Just like we have schools and roads and public TV we should have a blog and an email for everyone on public infrastructure. Full of spam etc, but it should exists. and it would teach people about the problems of cybersecurity.
My ex is crazy stalker. Sometimes they would get drunk, look through my facebook and linkedin, and send me many nasty messages. Very annoying. Removing my online presence solved this.
> Hey, I have a crazy story. I found this website today. There used to be this person who did this and that. And he’s our grand-grand-grand-father
Imagine your class mates would discover, that your grand-grand-grand father owned slaves and they had pictures...
You seem to think that people will care about this proof or believe you in any way. Even if they do, they can still hate you because hating people on the internet is easy.
Indeed. There is no avoiding people hating people for things they haven’t done and no amount or form of payment from the latter group will cause that to statement be falsified.
Did you change your name from Sokolov? Was your grand grand grand father the creator of Shagohod? Big Boss stopped it before things got out of control. But, otherwise, we are not guilty of our predecessor's crimes.
Children get made fun of by other children all the time based on their families. Sometimes they get special treatment because of who they are related to as well: scholarships do this all the time, but punishments get lighter sometimes too.
It isn't fair, but no one can really escape their family history.
And while mature folks understand that their ancestors were probably horrible people, sometimes by both today's and yesterday's standards - it isn't something that always shows in actions.
Genealogy sites make this sort of thing very easy.
If your ancestors were slave owners, that information is there. If there is a picture, that will be there too. You would be astounded the sorts of detailed records that people have found and digitized.
It's not that much effort either as owned slaves were included on the census.
Pretty much if you were an affluent family that could afford one, you owned at least one slave.
Notably, Mitch McConnell's, Obama's, and Biden's ancestors are all confirmed to have owned slaves. Not surprising as they all come from affluent families.
Maybe if everyone stopped pretending they weren't descended from slaveowners, it would be less of a stigma and more of observing a fact about the world as it is? Everybody denying that they're descended from slaveholders just wipes slaveholders from history.
It becomes significantly harder to talk liberal/libertarian shit if everybody knows you're a descendant of slaveholders speaking to an audience of descendants of slaveholders, ridiculing the descendants of slaves.
That's a weak snipe against someone who's only enforcing posted guidelines, and in doing so gives us this great outlet to have discussion about topics like these.
I dunno, but honestly so far, HN seems to be much more free speech and free debate-focused than any other social platform I've seen. Not sure where you got this from.
(I have showdead on and 99% of what is deleted is just outright malicious or flame-y.)
A farmer could say that everyone should grow vegetables. Because, well, he is passionate about farming. It would actually make more sense than the proposed nonsense.
You could say this about everything though right? Everyone should jog because … everyone should do woodworking because … everyone should do yoga … everyone should go to church .. everyone should mentor kids … everyone should paint watercolors … everyone should be involved in politics … everyone should get a second uni degree …
It does, but I can just go to the grocery store. Likewise, I don't have my own well for water. It'd be cool if I did, but that'd require moving first of all.
My modern phone is useful. It has replaced so many things: I no longer carry a paper notebook, for example. I no longer spend money on watches. I have a map with me. If I get in a bind, I can get help - I have some security because of the phone. I have a translator app in my phone! As imperfect as it is, it is better than all of the tools before it. I can pay for stuff with it if I'd like to - and I do, every time I ride the bus. I don't need to print out airplane tickets any more and a slew of other useful things.
I wish everyone had a telephone, as the world would improve a bit. I don't really understand why you think it is a dumb idea.
> I’ve had my own website since I was 13. I will not tell you the domain name because it contained some cringe ass shit that’s still visible on archive.org.
He also doesn't conceive that maybe their mind was retracted rather than expanded despite the lack of specifics of "expansion" and adding a belief in own mind expansion being a contraction.
Given that I have not mentioned of my history of drug usage in any form, you and the sibling commenter make a lot of uninformed assumptions.
Since the dawn of time we know the effect of hallucinogens, so only someone that doesn't know what they're talking about, like you, would dispute this fact.
But please do offer your invaluable insight on the matter.
As someone who has taken a lot of drugs of all sorts, I also find it a bit 'cringe' to post a list of them with no context on your public website. To me, it comes off as a humblebrag for having some specific personal hobby, but without anything interesting to say of it. I view it like posting a list of the different ethnicities of women you've bedded.
But I found the collection of quotes page decidedly more 'cringe.'
So, I am working on an e-book reader myself and I love e-books as well. But the problem with e-books is not that they don't have "smell or feel" but rather DRM issues. Unless you get all your books in a DRM-free e-pub format, they can be taken out of your library at any time for any reason. Also its nice to have something to pass down from generation to generation.
I am personally an avid supporter of both digital and physical books, but to say that physical books are an "inferior" choice is incorrect because people choose those for entirely different reasons than they might choose a digital copy.
Good point. Thing is, most people get their e-books from Amazon which has a history of harsh DRM restrictions and removing them from libraries when licensing issues arise. I fully support DRM-free ebooks. That is part of the reason why I am working on my e-reader...once I am done I plan on writing a book repository software to work with it to make getting e-books easier. However the fact of the matter is that people who buy them DRM-free are a minority. The majority of people prefer the convenience of just downloading from Amazon over grabbing one from a DRM free store and porting it to their e-reader of choice.
