Surely noone will ever use that character!

Check it out. Year is 1999 or so - [edit: scram that, more like 2001] and I'm working at a Starbucks on my laptop. Mind you, wifi does not exist. Having a color laptop is sort of posh. One other person who shows up there every day, this kid Jon who's my same age, he's got a laptop. We end up talking. No one even has a cell phone.

Jon's my age and he's writing PHP scripts. So am I. I have a client I built a website for that needs an online store - they sell custom baby blankets and car seat covers. They want a store where you can choose your interior fabric and exterior fabric for each item, and see a preview. They have 10 interior and 20 exterior fabrics. They sew these blankets by hand for each request, for like $100 each. This is a huge job at the time... it pays something like $4000 for me to write the store from scratch. (I'd easily charge $60,000 now for it). First I have to mock up 200 combinations in photoshop?... so instead I write a script that previews the exterior and interior fabrics. Then I write a back-end in PHP to let them upload each fabric and combine them.

One day I'm sitting at the next table to Jon (he was working on a game at the time, I think - fuck, who knows, we were both 18 year old drop outs) - and I showed him how I wrote these fabric combinations to text files. And he was like... "Dude, have you tried SQL? It's AMAZING!" And I was like, "what the fuck is SQL?"

Yes, people used to pay idiots like us to build their websites. I'm still sort of proud of a lot of shit I got to do back then. But I am thankful to Jon that he introduced me to SQL when I was at the time trying to invent databases from scratch with fopen('r') and fopen('w') and hand-built parsers ;)

[edit] Just one little thing I'd note my friend: If you have a brain, it's always the wild west. Those jobs that make you create something from scratch, they haven't evaporated. Sure, it helps to know newer technologies, but the more important thing is being sure you can do what they're asking for, and then figure out a way to do it. This is the hacker ethos.

Not if you see some of the stuff my coworkers write.

Only, I used the ASCII FS character (the Field Separator character) and everything worked brilliantly.

i've submitted an entry about this a few minutes ago. https://eksisozluk1999.com/entry/143247963

There were many posts about cats and their livelihoods and protection. Love that

Turks have a wonderful relationship with cats, especially in Istanbul: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_cats_in_Istanbul

There is a nationwide no-catch and no-kill policy for feral cats.

Cats shit in my garden and leave dead songbirds where I grow food. No, we don’t need more cats.

1. An increase in the population of predators will have no effect on the population of the prey.

2. Rats don’t shit and/or aren’t attracted to food.

Are you speaking in jest or do you actually believe those? The fact that your second statement directly contradicts your first doesn’t help.

In fact, the community dynamics resemble Reddit a lot despite having significant differences in layout and format. Irony, sarcasm, harsh criticism are common yet tolerance of differing viewpoints is relatively high compared to other platforms where people just flock to their own bubble or just block everyone else who they don't agree with.

It's fun too, has a rich history spanning a quarter century, and has been quite influential.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?lr=lang_en&q=eksi+sozluk&...

[2] https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Global-...

[3] https://www.twitterandteargas.org/

[4] https://gc.copernicus.org/articles/4/69/2021/

For starters, all the program does is receive requests (as text) over a TCP/IP connection. It replies over the same connection.

So writing a Web server in any language, on any OS is a trivial exercise. (Once you have the ability to read or write TCP/IP.

The program has to accept the input, calculate the output, and send the output.

If the input is just file names, then the program just reads the file and sends it. (Think static site).

The program may parse the file, and process it some more. It "interprets" code inside the file, executes it, and thus transforms the output. Think PHP.

In these cases a generic server fits the bill. Think Apache, IIS, nginx and so on.

The next level up are programs that are compiled. They generate the output on the fly, often with no, or little, disk interaction. This sort of program often uses a database, but might not. (An online Soduku game for example might do everything in memory.)

Again, any if the above can be built on any OS and written in any language with TCP support.

Here is a very simple example from the original sources: https://github.com/ssg/sozluk-cgi/blob/master/hede.pas

That said, FastCGI and similar technologies were inevitable and something like PHP-FPM isn't much more difficult to actually run in practice.

Still, having a clearly defined request lifecycle in wonderful, especially when compared to something how Java application servers like Tomcat/Glassfish used to work with Servlets - things there have gotten better and easier too, but still...

There is an HTTP server handling all the HTTP stuff and process launching (API gateway in AWS parlance), and the communication between it and the “script” just uses language or OS primitives instead of more complex APIs.

The 2000s were quite wild in how things changed… suddenly you have giant frameworks that also parse HTTP, a reverse proxy. At some point even PHP became all about frameworks.

I wonder if we wouldn’t have a more open, standardized and mature version of CGI/Serverless if it had been a more gradual transition rather than a couple of very abrupt paradigm shifts.

It eventually stopped being popular under my administration, so I transferred the domain to some people around 1999. It was rebuilt with PHPBB or something and got a new life. It's still on, surprisingly.

Fast forward 10, 20, almost 30 years and I frequently encounter websites that struggle to work under the same load, even with expensive AWS bills, especially when working with Rails.

Perhaps ASP was performant because the site was a few orders of magnitudes smaller than anything you'd see today, even though it was full featured. Probably 1000x or 10000x smaller if I also include third-party libraries in the count. It was quite comparable to serverless/edge computing actually.

Shouldn't it be straightforward to prove that Eksi Sozluk lacks "meaningful moderation"? Shouldn't it be a requirement for such a drastic action like banning the whole web site?

Twitter produces orders of magnitude more disinformation in volume, amplified way faster and way broader too, yet they don't get any ban from Turkey whatsoever. How do you explain this kind of double standard?

If I were the Turkish government I would never even do the favour by banning the site, cause that draws attention the site doesn't deserve. I dont care if it's most visited site whatever, it's just useless.

Also, i think every logical person can see that its much much easier to provide a single example of a lack of moderation than it is nebulous "prove you have moderation". What kind of standard do you have for that and how do we know you're not going to shift the goalpost the moment they bring you what you ask for. An example is an example is an example. Provide your proof or cease accusations. I've seen this argument many times in my country, always used to shut down free expression and enforce repression. There's great books and videos on logical fallacies out there

Either you like authoritarian governments or you have it in for this website (or both?)

No other popular social platform has this level of transparency. Not Twitter, not Reddit, not Facebook. How did they prove they have moderation to Turkish government? How do they not get banned?

Do you know?

Do you want to know?

Do you care about what's right or fair, or do you just believe in something and want to justify your beliefs in whatever means necessary?

(That's the best I've got, clearly need more crackers.)

Turkey has more inhabitants than the most populous country in western Europe (Germany). Turkey is also significantly larger than the largest country in western Europe (France).

When it comes to the number of Internet users it is on par with Germany and beats all other western European countries.