR) Post #B1HP0svjoVMgC9Riu8 by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-15T17:35:29Z
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@timoj Chronically broken stuff causes people to find other solutions to problems, and old broken systems are forgotten and are left behind. Us current users of Internet know of all its wonders, blah blah. But the locked out folks don't. Its not like there's any chance of wresting control of the intertubes from its current ruiners in any practical time scale.And paper print tech is flatly amazing today. I had been overlooking it cuz I'm dense old folk, remembering old methods. It's all changed and for the better. Everything is a TAZ.
(DIR) Post #B1HhJvXs75gAyyVqQS by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-15T19:19:28Z
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@timoj The American Internet should have been handed to the postal service. They were the sole entity with a compatible mission. I think there's no point wasting any time is peeps battling the gargantuan transnationals that own the Internet. Seriously they don't listen at all. I'm not measuring my time. This is not "giving up". We will make our own systems. They will not look anything like anything we know now.
(DIR) Post #B1Hn4QG2kzdNKLACno by codinghorror@infosec.exchange
2025-12-15T22:05:01Z
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@tomjennings appreciated, but not true yet in my experience, unless we let it be true. Open source all the way. Mastodon itself is evidence of this, and we put $2m into it.
(DIR) Post #B1IHlOvGasdYGNr5LE by timoj@mastodon.online
2025-12-16T03:48:55Z
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@tomjennings I have faith that the substrate is still mostly open and it can still support alternative models—be it traditional email, something like Mastodon, or the Tor project. The old methods are still here. We just have to use your old post-punk methods on them.
(DIR) Post #B1II59soDjXpPV7v5E by timoj@mastodon.online
2025-12-16T03:52:27Z
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@tomjennings I have faith that the substrate is still mostly open and it can still support alternative models—be it traditional email, something like Mastodon, or the Tor project. The old ways are still here. We just have to apply your old post-punk ethos to it. That’s not on you, per se, but we can’t build on it without your foundations.
(DIR) Post #B1IKqZiKCQ872fxcHI by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-16T04:23:31Z
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@codinghorror "Open source" is not a solution for anyone not already an experience programmer.The young and old folk I talk to about this stuff are not stupid but they are not ever gonna be programmers.Requiring everyone to be a programmer is like requiring everyone be a mechanic to drive cars (but please drive less :-)Open source is not a social solution. It's a fraction of 1% of internet users.
(DIR) Post #B1ILOaNKFNSmwHM7qi by codinghorror@infosec.exchange
2025-12-16T04:29:38Z
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@tomjennings that $2m was specifically to improve the Mastodon UI as a topline item. They are a small team competing with enormous companies.
(DIR) Post #B1IOAAkX1ewJGq1rwe by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-16T05:00:41Z
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@codinghorror I'm not criticizing open source per se, in any way. I'm saying that it's not a social solution in and of itself for non-nerds to actually use the internet.And I have no serious issues with the fediverse or its code. People -- not generalizations, people I could but will not name here -- write zines and make 7-inch records and mail them to each other or swap them at face to face shows, sparse events due to the lack of physical accommodation -- tell me their presonal experiences and they are not good,They effectively cannot use the internet, at all, for these things. Even at peak-ease times, say 1995 - 2010, creating HTML documents was fraught with complexity and difficult to grokk underlying paradigms.I've spent *decades* working with people as smart as anyone here in the fedi, who persistently found and find the internet extremely unuseful to publish on. Read, sure, easy.Even friends who managed to put up sites after great struggle, have abandoned them in the SEO era. And now that we have actual fascists -- all traded corps are fascist friendly at least in the US, and if you name some that are not, I'll respond that they simply have not, yet, and there is nothing in the structure f a corporation that can make them not growth/profit first.The internet has not been much of a revolution for human works without mercantile interest.And even arts organizations that do support artists and such balk at explicit material, fuck and shit and piss and true transgression; it's out for bigots to see and be hammered by. I've had websites up since 1994, and helped countless folk make them and run them. It was never great, and it's definitely peaked. Monsters roam the earth and the net.
(DIR) Post #B1IOWwa3s5Y9zFzRey by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-16T05:04:42Z
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@emma Oh please, that's utter bullshit. I'm not going to argue this with you.You will not win a battle with eg Google using google's or anyone's code.