My complaints about DRM aside, my biggest problem with OPs article on e-books is thinking that one is "superior" to another, when different people get different formats for different reasons. Some may like the idea of being able to carry tons of books around with them on a tablet, or being able to search text. Others might dislike these features, and prefer physically turning pages. Neither is "better" than the other, and I dislike people that DO think one or the other is inherently superior for whatever reasons.
They don't seem to be arguing everyone should necessarily have a website known to be linked to them.
The argument seems to be "leave a record".
And secondarily, "for your descendants" (they write "ancestors", but that's obviously wrong).
You can do the second part without sharing with the world that it was yours. Ensure someone in your family knows, or leave notes in safe locations.
I guess we can infer a third assumption: that there's a reasonably high chance that archive.org will outlive your personal papers or data, making it potentially a valuable alternative to a journal on paper or your own systems. That part is an interesting discussion. I'd worry if everyone opted for relying on archive.org over their own copies, but at the same time, I know how vulnerable personal records can be.
There are any number of reasons why this is a terrible thought.
Boomers and Gen Xers were brought up in a world without the Internet and we all survived just fine.
Being told by someone who does something that we should all do the same thing, is a sign of emotional insecurity and narcissism.
Free choice is great. I used to have a blog, however I no longer had time for it. Which is also totally fine.
The older I get, the less I desire for my “public” me to do anything with Social media, leaving my various aliases (all different) to have that minimal outlet.
> Every person on the planet should have their own website, on their own domain name, and blog about whatever they want.
Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety.
> Everyone should be writing in public.
I never understood why this kind of injonctions for us to do things keep on coming up to the front page of HN. I understand that they make good titles, though.
> “Hey, I have a crazy story. I found this website today. There used to be this person who did this and that. And he’s our grand-grand-grand-father!”
I vaguely know that my grand-grand-grand-father was a farrier in one of the Napoleons' army and was a kind man, my children will vaguely know it as well. We'll all die and be forgotten, I think that's OK.
There is also no guarantee that archive.org will survive a couple decades. But a notebook in the attic definitely will.
> Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety.
Ok, "every person on the planet should have access to basic hygiene and food safety, their own website, on their own domain name, and blog about whatever they want."
I can't believe you went out on a limb like this. I've been assured that the fact that many people don't have access to basic water and food safety means that they shouldn't have a website either. I suppose you think they should have the vote, too? How can you give people the vote if they don't have indoor toilets?
It's pristine LLM training data. The author is shilling for the forthcoming robot overlords. I personally think we'd all be better off playing outside and loving life, than cooped up staring at blogs on phones.
OP is right, it will survive bar some destructive process, and it's in your control. Hosted content is susceptible to destructive processes as well, Data loss? Gone. Org gives up and shuts down? Gone. Deindexed or lost in some future search LLM to rule them all? Gone. it's mostly out of your control.
This all just points out how hard it is to preserve anything over a long period of time. We think of the things in our lives as being permanent because they mostly last for a good portion of our lifetime but once property or information changes hands all of the tacit knowledge about it is lost. The next generation doesn’t see that notebook as important so it is just as likely to end up in the trash as in a box in storage. Even if they do try to preserve it there are many ways it can be destroyed or degrade or simply be lost.
Even the seemingly simple thought experiment of “deliver a one sentence message to a person living at your current address 500 years from now” is nearly impossible using ordinary means available to an individual.
This discussion brings to mind the monastic practice of copying texts for the purpose of preservation [1]. An interesting practice I learned from the sci-fi classic "A Canticle for Leibowitz" [2].
We aren't immortal, so it won't be in your control forever regardless of how you record it. Over long periods of time, the internet is far more accessible for long term storage of someone's writings than physical media. An unsheltered person with a library card could write about themselves and that would be preserved on archive.org, copied by other/future archival websites, copied by individual data hoarding enthusiasts, etc. There is almost zero chance a notebook would survive any significant period of their life, let alone after their death.
Maybe for people with stable families and enough disposable income to easily store boxes of printed material for generations, physical media is a good choice. But not everyone has progeny to pass things on to. Not everyone has the ability to safely and securely store generations of writings. A house fire in your lifetime may be unlikely, but what about in 3 generations worth of houses? And there is zero redundancy. If archive.org shut down tomorrow, there are people on reddit’s r/datahoarder that have copies of various portions of it. Data would be gone, but not all of it. If a tornado hits your house tomorrow, there is no one that has copies of your handwritten notebooks. 100% loss.
Reality is a notebook in the attic, if found, will at least get a few minutes interest. Only the crazy narcissists think anyone is going to care about their curated babble once they're gone.
Is it about having your personal writings accessible or is it making people’s writings accessible? An unsheltered person with a library card could write about themselves and that would be preserved on archive.org, copied by other/future archival websites, copied by individual data hoarding enthusiasts, etc. There is almost zero chance a notebook would survive any significant period of their life, let alone after their death. That record might become valuable insight to some future researcher that would otherwise have little information on the experiences of marginalized groups in that time and place.
> Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety.
