• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 5th, 2023

help-circle

  • Yeah, from what I remember of what Web 2.0 was, it was services that could be interactive in the browser window, without loading a whole new page each time the user submitted information through HTTP POST. “Ajax” was a hot buzzword among web/tech companies.

    Flickr was mind blowing in that you could edit photo captions and titles without navigating away from the page. Gmail could refresh the inbox without reloading the sidebar. Google maps was impressive in that you could drag the map around and zoom within the window, while it fetched the graphical elements necessary on demand.

    Or maybe web 2.0 included the ability to implement states in the stateless HTTP protocol. You could log into a page and it would only show you the new/unread items for you personally, rather than showing literally every visitor the exact same thing for the exact same URL.

    Social networking became possible with Web 2.0 technologies, but I wouldn’t define Web 2.0 as inherently social. User interactions with a service was the core, and whether the service connected user to user through that service’s design was kinda beside the point.


  • Yeah, you’re describing an algorithm that incorporates data about the user’s previous likes. I’m saying that any decent user experience will include prioritization and weight of different posts, on a user by user basis, so the provider has no choice but to put together a ranking/recommendation algorithm that does more than simply sorts all available elements in chronological order.





  • Windows is the first thing I can think of that used the word “application” in that way, I think even back before Windows could be considered an OS (and had a dependency on MS-DOS). Back then, the Windows API referred to the Application Programming Interface.

    Here’s a Windows 3.1 programming guide from 1992 that freely refers to programs as applications:

    Common dialog boxes make it easier for you to develop applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system. A common dialog box is a dialog box that an application displays by calling a single function rather than by creating a dialog box procedure and a resource file containing a dialog box template.



  • Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way.

    Raw chronological order tends to overweight the frequent posters. If you follow someone who posts 10 times a day, and 99 people who post once a week, your feed will be dominated by 1% of the users representing 40% of the posts you see.

    One simple algorithm that is almost always better for user experiences is to retrieve the most recent X posts from each of the followed accounts and then sort that by chronological order. Once you’re doing that, though, you’re probably thinking about ways to optimize the experience in other ways. What should the value of X be? Do you want to hide posts the user has already seen, unless there’s been a lot of comment/followup activity? Do you want to prioritize posts in which the user was specifically tagged in a comment? Or the post itself? If so, how much?

    It’s a non-trivial problem that would require thoughtful design, even for a zero advertising, zero profit motive service.



  • Which is is such a high dollar count that this simply cannot be USD

    So I haven’t used Windows on my own machines in about 20 years, but back when I built my own PCs that seemed about right. So I looked up the price history, didn’t realize that Microsoft reduced the license prices around Windows 8.

    I remember 20 years ago, Windows XP Home was $199 and Professional was $299 for a new license on a new computer. Vista and 7 were similarly priced.

    Since Windows 8, though, I just don’t understand their pricing or licensing terms.



  • Honestly, this is an easy way to share files with non-technical people in the outside world, too. Just open up a port for that very specific purpose, send the link to your friend, watch the one file get downloaded, and then close the port and turn off the http server.

    It’s technically not very secure, so it’s a bad idea to leave that unattended, but you can always encrypt a zip file to send it and let that file level encryption kinda make up for lack of network level encryption. And as a one-off thing, you should close up your firewall/port forwarding when you’re done.





  • That’s why I think the history of the U.S. phone system is so important. AT&T had to be dragged into interoperability by government regulation nearly every step of the way, but ended up needing to invent and publish the technical standards that made federation/interoperability possible, after government agencies started mandating them. The technical infeasibility of opening up a proprietary network has been overcome before, with much more complexity at the lower OSI layers, including defining new open standards regarding the physical layer of actual copper lines and switches.


  • I’d argue that telephones are the original federated service. There were fits and starts to getting the proprietary Bell/AT&T network to play nice with devices or lines not operated by them, but the initial system for long distance calling over the North American Numbering Plan made it possible for an AT&T customer to dial non-AT&T customers by the early 1950’s, and set the groundwork for the technical feasibility of the breakup of the AT&T/Bell monopoly.

    We didn’t call it spam then, but unsolicited phone calls have always been a problem.


  • Loops really isn’t ready for primetime. It’s too new and unpolished, and will need a bit more time.

    I wonder if peertube can scale. YouTube has a whole sophisticated system for ingesting and transcoding videos into dozens of formats, with tradeoffs being made on computational complexity versus file size/bandwidth, which requires some projection on which videos will be downloaded the most times in the future (and by which types of clients, with support for which codecs, etc.). Doing this can require a lot of networking/computing/memory/storage resources, and I wonder if the software can scale.