(DIR) Post #B1IRB8lkArflHRkWCu by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-16T05:34:26Z
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@macross Yes! The word for me is "craft" -- academics often denigrate craft and separate it from "art". Craft covers much more ground.
(DIR) Post #B1IRU84YzJ4ycebfRw by maxime_andre@mastodon.xyz
2025-12-15T22:27:18Z
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@ai6yr @tomjennings I often think "What if all the money put into AI was used to make a better search engine ?" 😔
(DIR) Post #B1IRU9mCeXa5uI226q by GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai
2025-12-16T03:02:12Z
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@maxime_andre @ai6yr @tomjennings My first thought would be you’d need a tiny fraction of the money that’s been incinerated in AI and data centers.Suppose for a moment that we take one percent of all the money they’re burning and distribute it to libraries everywhere and give them basically the resources to hire enough processing power and connectivity and tell him go forth and build us a search system and let them figure out how to get it done
(DIR) Post #B1IRUB7VeoDc4f0YxU by ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org
2025-12-16T03:07:55Z
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@GhostOnTheHalfShell @maxime_andre @tomjennings The thing is, these tools already exist. They don't need to be developed... They just need to not be wrapped in crap.
(DIR) Post #B1IRUC8xqsybFShErg by geonz@mathstodon.xyz
2025-12-16T04:07:18Z
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@ai6yr @GhostOnTheHalfShell @maxime_andre @tomjennings Oh, but librarians could do an awesome job of organizing them and getting them out there.
(DIR) Post #B1IRUD5SLPlSAs3x2G by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-16T05:37:45Z
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@geonzAs a rule librarians are badass. @ai6yr @GhostOnTheHalfShell @maxime_andre
(DIR) Post #B1IRx2WWhKDpoJTIpM by lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me
2025-12-16T05:42:58.621929Z
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@tomjennings @timoj Kind of interesting, print gives me bad memories of word processors being both clunky and glich-fests, and even good home printers still seem to be annoying to use for most people.But well I guess I'm old web. Like if it's wrestling with a CMS, scummy hosters, social media obscure limits on how posts gets spread and awful moderation being applied there, …Yeah, print and I guess other physical media then makes sense, at least as an alternative, and specially if you're not much of a techie.
(DIR) Post #B1IS2yGzPkSAMh25hY by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-16T05:44:10Z
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@emma Ok I came back to your post to apologize for my rude reply, though not for my stance. But then youve doubled down on this weird assumption of wimpiness. It is very odd. Your assumptions are trivial and make me think you're trolling. I'll allow you the last word if you'd like but I am done with wasting time with you. And confirms my initial impulse was correct.
(DIR) Post #B1IUPupiZNEeGVLScK by rrdot@infosec.exchange
2025-12-16T06:10:44Z
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@tomjennings to me this sounds less like a dead Internet and more like the Internet of the 90s. Where the good stuff was niche, connected by hand, and spread by word of mouth. That human net is what allowed things like Google to be effective - the goog mined the connections and links made by people without search, and created a front end for it.Which was awesome. But no more.Nobody* posted shit on the net to make their break and play the social game. There was no social game. There was no money in it (for most). Just connections, built over time, one link at a time.We can do it again.
(DIR) Post #B1IrrPZegJKaN3ubSK by benjohn@todon.nl
2025-12-16T10:33:22Z
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@tomjennings @codinghorror I think there is an interesting debate to have that I’d like to hear. I do tend to think seeds of the current web’s downfall existed from very early on, particularly in accepting the need for expertise to publish. I also reckon there’s a useful web might be able to exist next to the corporate run ruin; although I wonder how palatable that is, and if it might ultimately be pushed out … wider adoption of age verification might make coexistence almost impossible, as just one example. Capitalism will continue concentrating power until an equal force prevents it, and I bloody well hope, takes a lot of power back. I don’t know how tenable it is to live next to that, share the same roads and low in the same fields.