Agree, whole thing comes across as notionally adjacent to shit like "effective altruism" and disguising a greedy disregard for material reality as equitabiity
I feel the need to remind you that the Effective Altruism community is also moving billions of dollars to substantially help the extreme poor.
And the original commenter is wrong, 91% of people do have access to basic hygiene (i.e. hand washing facilities), according to https://ourworldindata.org/hygiene
> I feel the need to remind you that the Effective Altruism community is also moving billions of dollars to substantially help the extreme poor.
The Dutch government alone spends $5B per year on aid to the poorest country, and The Netherlands is a small country. Effective Altruism is just a guise to get political influence through capital.
It doesn't even have to be a scheme. It's just selfish and greedy people trying to rationalize their selfishness and greed by being even more selfish and greedy.
Of course people who already think they are god's divine gift to the world will think they would be the best to give out or pick the recipient of billions in charity over a more democratic system.
But wasn't that in direct response to the claim that most people did not have that access? It feels like either a misunderstanding or mischaracterization of what they were saying.
> my grand-grand-grand-father was a farrier in one of the Napoleons' army
I am hopeful that the author did not mean for this idea to apply retroactively.
> There is also no guarantee that archive.org will survive a couple decades. But a notebook in the attic definitely will.
Houses burn down all the time. Pointing out that everybody has access to a theoretically fireproof house is a bit funny for a thought that began with an admonishment about hygiene and food safety.
> Houses burn down all the time. Pointing out that everybody has access to a theoretically fireproof house is a bit funny for a thought that began with an admonishment about hygiene and food safety.
While I do get your follow-up criticism, I took the notebook comment to mean that if I stop paying my “notebook bill”, or a massive solar flare strikes my house, the notebook in my attic doesn’t vanish from existence.
Is it? Look at Etreia or Ethiopia. You need a smartphone or computer, and then you need power for it. You need Internet distribution that isn't going to get stolen for copper. It's easy if you have the money for a distribution network for them, but hygine and food safety is also a lot easier if you pour money into them. Humans' need for access to food and clean water predates the Internet and it'll be there after it as well.
> Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety.
Not to be pedantic, but since another comment questioned that, the numbers for 2020:
> 3.6 billion people lacked safely managed services, including 1.9 billion people with basic services, 580 million with limited services, 616 million using unimproved facilities, and 494 million practising open defecation.
To be clear: I don't care whether this is technically "most people", it is far too many people lacking decent sanitation.
(edit: fix wrong negation in last sentence).
> Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety.
I've had a website since I was in my early teens and throughout most of my career as a programmer, 20+ years.
In 2018 I became homeless in SF and still had some websites for the first couple years where I started posting stuff about being homeless. When I lack basics like hygiene and safe food is when I've felt having a website would do the most good.
I've been pretty vocal about being homeless and it's taken over my social media channels, but you can bet the content isn't surfaced much or to people who I knew in real life who might've cared or helped me out if they knew sooner. If my RSS feed wasn't dead, who knows?
Even $5/mo or $10 for a domain renewal is too much most months, lacking said and similar resources. I've not had phone service in a year, phone in need of repair and now lost to forced migration due to domestic violence. I'm aware of Obama phone but I'm also aware of spyware, data privacy and similar and have done the math--no thanks.
Not a happy story at all (I feel joy and peaceful, personally). Makes most people feel super bad. Not feeling like a victim either... I totally understand why mainstream sites don't surface real content that I post. I still post it, but having my own website with a feed or forum now of all times would be superior. Especially when I have to hold my tongue about various topics that fall too far outside of community guidelines / algorithmic fairness and could get my account suspended.
Long winded I know, just underlining that people without basic hygiene or safe food may be perfectly capable of running a web site and even custom apps with novel features, and may need to have a voice more than anyone or ever. There are mainstream options but most here can probably get behind the idea of running one's own services and owning the registration.
A solution I've had in mind is libraries running decades-long hosting services attached to member cards. Various people have expressed a little interest but I've not been persistent in following up or pushing anything forward myself. Lack of stability makes me come off as really flaky and poor at communication online and more--and look like an excuse maker for expressing such things.
There's 7.8 billion people in the world, so 3.6 billion qualifies as "most".
It's also worth noting we're in a global food crisis which started in 2020 and got worse in 2021. It continues to grow year over year. Ukraine and Russia were also the two biggest cereal providers, which apparently has affected these numbers significantly. That's just food safety though, for nutrition the numbers are worse.
In the end, however, it hardly matters whether it is 46% or 51% percent. The exact wording by the GP may have been inaccurate, but the numbers support the underlying point: sanitation very far from universally accessible.
Also keep in mind that these numbers are based on estimations and definitions that give some room for interpretations, so they cannot be 100% accurate either.
> Regardless how does 3.6:7.8 ie 46% constitute a majority? Most is a word. Words have meaning.
Graciously, they are off by a few percent. Parsing words does not diminish the magnitude. The issue still stands. A large enough portion of the worlds problems dwarf the initiative to give everyone a webpage/domain. It's silly enough to discount.
Trying to make some separate point about parsed words (you really left the subject behind for some reason), in this case, is not a compelling argument against the assertion. I phrased it in a more amicable form (the way it was obviously intended to be communicated) and another random person, takes up with minutia. Good luck with that.
> Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety.
