the modern internet is garbage.
seriously, everything nowadays tries to spy on you, and that pisses me off, seriously.
spying, that’s a small word, a better description would be:
everything you use nowadays is probably wanting to spy on you and steal your data and sell it to companies to build a profile on you every single minute
we need to bring back the old way of using the internet and tech
and no, i don’t mean going back to dumb terminals, and have everyone program in C99 with TECO or vi, i mean simplifying everything.
discord, youtube, modern websites built with Ruby on Rails, next.js, node.js, any JS, it’s too complicated.
how to fix this?
go back to old standards
old as in:
using e-mail, pidgin, irc, etc. instead of “whats your dc @” to every other joe schmoe you meet.
using smolweb on your websites.
avoiding LLM’s and AI in general.
supporting living, breathing people trying their best any way you can
LLM’s
these guys suck,
first of all they’re a giant hog of humanity’s health, hefty data centers ruining water for the earth.
People say water "just evaporates" and rains back down, but those clouds MOVE! they dont always rain back into the OCEAN!!!
LLM's steal, they steal from existing artists of all kinds, music, art, fucking ASMR for all it cares, it eats up everything it sees.
it is also causing issues in human life, there is a whole wikipedia page about deaths caused by AI chatbots
what i’m doing about it
in the past couple of months i’ve been trying to get rid of my Amazing Digital Footprint and minimize my usage of Big Tech & Media. I started using IRC more, moved to bluesky instead of twitter (is better, but bluesky is heavily vibecoded, and it's showing.)
in the terms of the internet, librewolf is a great choice, it's heavily hardened firefox, basically.
I personally use Helium, a browser based on ungoogled-chromium that gets out of the way.
think brave but the CEO isnt a horrible being, and theres no crypto, and the adblocker is ublock origin!
i’ve been also thinking of getting an old phone. an old flip phone type, enough to get me calling my friends and family, that’s all i need out of a phone
discord is another hard part, everyone i know is on discord, and that’s hard, one of my beautiful friends said that using mail or irc instead of discord as my preferred way of talking is lame.
but i have a counterargument: what happens if discord shuts down? you get banned? the HQ and servers explode? they go bankrupt?
that’s when good old email comes in clutch, you write a mail, you send it, IMAP or POP3 reads it, then shows it to your receiver. it’s that simple
and with discord it goes through a huge centre of servers that can be read by the company any time, your password is at risk of getting ripped from discord anytime.
email is great, and if you want a more discord-ish experience, IRC via hexchat is also great.
the rust problem
everything is getting rewritten in rust, and thats a problem.
theres too much, uutils for example, the whole gnu coreutils, rewritten in rust, and for what? nothing, sure, memory safety that, borrow checker that, but everything just worked, you gained a couple of miliseconds of time, thats fucking it.
i get the whole safety thing, because rust is really safe, sure, but not everything needs a rewrite in rust, gosh.
normalize writing things in c, which by my standards is the best language for cli tools that dont do alot of stuff.
a good language for cli tools is also python, its easy, modulable, your team can learn it if needed, take for example bazaar, portage/emerge, theyre great tools that do the job.
fossils and swimming upstream
fossil /ˈfɒsəl/ — n.
- 1.
the preserved remains of an organism from a past geological age.
- 2.
(computing, informal) a tool, format, or piece of infrastructure that has ceased active development but continues to function, preserved not by relevance but by the quiet refusal of its users to let it die; distinguished from obsolescence by the fact that it still works, and from corposlop by the fact that no one is trying to sell you anything.
everything is moving to corpos claiming to be OSS but truly just stealing from open source.
we need to bring back the fossils, bazaar is a great vcs, ill say its better than most, the only way git won is because of inertia, and more specifically github.
before git and github there was life, there were forums, there were emailing lists cursing eachother out about merge conflicts. now its just pr’s and corporations ruling everything about software.
this whole section is dedicated to the philosophy of “if it ain’t broke, dont fix it.” the fossils worked fine. and yet everyone moved to github, git, discord, slack, whatever.
i truly believe that fossils should be revived, and ive been trying to use as many of them as i can, which is the swimming upstream part of this section.
breezy, the modern day equivalent to bazaar/bzr is a cli for managing git, aswell as bazaar repositories! and its great, there isnt a staging area, there isnt a brz checkout that does 4 different fucking things.
a short list of fossils:
savannah1
bazaar
POP3 mail
mercurial VCS, although sourcehut2 is still a forge for it.
UFS - the unix filesystem
make - cmake, ninja, bazel, etc. took over.
irc chat
if you don't want to use python tools, i'd suggest Game Of Trees. it's an OpenBSD project that operates on git repositories just fine! it is also intentionally minimal, i mean got has 30 commands total.3 look at what the -h flag outputs!
$ got -h
usage: got [-hV] command [arg ...]
commands: init import clone fetch checkout update log diff blame tree status ref branch tag add remove patch revert commit send cherrypick backout rebase histedit integrate merge stage unstage cat info
all of these tools work fine, and yet almost no one uses them. i am still looking for a reason for that.
if you’re reading this, please try to put this into effect
even if it’s just 1 thing from anything above, please, try to put it into use
that’s how i think things should be, cheers