(DIR) Post #B1Is2JMa76XaIGzhvk by operand@todon.nl
2025-12-16T10:35:21Z
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@tomjennings @codinghorror I feel like web hosting and such should have been a library service or something like that. Some people whose job it is to take care of the technical stuff and who you can talk to when you're stuck.
(DIR) Post #B1JIizS4cK7HneZgYK by dec23k@mastodon.ie
2025-12-16T15:34:24Z
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@tomjennings @timoj I recently spoke to a friend at a gig, about how I had been kicked off Facebook last year because their AI 'security' picked up on something harmless in one of my posts, and I'm refusing to go along with their bullshit process in order to recover my account.The first question was "how do you find out about gigs now?"My answer was: word of mouth, a few listings websites, and various regularly published magazines.
(DIR) Post #B1JuwnZjMoHvHIASCu by codinghorror@infosec.exchange
2025-12-16T22:42:42Z
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@tomjennings have you looked at https://neocities.org/ ? sponsored that site for a while too
(DIR) Post #B1JwvoJTL273BWDfG4 by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-16T23:04:57Z
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@macross Craft has been given low status by academics. They're simply fucking wrong. Art is craft. The US has a weird hangup on heirarchy, and will make them up where they don't exist. Somehow, professionals are more admirable than amateurs. You just have to ignore the haters and keep on.
(DIR) Post #B1JxdAa4QIYIhOesJk by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-16T23:12:48Z
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@codinghorror I know of it only marginally; it does seem good.Personally, I'm fine; I have a very privileged virtual host to use, and my history is weird anyway, lol, so I can't know.sBut all of these smart people who posess far more than the gumption necessary to follow through on projects and collaboration and production, don't use it and don't seem to care. It's probably about 10 years too late to ask, and probably too late to fix, what with the industrial and political world going fascist.This "digital native" bullshit is depressing -- it seems to refer to very young people glued to their phones doing minecraft and online games -- the complete opposite of creation, mostly, and containered where it is creating, and it's such a narrow skill to be kinda useless outside those venues. (We've got an 11 yr old on the compound and he's done all of their cohort's cliches, but has also been gently guided towards things that actually exist in the world too, and it seems to have worked. Also parents raised their kid to be kind, and THAT worked.)I think the threshold is too high; too much overhead, to do shit on the net that is not already in someone's container.
(DIR) Post #B1JyU50NsqWGkqCCi8 by codinghorror@infosec.exchange
2025-12-16T22:43:11Z
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@emma @tomjennings I mean, this is a bit harsh, but yeah, learning tools should be fun to some degree?
(DIR) Post #B1JyU6NSmWZh0i09K4 by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-16T23:22:19Z
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@codinghorror @emma Absolutely learning to use tools is fun -- for me, dunno others. I got enough of that macho toughen-up bullshit as a kid, not putting up with it today. It stopped any further discussion down that path. If they had any idea what I do they'd know it wouldn't apply to me; and if it wasn't aimed at me, it was empty polemic.The purpose of life is living, not being productive. Paradise stands in the shadow of swords and all that shit.
(DIR) Post #B1JyeLd0vzJtCpA2Do by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-16T23:24:13Z
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@codinghorror Absolutely learning to use tools is fun -- for me, dunno others. I got enough of that macho toughen-up bullshit as a kid, not putting up with it today. It stopped any further discussion down that path. If they had any idea what I do they'd know it wouldn't apply to me; and if it wasn't aimed at me, it was empty polemic, not requiring response.The purpose of life is living, not being productive. Paradise stands in the shadow of swords and all that shit.
(DIR) Post #B1KWqTvlHyPws6t504 by codinghorror@infosec.exchange
2025-12-17T05:47:22Z
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@tomjennings I definitely do not agree with toughen up. I find joy in the reflected happiness of others as we work together on a goal that matters.. for all of us
(DIR) Post #B1KXOk9hTJbv2PkCbw by codinghorror@infosec.exchange
2025-12-17T05:53:33Z
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@tomjennings “parents raised their kid to be kind, and THAT worked” that’s the most important part
(DIR) Post #B1KXSDakU7zpCZ3L7Y by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-17T05:54:12Z
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@codinghorror Agreed! Diversity means we do not automatically understand what others do. Anyone working towards what they think makes the world better is a damn good thing.