Hyperbole for the sake of making an argument does not mean the writer is unable to construe of or consider situations where what they wish for is impractical or far down peoples priority list.
> I never understood why this kind of injonctions for us to do things keep on coming up to the front page of HN. I understand that they make good titles, though.
Because they set out ideas about society that may or may not be something we agree with, but that makes for interesting discussion.
> But a notebook in the attic definitely will.
Most of my dads notes have survived, but certainly not all. One of my grandparents diaries have survived. To my knowledge no writing by the other tree has survived; if it has it has already diffused among siblings two out of three which are dead, with no clear knowledge where any documents might have ended up.
None of my great grandparents or great great grandparents writing survives other than a couple of words written on the handful of photographs and two drawings which have survived, even though I know for a fact that some of them wrote regular letters to family after emigrating the the US.
The written records we have even from a time when people used to write a lot on paper are only a tiny fraction of the records made.
Some families will be lucky and have a lot, some will have nearly nothing, and often when you have a lot it quickly difuses out among descendants to the point that soon many will not have more than small fractions of even what is available about their ancestors, if any. E.g. I only got hold of one of the handful of surviving pictures of one of my great grandfathers because I stumbled on my grandmothers half brothers daughter doing genealogy and found her daughters on Facebook, and she happened to have one picture.
I do agree there's no guarantee about archive.org, and so I'm certainly ambivalent about people putting all their eggs in that basket, but this admonition for all of us to have a website will never reach anyone to start with, and nothing prevents both and/or at least keeping local copies of the site as well.
- knowing this about you ancestor is interesting but thinking they are the inspiration for the "for want of a nail" cautionary tale is what most people are expecting when they start looking into the past. The reality is most people's lives are pretty mundane and they personal connections are what make it interesting.
- notebook in the attic - there's a movement to digitize all the notebooks in attics we are losing over time. This is especially a thing in agriculture because of all the information about local weather, crop yields, etc. It would be great if there was some publicily funded service that you could send these to for free instead of throwing them out (possibly with drop off at public libraries that could either digitize them or send them in bulk). They could scan and return for a fee.
Re: notebook in the attic, one of the things I've recommended historical societies do is conduct public scanning days so that individuals/families can preserve their pics and docs and at the same time share them in a curated collection with DPLA (dp.la), Digital Public Library of America. Few organizations are interested. I've never expected them to drop everything to do it, but I at least expect them to contemplate broader community engagement, increasing membership, generating interest in families beyond those already interested in genealogy, etc.
I recently tried to search for my own web presence from late 90s early 00s, and I found the famous claim that nothing dsappears from the internet to be greatly exaggerated. A few snapshots made its way to web archive, but incomplete, and not very useful for any purpose. But to be fair I lost a big chunk of my own paper archive as well for various reasons.
> I found the famous claim that nothing dsappears from the internet to be greatly exaggerated.
It is exaggerated, but many cautions are. Some things you post on the internet will likely disappear, but many won't, and the key factor is after you've posted it, you quickly lose control over its ultimate fate.
I always understood that saying more like: "you can't put the genie back in the bottle"
Once you share something online, there's a big chance someone is keeping a copy, it might not be accessible on the internet anymore, but it's never lost
Some of the best conversations on the early Net were closed communities where users had a safe zone. Things like The Well and Screen Porch/Caucus "virtual communities" were mostly "conversations", but lots of just informative posts.
I'm a bit pedantic about our family's information being stored on other people's computers. I simply don't trust access to it long-term.
So I'm building Timelinize: https://twitter.com/timelinize -- the idea is that everyone can get their data out of the cloud and off their devices and into a single, unified timeline on their own computer. And their timeline is just one shard of a global universal timeline, and timelines can be meshed together seamlessly.
Still much work to do but my family is hopefully going to start using this in the next few years! And maybe yours too :)
I am fascinated (mostly genuinely, not in a snarky way) by the fact that you express concern about storing your information on other people's untrusted/unreliable computers, then link to a twitter page - which notably decided to suddenly restrict access without a login last week. Maybe you should link an independent website page instead?
Oh I really, really want to. But honestly, I've been way too busy making Caddy's new website, preparing the upcoming Caddy 2.7 release, and building Timelinize itself to have any time to work on a website for Timelinize. But I'll eventually get around to it.
The reality is, the quickest way for me to get updates out to wide swath of people (at the time) was to set up a Twitter. Things have changed a lot since then... ironically validating the need for something like Timelinize, I guess.
You missed the important part. Hoping that this won't be misused is very naive and dangerous.
The part about lying is simply pointing out that most pages will be not even particularly interesting (e.g. see Xing profiles). Not sure what you understood it to mean.
I want a social network with domains as useraccounts. A little CMS interface UX/Ui more like twitter. Self hosted or by a hosting provider. There is one Mainsite that aggregates and caches the posts via RSS. Does the moderation against RSS Feeds and combines all RSS Feeds to one timeline. Private Messaging goes over email and useraccount links are just links to your own domain.
It is unfortunate that the mainline Mastodon server doesn't support proper multi-domain hosting/multi-tenancy, but that is just implementation detail rather than protocol issue. There are alternative servers that support multiple domains[1] and multi-domain support has been discussed also for Mastodon server[2]
A "lite" instance of mastodon, which just hosts on profile should be possible though, it's just that noone has created it yet.
