Architects of the internet, they said.

If they said the people currently in charge of the internet are an uneasy alliance of shadowy goons and idiots, afraid to openly break anything too irrevocably but occasionally trying to yank on the wires to see if there isn’t some way a little more money inside them somewhere, I would generally agree.

I mean, it is kind of getting that way. The proliferation of some domains that are more expensive than others could potentially be a sign of the whole thing slowly collapsing into costing $10/month or maybe orders of magnitude more, if you are a big company with fat pockets that can be rummaged through, like everything else is nowadays. My point is that the price is $12 per year specifically because those forces have been kept at bay, at least partially, which means the system is an ever-more-incongruous-with-every-passing-year vestige of the decent way that the internet used to be. And also, yes, there’s an increasing cacophony of services which are trying to charge you more than it should cost, hoping that you’ll think $50/year is reasonable and just pay it not knowing any better.

If you think it is sustainable to be able to submit registrations completely for free, though, you are welcome to provide that service to the world under some subdomain, and do a vital service to remove the evil of which you speak. Just register dns.free or whatever, and set up a thing where people can register mysite.dns.free or whatever subdomain they want, and then they can all have it for free. You can be the change. I suspect that it you undertook this mission, it would quickly become apparent to you why the system as a whole still needs to charge a tiny nominal fee in exchange for doing it.

Running the central DNS servers is so cheap that it makes no sense to try to charge for it. Doing the administrative work of keeping track of hundreds of millions of people who all want to register some appellation for themselves, and keeping track of all the changes thereto, is significant, which is why that side of the operation wants to charge you a few bucks a year for it.

You don’t have to pay anything to have your own identity.

If you want someone else’s servers to replicate a piece of information for you, and you want them to take responsibility for administrative issues like figuring out whether you still want it next year or what to do if you’re doing something illegal, you may have to pay anywhere from $5 a year to $30 a year for the privilege depending on a couple of factors. Given how massively inflated the price of registering a domain could be, if the type of ghouls who like to get their hands on things like this were able to get their hands on it, I’m inclined to call that success. About 99% of internet users will never need to know or care about DNS, and they can still have their identity without having to pay $30 a year.

I’m pretty sure the price of domains has actually been going down over time, and they’ve introduced a bunch of new TLDs and new types of entries in the records in response to pretty much the only significant problems that the 40-year-old system has ever had during its history. Like I said, I’d call that success.

I like how a whole community of academics and researchers worked out how to run a system which, even into the modern day which is kind of amazing, is largely disconnected from being abused by government and industry, and just runs according to what the people who need to use the system need it to do. You can get extorted for a fancy domain name if you really want to, but you can also go to Hostinger and get one for $5/year or something, because a lot of the core of the system is still pretty well-protected from being a cash-grab, through application of good governance and cooperation.

And then, somehow Hexbear managed to find their way around that system and fucked things up for themselves, and now it’s all DNS’s fault that they stepped in a pile of doo doo.

Never forget the architects of the internet were some of the vilest US MIC and Silicon Valley ghouls who ever lived and they are still in control fundamentally no matter how much ICANN and IANA claim to be non-partison, neutral, non-political, accountable, democratic, international, stewardshipismists

Yes, John Postel and David Mills were some of the vilest ghouls and so on. There was nothing about them that could provide a good model for how to do effective cooperation and succeed outside the systems of ownership that defined computing and telecommunications at the time, no particular reason they succeeded so dramatically and gave you, ultimately, this space to post pig balls today, and nothing about their work and traditions that needs to be defended against any silicon valley ghouls in the modern day. You fucking dingbat. I started out sticking up for you guys because no one deserves to get victimized by DNS scammers, but I take it back, go fuck yourselves.

Watching Linus take a big public dump on someone who deserves it is one of life’s finest guilty pleasures. It’s like a Maya Angelou poem. You can tell he really cared, and meant it, and took some time to get it right.

