hotwire's comments

This guy is a genius and also freakin hilarious, I knew I recognised his voice from somewhere; watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGI-GqAK9c

I'm in the same boat as you my friend. Mid thirties guy, hit adolescence right as the net was blowing up mid 90s. I still remember the first mp3 I found on a computer in the library at school and it blew my freakin mind how small it was (I had experimented with ripping CDs before resulting in huge, huge wav files...)

I think it's natural that any time things get as absolutely crazy as they are right now, there's a natural yearning for "simpler times".. I'm sure when the technological revolutions came around in previous generations (and centuries) there was the same yearning for more pastoral times.. I think what we're both feeling is that same kind of yearning.. This doesn't make what we're feeling any less relevant or important.

In my opinion, the real murderer of the internet was the iPhone and then soon after facebook. Suddenly every single person has an internet machine in their pocket and the flood of normies began. Even early 2000s, most people online were there for learning or fun (actual fun) as opposed to just social validation (FB/IG/TW) or pure media consumption (netflix, YT). Broadband/ADSL probably contributed as well, as it was no longer "I'm going on the internet", just "I'm always on the internet"... To me, somehow there's a psychological difference to that.

I have vivid and pleasant memories of scouring geocities sites in the 90s for new X-File JPGs that I didn't have in my collection yet, episode summaries, or FAQs about my favourite bands. I got chatting with Blink 182's web master at one point when I had some suggestions for their site. Now all of that is pretty much just done through the grinding gears of facebook and with far less charm or enjoyment.

I met and chatted with randoms on ICQ, I played C&C over Westwood chat. I did 33.6k dial up games of Duke 3D with my friends, I learnt to program QBasic, I was blown away when I discovered Nesticle, I collected lists of cheats for games I'd probably never end up playing, and the list goes on.

I miss the basic charm of "personal websites" too, I guess. It's all just on facebook now. In the vein of geocities sites; simple designs, simple technology (no fucking React or Angular or whatever's popular these days); just a bit of HTML and some styling and some pages about your interests. Buy a domain name, dump it on an S3 (cheap/free) and just keep updating when you feel like it. (I still feel like with how bad google's search has gotten you'll never be discovered, but maybe: who cares..) Maybe it's one of those "create the future you want to see" type things. Small, but if everyone got off facebook and did something like this, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

personally, i order my co founders off amazon prime

John Carmack is an absolutely brilliant speaker. Conversational, captivating and effortlessly natural. I could listen to him talk all day about the most arcane bits of graphics development which i'll never understand but am fascinated by regardless.

His QuakeCon talks are particularly good.

QuakeCon 2011 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28

QuakeCon 2012 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk

I like his talks because he's always interested by what he's doing and it tends to make me interested again in code.

Linus Torvalds is another surprisingly good speaker. His talk on git - one of the dryest possible topics - was very interesting. There's not many other people I'd sit and listen to talk about SCM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

- You can identify trends and patterns in your traffic

- You can figure out where in the world your traffic is coming from

- It can be helpful in responding to security incidents

Just want to say; I'm checking in after a few days of using it and... if i think about it, i guess i'm clicking that "killsticky" bookmark less and less.

its funny, suddenly i don't even have to think about it, which is what this is all about - reducing cognitive load.

re inclusion on ublock and the like: it should probably be an option that people can enable/disable; ublock is more about blocking ads/trackers, but i would wager that most people are annoyed with sticky stuff too.

ready for the next challenge?.... getting rid of sites that fuck with the default scroll behaviour ;)

thanks again :)

that one looks better than the one i pasted - i've noticed that some sites are using "sticky" instead of "fixed" and my bookmarklet (which I copied off someone else) doesn't remove them.

thanks.

holy shit dude.

if this is as awesome as it looks, i'm actually excited.

thank you.

I just have a bookmarklet to kill all "fixed" position divs.

I'm clicking it more and more these days - even those damn fixed navs that take up a stupid percentage of the screen give me the shits.

If clicking the bookmarklet doesn't get rid of your stupid modal newsletter sign up or annoying sticky nav, I'm just closing the tab.

Here's the bookmarklet btw:

javascript:(function()%7B(function () %7Bvar i%2C elements %3D document.querySelectorAll('body *')%3Bfor (i %3D 0%3B i < elements.length%3B i%2B%2B) %7Bif (getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'fixed') %7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()