Edit: I'm mistaken, because it's all just ActivityPub on the fediverse, of course there are projects making stuff lighter. I haven't found a dedicated single user project that's more than a demo, but stuff like Plemora seems light enough
IF you can I think it's absolutely imperative that you own your name in a domain. I was very lucky in that my father purchased the com/net/org for my name when I was still in elementary school. It has been very helpful to me.
Its unfortunate that there is no sensible approach on DNS to facilitate everyone getting their own name. Having everyone attempting to register unique 2nd level domain from handful of TLDs is not really scalable approach, good memorable identifiers are going to run out fast. Based on quick search, currently there are <400M registered domain names across all TLDs. Growing that to order of ~10B will have challenges.
What would be needed is either some kind of sensible hierarchy, or solve the problem like we did it with phones and just skip the name part completely and allocate a number to everyone instead. The discovery of everyones "internet number" could be delegated to social networking, both the old fashioned way (printed business cards) and more modern way ("facebook").
Interesting question is could we allocate IPv6 block to everyone and have it be somehow part of the solution. Maybe not directly, but it would be still something to ponder.
sometimes I like to fantasize that over millions of years humanity will spread throughout the cosmos and when there are gazillions of humans (or our machine descendants) with unlimited time and resources there will be in some university somewhere an archeology department that specializes directly in each and every one of us. it’s simply an extrapolation of current trends in academia combined with a possible future where there are a billion people alive for each single one of us alive now. what do you want your personal archeology department to be like? personally i want a graham hancock style character to come up with wacky theories about me so i try to leave as many confusing bits of evidence as possible.
This post makes big broad statements but doesn't consider the nuance. I think they are somewhat correct, and the reality is most people do have a "website", it's a page on a social media site where they post stuff. The accessibility for everyone to have a publishing space is one of the most incredible advances in civilisation.
However, the identity of the page, publishing under your own name is the thing that this post doesn't really cover. They mention not linking to their own old site as it has stuff that they did when they were a child. They really should have expanded on that.
Archive.org is both an incredible resource but also a risk to people publishing things that they later regret. We have a right to change our mind, grow up and become a different person. Under GDPR there is the "right to be forgotten", we are early in the societal development of such rights in relation to the internet, and they can be abused by people removing thing the public should have a right to know. However I believe this is an important right, and because of it I believe the right to publish online under a pseudonym is important.
So yes, almost everyone should have an online presence, and most do. But we should also have a right for it to disappear in time.
I write online for myself now and the communities I contribute to, not for my children or their theoretical children. Certainly not some random slooth in future.
Yup, it’s tongue-in-cheek. But I do genuinely believe that if every sentence framed as „everyone should do X” were rewritten as „if everyone did X, then the world would change in the way of Y”, it would make its argument more meaningful and less violent.
It's an interesting challenge. Let's assume these accounts aren't just deleted, like Google started doing this year after accounts go inactive (what a lightcone horror show that is, ye monsters). But let's also assume Facebook accounts retain their security settings, and assume there's no massive change in behavior where people start making everything public again.
What happens to these accounts then?
Do we see great great great grandma, but all her posts are closed & locked to time?
Maybe account inheritance is the way. You designate one person to take over your account. People become maintainers of the family tree, are the designated owner. You want to see the family tree? Talk to your cousin four times removed, he has the access keys to ~80 of your ancestors. And that other nephew has another ~40. Oh and your aunt has ~20.
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[ 9.0 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] thread> Hey, I have a crazy story. I found this website today. There used to be this person who did this and that. And he’s our grand-grand-grand-father
Imagine your class mates would discover, that your grand-grand-grand father owned slaves and they had pictures...
Why would I worry about people knowing what my great great grandfather did?
It isn't fair, but no one can really escape their family history.
And while mature folks understand that their ancestors were probably horrible people, sometimes by both today's and yesterday's standards - it isn't something that always shows in actions.
If your ancestors were slave owners, that information is there. If there is a picture, that will be there too. You would be astounded the sorts of detailed records that people have found and digitized.
Pretty much if you were an affluent family that could afford one, you owned at least one slave.
Notably, Mitch McConnell's, Obama's, and Biden's ancestors are all confirmed to have owned slaves. Not surprising as they all come from affluent families.
It becomes significantly harder to talk liberal/libertarian shit if everybody knows you're a descendant of slaveholders speaking to an audience of descendants of slaveholders, ridiculing the descendants of slaves.
(just like Hacker News where the comments posted must align with dang's views, he's also known as "the algorithm").
dang != "The Man"
(I have showdead on and 99% of what is deleted is just outright malicious or flame-y.)
if you have a garden, even a small one, its so rewarding and interesting, and it develops attention
My modern phone is useful. It has replaced so many things: I no longer carry a paper notebook, for example. I no longer spend money on watches. I have a map with me. If I get in a bind, I can get help - I have some security because of the phone. I have a translator app in my phone! As imperfect as it is, it is better than all of the tools before it. I can pay for stuff with it if I'd like to - and I do, every time I ride the bus. I don't need to print out airplane tickets any more and a slew of other useful things.