I think this is a pretty key outcome for AI in software engineering: It really can speed up writing big chunks of code for you so you don’t have to do drudgery. But, you kind of have to go through doing some drudgery to really get familiar with what’s going on, how the algorithms work, be able to read and write code comfortably. I wonder if the new engineers coming up in the near future are going to be interacting with AI systems that interact with the guts on their behalf, but always have a significant disadvantage because they didn’t have to work with the bits and bolts thoroughly enough to get a solid understanding of how they work, and strengthen the muscles for years and years.

It might just be cope on my part, or it might be that the landscape will change so quickly that it doesn’t have time to even become relevant because the current way that it is will change in a few years anyway.

What’s the problem? I for one absolutely applaud this move. In fact, I’m so excited that I think someone should go and get Bibi, and bring him absolutely for free to Germany to meet with some of Patriots.eu’s most fervent and longstanding members. Just show up with him, bust in the door, and announce who he is and let them give him a warm welcome.

Don’t get too excited. It seems to be missing a bunch of stuff.

I don’t really know the explanation for why the Lemmy API seems to just randomly drop stuff out of the modlog if it’s more than 5-10 entries long, but you’ll have to search for the exact stuff you’re specifically looking for a lot of the time. Maybe I am misunderstanding what I’m seeing but I’ve gotten the strong impression that’s what I’m seeing. It’s similar to how looking at a user’s profile randomly drops comments out after a certain time and just switches to posts only, so it’s hard to search through for specific stuff you’re looking for. Apparently that is going to be fixed in 0.20.

Being able to customize everything and having the defaults not be shit would be great. Using the customization options, which are excellent, as an excuse for the defaults being shit doesn’t fly. To me.

If it was a good light theme, I would agree with you, but the light theme it chose to show me was awful. It sounds like if someone logs in and chooses light theme, they get this.

(And again, Lemmy does the same: Of the pretty unappealing theme options, the default is one of the most unappealing ones. If I remember, it likes to color unimportant UI elements in GARISH bright green and orange colors which are borderline alarming compared with the muted colors of everything else. Why not just default to “darkly”, because that is one that looks okay? Who knows.)

I was even questioning myself, like “why am I complaining about the pushpin”, and then I looked again at my screenshot and the pushpin is the only solid dark contrasting thing anywhere in the whole article listing, which explains why I was looking at it first and wondering what the heck it “did” until I figured it out. It’s so bad.

I just opened fedia.io and screenshotted what it showed me. Same for mastodon.xyz. I wasn’t trying any kind of rigged setup. If there’s a simple change to the default theme choice which would make it less horrendous by default, or the layout is more logical on some screen sizes, then I think they should make the defaults better yes. Maybe I happened to hit on one badly-configured server or bad screen size, but I didn’t change anything on purpose, it just kind of feels like making it not-horrible visually is simply not a priority.

I would actually describe that as a problem for both Mbin and Lemmy. It really annoyed me when I was setting up this server that the default theme is kind of bad, the default sort is “Active”, and so on. It feels like there’s a pretty common mindset of “as long as it works for my account I don’t care what experience new users get.” I don’t think it’s deliberate, I think it’s just a natural outgrowth of working on the project because you want it to exist for you, not like trying to “grow the user base” necessarily or worry about what happens to novice users, like would be front of mind for a standard software company.

I mean Lemmy is pretty ugly and awkward too sometimes… actually I realized that I changed around my Lemmy theme so it wouldn’t look quite so bad to me. So maybe I’m making an unfair comparison of that versus stock Mbin. But check this out:

What’s the important stuff? Is it the high-contrast areas, like the “what is the fediverse” box or the always-vital “Add new link” button? Or the icons for the users, which are huge and in attention-grabbing high contrast for some reason? What does the pushpin do? Oh, that’s letting me know it’s a pinned comment. Can we just change the color for that, like every other platform? Is “People” really so vital that it needs it own big menu entry? Why is everything that’s in a bright contrasting color something that isn’t important, and the headlines are only a little shade different from the normal text? Why do we have giant boxes with speech bubbles in them, right in a super-prominent place, which sort of look like skeleton shapes because the page hasn’t finished dynamically loading yet, except that they’re actual final content elements? And why do they so skillfully separate the very unobtrusively colored vote counts from the things that they are counting votes for?

