Notices by tom jennings (tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org)

@timoj

Chronically broken stuff causes people to find other solutions to problems, and old broken systems are forgotten and are left behind.

Us current users of Internet know of all its wonders, blah blah. But the locked out folks don't. Its not like there's any chance of wresting control of the intertubes from its current ruiners in any practical time scale.

And paper print tech is flatly amazing today. I had been overlooking it cuz I'm dense old folk, remembering old methods. It's all changed and for the better.

Everything is a TAZ.

@codinghorror

I'm not criticizing open source per se, in any way. I'm saying that it's not a social solution in and of itself for non-nerds to actually use the internet.

And I have no serious issues with the fediverse or its code.

People -- not generalizations, people I could but will not name here -- write zines and make 7-inch records and mail them to each other or swap them at face to face shows, sparse events due to the lack of physical accommodation -- tell me their presonal experiences and they are not good,

They effectively cannot use the internet, at all, for these things. Even at peak-ease times, say 1995 - 2010, creating HTML documents was fraught with complexity and difficult to grokk underlying paradigms.

I've spent *decades* working with people as smart as anyone here in the fedi, who persistently found and find the internet extremely unuseful to publish on. Read, sure, easy.

Even friends who managed to put up sites after great struggle, have abandoned them in the SEO era. And now that we have actual fascists -- all traded corps are fascist friendly at least in the US, and if you name some that are not, I'll respond that they simply have not, yet, and there is nothing in the structure f a corporation that can make them not growth/profit first.

The internet has not been much of a revolution for human works without mercantile interest.

And even arts organizations that do support artists and such balk at explicit material, fuck and shit and piss and true transgression; it's out for bigots to see and be hammered by.

I've had websites up since 1994, and helped countless folk make them and run them. It was never great, and it's definitely peaked.

Monsters roam the earth and the net.

@timoj

It's not the purpose of the Archive to host new stuff, and it's all far too technically involved in any case. The Archive is amazing, but it's solving a different set of problems.

It's simple fact: it's arbitrarily difficult to post new material on the net, and have your friends find it. It's expensive and doesn't work.

@timoj

Thanks! Yeah, lol, I'm the world's worst archivalist! I keep meaning to post urls to save but never get around to it.

Historically the archive didn't save images so my oldest stuff never got saved. Haven't looked since.

It's not my past I'm worried about. It's my future and my peers, and these kids (ok they're not children, but i think of them as the kids), they're less than 1/3rd my age) whose work I want to see and read!

Im telling ya, it's not on the Internet and this will not be fixed. The readers of books don't fix bad presses or go make ink. The Internet broke a decade ago and this is the end result.

One of the design-philosophy things, for lack of a better description, is the now-upsoken desire for what I think of as excess automaticity; to have the code in this instance the debugger, SID, figure out your intent from context; for example, SID's symbol handling.

In DDT or SID, to continue execution from current PC to some place you want to place a breakpoint at 5678h, the syntax is

$ G,5678

Using SID with symbols, and assuming symbol name FOOBAR has a value of 5678, SID requires:

$ G,.FOOBAR

The leading dot explicitly says "characters following are symbol name" (and not digits).

The excess automaticity, lol in this example pretty trivial! is to make SID smart enough to discern a hex number from a symbol name. We've all coded such things and dealt with all the common issues ("symbols cannot start with a digit", allowed delimiter lists, complex parsers, feedback, etc) when simply requiring a dot reduces the CLI parser to a trivial act (as does, no extra spaces allowed! No trailing spaces! No variable arguments!)

There can be elegance but it's restricted and quite limited -- but the binaries can be *tiny* and frugality is primary in a 16-bit address system!

Modern practices are a hard habit to break. And spare elegance is hard, and avoiding creeping featuritis is hard!

And CP/M sysbol tables are never large; so error rates hardly matter, and corrupted symbol tables (usually external file-smashing and human practices) are fixed by simply recompiling, Nothing is ever large enoug to worry about,

@codinghorror

"Open source" is not a solution for anyone not already an experience programmer.

The young and old folk I talk to about this stuff are not stupid but they are not ever gonna be programmers.

Requiring everyone to be a programmer is like requiring everyone be a mechanic to drive cars (but please drive less :-)

Open source is not a social solution. It's a fraction of 1% of internet users.

The Internet is already dead.... I got to talk to a number of queer and/or punk young people (teens and 20s) who are fairly prodigious makers of media stuff, all print and music, are clever with phones and computers, but don't put their stuff on the net.