I wish everyone had a telephone, as the world would improve a bit. I don't really understand why you think it is a dumb idea.
Doesn’t this counter the entire argument?
https://www.npostart.nl/drugslab-afl-5-bastiaan-snuift-ketam...
Since the dawn of time we know the effect of hallucinogens, so only someone that doesn't know what they're talking about, like you, would dispute this fact.
But please do offer your invaluable insight on the matter.
But I found the collection of quotes page decidedly more 'cringe.'
Please explain what is heroic about hallucinogens?
And psychedelics are fun (in moderation). Try some, they might expand your mind a little.
"Every person on the planet should have their own website" probably qualifies if the beholder's eye is over the age of 20.
https://eftegarie.com/epub/
So, I am working on an e-book reader myself and I love e-books as well. But the problem with e-books is not that they don't have "smell or feel" but rather DRM issues. Unless you get all your books in a DRM-free e-pub format, they can be taken out of your library at any time for any reason. Also its nice to have something to pass down from generation to generation.
I am personally an avid supporter of both digital and physical books, but to say that physical books are an "inferior" choice is incorrect because people choose those for entirely different reasons than they might choose a digital copy.
Most of the time it is actually easier to find a copy of a DRM free book on Anna's Archive than it is to find a DRM copy...
This is more an argument against DRM than it is against ebooks.
My complaints about DRM aside, my biggest problem with OPs article on e-books is thinking that one is "superior" to another, when different people get different formats for different reasons. Some may like the idea of being able to carry tons of books around with them on a tablet, or being able to search text. Others might dislike these features, and prefer physically turning pages. Neither is "better" than the other, and I dislike people that DO think one or the other is inherently superior for whatever reasons.
The argument seems to be "leave a record".
And secondarily, "for your descendants" (they write "ancestors", but that's obviously wrong).
You can do the second part without sharing with the world that it was yours. Ensure someone in your family knows, or leave notes in safe locations.
I guess we can infer a third assumption: that there's a reasonably high chance that archive.org will outlive your personal papers or data, making it potentially a valuable alternative to a journal on paper or your own systems. That part is an interesting discussion. I'd worry if everyone opted for relying on archive.org over their own copies, but at the same time, I know how vulnerable personal records can be.
Or his descendants might find a reference to it or figure out it was him ?
There are any number of reasons why this is a terrible thought.
Boomers and Gen Xers were brought up in a world without the Internet and we all survived just fine.
Being told by someone who does something that we should all do the same thing, is a sign of emotional insecurity and narcissism.
Free choice is great. I used to have a blog, however I no longer had time for it. Which is also totally fine.
The older I get, the less I desire for my “public” me to do anything with Social media, leaving my various aliases (all different) to have that minimal outlet.
Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety.
> Everyone should be writing in public.
I never understood why this kind of injonctions for us to do things keep on coming up to the front page of HN. I understand that they make good titles, though.
> “Hey, I have a crazy story. I found this website today. There used to be this person who did this and that. And he’s our grand-grand-grand-father!”
I vaguely know that my grand-grand-grand-father was a farrier in one of the Napoleons' army and was a kind man, my children will vaguely know it as well. We'll all die and be forgotten, I think that's OK.
There is also no guarantee that archive.org will survive a couple decades. But a notebook in the attic definitely will.
Ok, "every person on the planet should have access to basic hygiene and food safety, their own website, on their own domain name, and blog about whatever they want."
Unless you move and lose it... or there is a house fire... or someone finds it and burns it... etc.
A notebook in the attic is probably the least persistent medium you could choose. Fire? Gone. Water? Gone. 20 years of heat. Probably unreadable.
Even the seemingly simple thought experiment of “deliver a one sentence message to a person living at your current address 500 years from now” is nearly impossible using ordinary means available to an individual.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptorium
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
Always have backup.
We aren't immortal, so it won't be in your control forever regardless of how you record it. Over long periods of time, the internet is far more accessible for long term storage of someone's writings than physical media. An unsheltered person with a library card could write about themselves and that would be preserved on archive.org, copied by other/future archival websites, copied by individual data hoarding enthusiasts, etc. There is almost zero chance a notebook would survive any significant period of their life, let alone after their death.
Maybe for people with stable families and enough disposable income to easily store boxes of printed material for generations, physical media is a good choice. But not everyone has progeny to pass things on to. Not everyone has the ability to safely and securely store generations of writings. A house fire in your lifetime may be unlikely, but what about in 3 generations worth of houses? And there is zero redundancy. If archive.org shut down tomorrow, there are people on reddit’s r/datahoarder that have copies of various portions of it. Data would be gone, but not all of it. If a tornado hits your house tomorrow, there is no one that has copies of your handwritten notebooks. 100% loss.
Agree, whole thing comes across as notionally adjacent to shit like "effective altruism" and disguising a greedy disregard for material reality as equitabiity
And the original commenter is wrong, 91% of people do have access to basic hygiene (i.e. hand washing facilities), according to https://ourworldindata.org/hygiene
And only 28% of people suffer from moderate to severe food insecurity: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-...
So really most people have the basics covered.
> I feel the need to remind you that the Effective Altruism community is also moving billions of dollars to substantially help the extreme poor.
