For the best experience on desktop, install the Chrome extension to track your reading on news.ycombinator.com
Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | history | joshuablais's commentsregister

I theorize it is going back to the protocol layer. The "web" for most people is a bunch of social media frontends.

I think the current web is sick and will never get better.

I propose building a new stack, without ICANN and friends (Verisign is raising .com prices yet again). I'm planning to build it[1] at some point, just working on other foundational stuff at the moment.

Cozy corners, webrings, and Gemini/Gopher is where I see the spirit of the old web alive and well.

---

[1]: https://dap.sh


Yggdrasil works like that. No bitcoin, no bullshit, your own tunneled ipv6.

Yggdrasil is on my list of things to try! I need to delve into it more tbh.

Yeah, it's quite sad where we landed. Circa 2004-2006 while the internet was mostly open and accessible I mentally grouped "the internet" into two buckets. There was the real web plus usenet plus email and then there was "facebook" with its weird garden wall and exclusive invites or some such shit. I didn't think of facebook as being "on the web" even though they used the http protocol. It was highly unusual then to have any web content behind a registration wall.

So hardly anyone considered facebook to be a part of "the web". It was its own weird duck. Twenty years later and most people only frequent this "weird" part of the internet - this limited ensemble of paid and unpaid walled gardens.


Your statement of ‘hardly anyone considered facebook part of the web’ is incorrect. Facebook became popular a bit after the Web had become quite mainstream. The idea of signing up for online services was not foreign to most of these folks. Now, AOL/Compuserve and such were more considered as non web.

That applies to aol, msn, compuserve etc, not to Facebook which you only ever accessed via http from a browser.

Yeah, those didn't count either. AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties. With AOL I'm quite sure nobody considered them to be a part of the web. Their pages didn't have URLs early on but AOL "keywords" instead. Compuserve also weren't using http I believe. It was some kind of commercial WAN that was pitched as a competitor to the internet, no?

> AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties

yes, they were, in the UK at least. speaking as a compuserve user.


Ids like 102615,1320, with pay per minute for compuserve and for the phone call

Personally I never used cix but one of the magazines (pc pro?) has columnists on it at least.


Similarly Twitter; I signed up in I think 2007 and only used SMS for the next several years until they finally stopped it. Once I switched to the web/app version I was frankly appalled.

and 1MB is "small" for the modern web!

No shade! I went and checked out of curiosity, since it looks like we’re both using Astro as a static site generator.

Most of my articles are pretty media rich and weigh in between 1-2 megs. I do try to be pretty conscientious about asset compression (mozjpeg, h264 for video, etc.). I'd love to switch over to AV1 but I've heard compatibility on older devices is spotty.


So we are just going to take companies at face value now while this model is not publically available? OpenAI literally said the same thing about their next model a day later.

Both companies have models "too dangerous to release". Both companies' girlfriends go to another school.


didn't they also claim this about gpt-2? for sure there is a lot of PR involved as well. Models can also be both, really good at cyber security and bad at writing emails.


Yes, and Anthropic has also claimed Claude has become sentient on at least 3 separate occasions in the last few years.


I personally use Doom because there are a lot of out of the box optimizations, some don't like how hlissner has brought nix ideas of declarative package management into the mix, but I am a nix user so it makes sense. I also am an evil (heretic) user - Doom is configured from the get go as a gateway from vim/neovim into emacs, and it does that job very well.

I would say use both. You can run multiple emacs configurations, and you could have your vanilla config which you slowly build as well as Doom/spacemacs where you can see what is possible.


I do have a wandering eye for EXWM, it probably would require my skill with emacs to increase and an optimization of my config so as to defer heavy tasks etc. If you have any suggestions on how to get there, I am all ears! The more I use emacs, the more I want to make my entire computer emacs.


You likely don't need to optimize anything; Emacs has seen some pretty significant optimizations recently (native Emacs Lisp compilation, tree-sitter modes, better handling of long lines, etc.) so performance is rarely the issue.

However, you do need to avoid call-process (spawning blocking processes) as much as possible. Also, my experience with TRAMP has been pretty awful due to the fix for https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=12145 (literally: TRAMP blocks all of Emacs while waiting on a network connection).


Some people want to just "do work" and not build a toolchest over the years. I think if I find myself doing something once, I will probably be doing it again, therefore the environment can help me greatly with achieving that goal in far less time. There is a diminishing return for some tasks, but some things I have written in emacs save me minutes of time each time they are run daily.


This is the thing people forget about emacs - it is primarily a lisp environment, entirely programmable. Something one can make their very own. Nothing else comes quite as close, even if the keyboard ergonomics (at least for me) do help to sell it. You can change the workspace to better the workflow in real time, that's the biggest selling feature.


And this is why, even though it is a better OS environment my grandmother will never use it.

And because emacs is under socialized and under adopted the emacs user will still have to use notion or outlook or whatever corporate security requires.


I'm not going to argue that emacs if "for everyone" and there's plenty in my own life that I'm happy to accept defaults in. But that said, it's not that hard to glue emacs onto existing tools if needed. If you're in a situation where you can only send emails on a locked down email client you can still script the client through emacs and some glue code. On MacOS, Apple script does wonders and for Windows there's AutoHotKey. Linux obviously is infinitely malleable.


To be fair to corporate, Emacs has a pretty terrible security model.

There's no reason a program like Emacs couldn't exist which had something like capabilities baked in, but as it is, every package has access to anything it wants.


I entirely agree - we could have had a completely unified computing environment, and we got... apps.


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search:

HN For You