Compare that to this:

See how it does the same “what the heck is this place,” but it isn’t the most attention-grabbing thing on the screen every time you’re there, and put in a place where you will look if you’re first getting oriented (the first thing in left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading order), but not grabbing your attention every other time? See how “show me all the users” is way down at the bottom left in an unobtrusive list, because it’s not commonly used, whereas the main three types of feeds it can show you are the only things grabbing your attention up top, and then there’s a bar off to the side with a small handful of other actions separate from that you might want to do? And how, if you’re totally lost, the one button that’s most useful (create an account) is the most obviously high-contrasting thing?

Like I say, I am saying all this with love. Mbin has great features and Mastodon has a lot more eyes on it and people who want to chip in and make it attractive. I’m just saying that anything you use every day, you can get used to, and Mbin could look like the Mastodon interface and become to my eyes a lot less jarring. Put a little “feed settings” icon next to where “Explore” is now, that pops down a set of filters if you want one, get rid of a bunch of the stuff that gets thrown around on the screen that only very rarely is relevant, emphasize the stuff that needs attention and de-emphasize the stuff that doesn’t. That is my feeling.

Yeah, Lemmy’s UI has more gratuitous awkwardness in the actual design, maybe. Mbin does a lot more stuff, and generally has it pretty well-organized conceptually. Lemmy does a more minimal set of stuff and somehow still manages to make some of it confusing or hard to access. I think I was mostly just talking visually.

• Lemmy pros: Fast, mature, everyone knows it
• Lemmy cons: Shouty communists, atrocious mod tools
• Mbin pros: Follow Mastodon people
• Mbin cons: (1) Ugly (2) Awkward (3) What the fuck is “Magazines”
• Piefed pros: Python, some semblance of responsiveness to what features people actually want in it
• Piefed cons: What the fuck is a Piefed

(all is satire, I love you guys)

Somewhere in Europe might be better. A lot of the global south probably wouldn’t be happy that it is still in “the West,” but Europe at least seems to be making some noises in the approximate direction of human rights and international law, whereas the US is… well…

They used to need to check for parasites, in the shattered state of misery that existed after the war. (Edit! This is wrong. TIL.) It’s disgusting, but so is having parasites and not knowing it.

Pro tip for US people: Get ready! The world is not inherently a safe and stable place, and if you knock out the supports that are keeping it safe and stable for you, all kinds of really bad shit can happen.

I am moderately surprised that this didn’t have anything to do with Trump or Elon Musk. I was pretty curious what activist organization Erik Uden ran. But, the punchline wasn’t that, and was in the Mastodon replies.

Interestingly, two days before Oracle deleted my account and all servers associated with it, I publicly criticized Oracle’s CEO in a viral post for promising dystopian AI surveillance technology to his investors.

https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113879369270806353

What a weird coincidence

I am one of the people claiming that Trump is already a massive disaster, including for Gaza. I don’t think children being happy that, for now, they can return nearer to their homes and no one is shooting at them, cancels that out. I’m posting this while also with my teeth gritted waiting for the other shoe to drop. That doesn’t mean that this part of the story shouldn’t be told in video form directly from the people living it. It’s an important side of the news.

The number is 200,000+, not 70,000. Biden didn’t kill them, neither did Trump. I’m fairly sure no one is saying Trump killed 70,000 people already. You seem mostly disconnected from any reality about the situation in any respect, except insofar as it can be twisted around to bash the Democrats. Why?