The Dutch government alone spends $5B per year on aid to the poorest country, and The Netherlands is a small country. Effective Altruism is just a guise to get political influence through capital.
Of course people who already think they are god's divine gift to the world will think they would be the best to give out or pick the recipient of billions in charity over a more democratic system.
But wasn't that in direct response to the claim that most people did not have that access? It feels like either a misunderstanding or mischaracterization of what they were saying.
"Most"?
I am hopeful that the author did not mean for this idea to apply retroactively.
> There is also no guarantee that archive.org will survive a couple decades. But a notebook in the attic definitely will.
Houses burn down all the time. Pointing out that everybody has access to a theoretically fireproof house is a bit funny for a thought that began with an admonishment about hygiene and food safety.
While I do get your follow-up criticism, I took the notebook comment to mean that if I stop paying my “notebook bill”, or a massive solar flare strikes my house, the notebook in my attic doesn’t vanish from existence.
Internet is a _lot_ easier to provide than basic hygiene and food safety. Look at most of India.
Not to be pedantic, but since another comment questioned that, the numbers for 2020:
> 3.6 billion people lacked safely managed services, including 1.9 billion people with basic services, 580 million with limited services, 616 million using unimproved facilities, and 494 million practising open defecation.
Source: https://washdata.org/sites/default/files/2021-07/jmp-2021-wa...
To be clear: I don't care whether this is technically "most people", it is far too many people lacking decent sanitation. (edit: fix wrong negation in last sentence).
- safely managed water is 1) clean, 2) immediately available water 3) in the household
- basic is if one of those above three criteria are missing but water can be accessible w/ a <30 minute round trip
- unimproved is people drinking surface water from lakes, ditches, etc.
I've had a website since I was in my early teens and throughout most of my career as a programmer, 20+ years.
In 2018 I became homeless in SF and still had some websites for the first couple years where I started posting stuff about being homeless. When I lack basics like hygiene and safe food is when I've felt having a website would do the most good.
I've been pretty vocal about being homeless and it's taken over my social media channels, but you can bet the content isn't surfaced much or to people who I knew in real life who might've cared or helped me out if they knew sooner. If my RSS feed wasn't dead, who knows?
Even $5/mo or $10 for a domain renewal is too much most months, lacking said and similar resources. I've not had phone service in a year, phone in need of repair and now lost to forced migration due to domestic violence. I'm aware of Obama phone but I'm also aware of spyware, data privacy and similar and have done the math--no thanks.
Not a happy story at all (I feel joy and peaceful, personally). Makes most people feel super bad. Not feeling like a victim either... I totally understand why mainstream sites don't surface real content that I post. I still post it, but having my own website with a feed or forum now of all times would be superior. Especially when I have to hold my tongue about various topics that fall too far outside of community guidelines / algorithmic fairness and could get my account suspended.
Long winded I know, just underlining that people without basic hygiene or safe food may be perfectly capable of running a web site and even custom apps with novel features, and may need to have a voice more than anyone or ever. There are mainstream options but most here can probably get behind the idea of running one's own services and owning the registration.
A solution I've had in mind is libraries running decades-long hosting services attached to member cards. Various people have expressed a little interest but I've not been persistent in following up or pushing anything forward myself. Lack of stability makes me come off as really flaky and poor at communication online and more--and look like an excuse maker for expressing such things.
Well, its not quiet a library but definitively running since decades: sdf.org
It's also worth noting we're in a global food crisis which started in 2020 and got worse in 2021. It continues to grow year over year. Ukraine and Russia were also the two biggest cereal providers, which apparently has affected these numbers significantly. That's just food safety though, for nutrition the numbers are worse.
https://www.who.int/news/item/06-07-2022-un-report--global-h...
Do I have an incorrect understanding of the word "most"?
Regardless how does 3.6:7.8 ie 46% constitute a majority? Most is a word. Words have meaning.
Respectfully, what you said would be less wrong if you had used the word many.
Also keep in mind that these numbers are based on estimations and definitions that give some room for interpretations, so they cannot be 100% accurate either.
Almost everything can be deemed as not worth doing because we need to fix sanitation first.
The author of the post is probably implicitly trying to say ‘everyone [who can] should’.
The person who posted about sanitation and taking “everyone” to mean literally everyone in the world, is being overly pedantic in my opinion.
Graciously, they are off by a few percent. Parsing words does not diminish the magnitude. The issue still stands. A large enough portion of the worlds problems dwarf the initiative to give everyone a webpage/domain. It's silly enough to discount.
From half. “Most” is likely close to 65-70%. And 46% is “less than half”.
If more than or equal to 46% qualifies as most, then both the statements would be correct:
(1) Most people don’t have access to sanitation.
(2) Most people do have access to sanitation.
That wouldn’t make logical sense.
Hyperbole for the sake of making an argument does not mean the writer is unable to construe of or consider situations where what they wish for is impractical or far down peoples priority list.
> I never understood why this kind of injonctions for us to do things keep on coming up to the front page of HN. I understand that they make good titles, though.
Because they set out ideas about society that may or may not be something we agree with, but that makes for interesting discussion.
> But a notebook in the attic definitely will.
