I miss old internet.
- without politics
- without robots
- without money
- without big portals
- without commercials
- without advertising
- without data centers
- without ipv6
but with great usenet and community

Shit fuck I’m old

"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."

 — Henry Spencer

Usenet signature, November 1987

Looking back on 2022 from a developer's perspective, even without talking politics, war, climate, health, and injustice, despite CSS updates and AI progress, it feels like two steps forward, one step back. I used to curse ReactJS and Webpack, but we can have breaking changes everywhere else, like PHP 8 vs. WordPress. Oh yeah, and why do customers still love WordPress so much that we have to mess with this unstable abomination with its half-baked Gutenberg block editor and (full) site editing? And what about "social" media? Well, never mind, after Usenet and Myspace, why did people favour Facebook and Twitter in the first place? Thanks to devRant, there is at least one site where I rant about obscure tech topics from my subjective point of view, using swear words and exaggeration, without getting downvotes. Maybe I am even allowed to say "Mastodon" here? Thanks and merry Chanukka, Jul, X-Mas, Y-Mas, and Z-Mas and a happy new year everybody!

MmmMmMMmmMM yes daddy please keep putting words in my mouth, they're so tasty. The false dichotomies keep me warm at night.

Arguing with other devs in 2020 is a sad state of affairs. Let's go back to the long winded usenet rants by Torvalds et al, where words meant shit and we were civil.

I missed this last week... so too bad ;)

My introduction into programming was rather slow. When I was a child, we had an Apple IIc, but there were no disks. When you'd boot it up, you got a prompt and I recall being able to type commands into it that someone told me was "Apple BASIC".

At the same time, our family computer was a 386 and it came with something called GWBasic. I was a huge Mortal Kombat fan as well, and I recall finding the moves for the game on an AOL usenet. I took them all and wrote a program in BASIC that let you search and find moves for your character. I distributed this on some floppies to friends.

After that I lost interest. My "Information Systems" shop in high school was more about how to use Office than it was about programming. A few years later I found out that you could run your own text-based games (MUDs) and I quickly jumped into that and the C language.

From there, I was in and out of programming - C, to C++. Java and PHP, then back to Java. It would be about 15 years later until I finally realized I wasn't bad at this and land a job doing it. :)

Every ten years, a new social nexus, from Usenet to Reddit. Every day, a flame war. Every year, a great leader that wins flame wars, convinces people to follow them. The question is, what happens next? What do you preach to the gullible masses you won over?

Every single time it gets to politics, and then, to philosophy. Yet, there are no large strides in sight to world peace.

You've seen that meme where everything is just applied math. Well, math is applied philosophy, and philosophy is a product of misunderstanding the language.

In the end, the flame war you won never mattered. Archived threads, Wayback Machine, inactive Usenet mirrors. Acres upon acres of human thought, passionately expressed in computer text, roamed by no one but web crawlers. Give them three days, and they'll forget what you taught them.

WWI had shown us that we couldn't improve the masses with art and education. There is no vaccine against stupidity.

Life on Earth is hell. People are hell. Living among people is hell. If your life isn't hell, you're fortunate enough to be paying criminals that are stronger than other criminals around them, for protection.

Only the habit of systematically denying yourself pleasures your inner animal wants, plus a healthy dose of doubt, can make you human. Without restraint, a man is merely a greedy beast.

While planning my (personal) server I just seem to pile up more and more things to do/consider. Basically, for now I just want to have rclone, nextcloud and jellyfin, plus some usenet stuff later on. But I want to have the whole installation and configuration automated as far as possible, since I'll at first it will run in a test environment and needs to be migrated to another server at a point, possibly even another OS. So I suppose that means docker, docker-compose and Chef (any better options?). I want SSL: Traefik. User management / auth? RADIUS, LDAP. SSO? keycloak. I also need to deal with virtual hosts. And probably much more..

Since I just have basic Linux knowledge and have no real experience with any of the other technologies, I feel a bit lost. I just got to the abovementioned software due to some ddg research. I don't mind digging deep, I want to learn (which is half the reason for this project), but it's not easy to the the best way to set this up.