Not only has it become difficult and expensive (shit hosting services, all of them) but once they put things up on the net, none of the promises come true -- none of its features work really at all. Search engines are dead. Absolutely no fucking human is gonna do the promotional bullshit that doesn't even work any more anyways.

I had a world changing experience at this Pretty Gritty show. Sold/gave away 90 or so of the 100 anthologies (so didn't have to cart them home). But mostly networking or the human kind, preparing for the long haul in front of us.

This Internet has been declining in relevance for me for some time. Soft nothing on my websites are searchable, and I know they're cleanly indexable. And I too find little of interest these days.

Technology on and of itself is fucked fascist crap I've long lost interest in. So no loss there.

My short term future is in print, and in computing machinery I can put my hands on, and put into the hands of others.

The net has become a bag on the side. I still deeply love computing, the mechanization of thought, the rigor and experimentation, but this corporate shit im utterly done with.

@roadriverrail

Can't really answer, except maybe it means taking your own efforts more seriously. I don't mean such stuff needs to become precious, if it's not useful, pitch it. But 'serious' in that your work is important to you; you can scratch it out and look at it tomorrow, and not *at the time* worry about that.

@SpaceLifeForm

@roadriverrail

I strongly recommend writing and sketching and drawing ideas, ideation and design stuff, not necessarily long form writing.

There is an underappreciated synergy between hand, eye, and internal dialog. As you verbalize or whatever your idea, your hand draws; your eyes see what you write. There's multiple feedback loops.

I use 10 x 10 grid pads, Alvin mechanical pencils, Mars erasers.

Especially first or early draft stuff. Once roughed out, then I often move to machine.

Text, i type (tea, vim, libre office) but for ideas, paper. There's no distraction of mice, modes, files, typos etc.

Hand and pen to paper is magic and invisible, it's built in and long practiced.

There is so much AI nonsense splattered all over San Francisco, how can you not want to burn it out all the ground?

PS if you put those two letters in a post to me my content filters will block it! Lol.

@prettygood

whet got up?

@mhoye

What's with the goatse camera?

Debugging programs (assemby) is sooooo much easier under mp/m then cp/m! Wow.

Text editor with source in window 1. Below it, TYPE displaying the listing in window 3. And SID (symbolic debugger) in 4.

SID (and ZSID but I prefer Intel z80 mnemonics) is not bad at all. Debugging with a symbol table seems luxurious.

One window unused.

Problems: I need a LESS program to display the listing, TYPE is barbaric.

@MLE_online

There is one single thing causing all of those problems. Corporations.

Otherwise we'd just have file format problems, more easily fixed.

I gladdens me they all the corp drm'd Disney type crap will be what disappears over time. And obscure one off work will survive simply because people can make copies. Good riddance to mediocre garbage.

@MLE_online

Totally true. I was thinking of the telegrams and site that encourage and exploit that lock-in but you're right.

Compare the international postal system, and the mostly complete global telephony systems; they actually deliver that! They're internet-like in that, give me an address/phone number, I really can send *anyone* a message (I realize it is not truly 100% but it's damn close). None of that's caused this kind or amount of social strife! Junk mail and spam calls are mostly but not entirely businesses, but are decades old, and made far worse by the Internet.

This is why I think it's the www that's the problem, not tcp ports. Or something laid on the Internet. (For once, it's not dns.)

Why has "internets" caused the grief that Telco and mail have not?

Or did they and I'm not seeing it?

@ai6yr

People obsessed with "purity" and "toxins". Both huge red flag words.

Purity is a creepy word, as far as I can see, it has meaning in chemistry, metallurgy, materials science etc and pretty much nowhere not technical.

Purity of anything else is a religious litmus test that is certain you will fail. Total cult stuff.

@lanodan

(I should have said, using the bdos print string function. You can of course write a string printer any way you want. But the OS can't!

@mathew

I'm OK with devices having MCUs. A variable brightness light with pushbutton controls would be easier than anything else.

But come on, field revision? Get it right the first time, it's a flashlight. That's just sloppy.

@gnomon @peter @cstross

@lanodan

To me, it's the opposite. You can't print a text string with $ in it!

Who needs to print a text string with $ in it? I actually don't, ever. I've never written business software.

The reason is probably knowable; I bet it's an IBM (etc) mainframe OS issue, where you can't easily represent non-printing characters in punch cards or something; the roots of this stuff are very old.

IBM 3270 terminals emulated sort of, a combination card punch and reader. Batch oriented, not characters.

It implies a lot when the operating system's declared string terminator character is a dollar sign.