Most of my dads notes have survived, but certainly not all. One of my grandparents diaries have survived. To my knowledge no writing by the other tree has survived; if it has it has already diffused among siblings two out of three which are dead, with no clear knowledge where any documents might have ended up.
None of my great grandparents or great great grandparents writing survives other than a couple of words written on the handful of photographs and two drawings which have survived, even though I know for a fact that some of them wrote regular letters to family after emigrating the the US.
The written records we have even from a time when people used to write a lot on paper are only a tiny fraction of the records made.
Some families will be lucky and have a lot, some will have nearly nothing, and often when you have a lot it quickly difuses out among descendants to the point that soon many will not have more than small fractions of even what is available about their ancestors, if any. E.g. I only got hold of one of the handful of surviving pictures of one of my great grandfathers because I stumbled on my grandmothers half brothers daughter doing genealogy and found her daughters on Facebook, and she happened to have one picture.
I do agree there's no guarantee about archive.org, and so I'm certainly ambivalent about people putting all their eggs in that basket, but this admonition for all of us to have a website will never reach anyone to start with, and nothing prevents both and/or at least keeping local copies of the site as well.
- knowing this about you ancestor is interesting but thinking they are the inspiration for the "for want of a nail" cautionary tale is what most people are expecting when they start looking into the past. The reality is most people's lives are pretty mundane and they personal connections are what make it interesting.
- notebook in the attic - there's a movement to digitize all the notebooks in attics we are losing over time. This is especially a thing in agriculture because of all the information about local weather, crop yields, etc. It would be great if there was some publicily funded service that you could send these to for free instead of throwing them out (possibly with drop off at public libraries that could either digitize them or send them in bulk). They could scan and return for a fee.
It is exaggerated, but many cautions are. Some things you post on the internet will likely disappear, but many won't, and the key factor is after you've posted it, you quickly lose control over its ultimate fate.
Once you share something online, there's a big chance someone is keeping a copy, it might not be accessible on the internet anymore, but it's never lost
Some of the best conversations on the early Net were closed communities where users had a safe zone. Things like The Well and Screen Porch/Caucus "virtual communities" were mostly "conversations", but lots of just informative posts.
The author makes interesting points, and "everyone" makes more sense when you scope it to the HN crowd.
Still no. So you are saying that everyone who reads HN should have a website?
So I'm building Timelinize: https://twitter.com/timelinize -- the idea is that everyone can get their data out of the cloud and off their devices and into a single, unified timeline on their own computer. And their timeline is just one shard of a global universal timeline, and timelines can be meshed together seamlessly.
Still much work to do but my family is hopefully going to start using this in the next few years! And maybe yours too :)
The reality is, the quickest way for me to get updates out to wide swath of people (at the time) was to set up a Twitter. Things have changed a lot since then... ironically validating the need for something like Timelinize, I guess.
Hm.
> I’ve had my own website since I was 13. I will not tell you the domain name
So what's the point.
Yeah, can't see how that could possibly go wrong or be misused or anything.
The part about lying is simply pointing out that most pages will be not even particularly interesting (e.g. see Xing profiles). Not sure what you understood it to mean.
How about i sit in my garden instead, smoking a pipe, and not give a ** about whether others know and see me.
[1] for example https://jointakahe.org/
[2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
Edit: I'm mistaken, because it's all just ActivityPub on the fediverse, of course there are projects making stuff lighter. I haven't found a dedicated single user project that's more than a demo, but stuff like Plemora seems light enough
I own myname.com and mylastname.com but so far it's been a complete waste of money and not at all helpful. Don't have anything to do with them.
What would be needed is either some kind of sensible hierarchy, or solve the problem like we did it with phones and just skip the name part completely and allocate a number to everyone instead. The discovery of everyones "internet number" could be delegated to social networking, both the old fashioned way (printed business cards) and more modern way ("facebook").
Interesting question is could we allocate IPv6 block to everyone and have it be somehow part of the solution. Maybe not directly, but it would be still something to ponder.
Not censored profile pages run by the latest social network that becomes obsolete in the next decade.
poo.
However, the identity of the page, publishing under your own name is the thing that this post doesn't really cover. They mention not linking to their own old site as it has stuff that they did when they were a child. They really should have expanded on that.
Archive.org is both an incredible resource but also a risk to people publishing things that they later regret. We have a right to change our mind, grow up and become a different person. Under GDPR there is the "right to be forgotten", we are early in the societal development of such rights in relation to the internet, and they can be abused by people removing thing the public should have a right to know. However I believe this is an important right, and because of it I believe the right to publish online under a pseudonym is important.
So yes, almost everyone should have an online presence, and most do. But we should also have a right for it to disappear in time.
I write online for myself now and the communities I contribute to, not for my children or their theoretical children. Certainly not some random slooth in future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbzSif78qQ
It curses an unaware person to feel shame or guilt if they choose not to do the prescription.
It's called Facebook/Instagram.
What happens to these accounts then?
Do we see great great great grandma, but all her posts are closed & locked to time?
Maybe account inheritance is the way. You designate one person to take over your account. People become maintainers of the family tree, are the designated owner. You want to see the family tree? Talk to your cousin four times removed, he has the access keys to ~80 of your ancestors. And that other nephew has another ~40. Oh and your aunt has ~20.