donut

Those phrases soften what happens too much.

Reminds me of E. W. Dijkstra's digitized hand-written manuscripts:

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/index13xx.html

Sometimes a pop-up appears that I blindly accept because I happen to be typing something with spaces. Wish that button was protected somehow.

The pickup idea sounds similar to how newsgroups work.

Also these:

* https://text.npr.org/ * https://lite.cnn.com/

But I think sites should be made more accessible/simpler to begin with, rather than having a competing implementation.

I loved that game. Played it on my 8086 with CGA graphics in the early 1990s.

Check this out:

> Chopper Commando, a DOS game written by Mark Currie using Turbo Pascal in 1990

https://blog.loadzero.com/blog/chopper258/

This is so cool! Thanks for sharing.

Taxonomies are inherently limited -- I love this portion of the talk "Everything is Miscellaneous" about Melvil Dewey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3wOhXsjPYM&t=1206s

Surely some things fit equally well in more than one category.

Have you considered asking for best two or three categories, and placing the episodes in multiple locations? Or would that be too noisy?

This thread is amazing.. thank you both for sharing!

The comments are mind blowing. I really didn't expect the theory to have so much confirmation in other languages.

> have our PERSONAL aggregator

That's the dream, isn't it.

So if there are 100 people whose messages you willingly watch, how do you discover new people? (Maybe you do so organically when they mention them?)

And if you _do_ allow yourself to taste from the firehose of unfiltered messages, a single personal list of users/messages wouldn't scale and you have the classic spam problem. Do you share your rules with others (and form an aggregation like https://www.dnsbl.info/)?

Curious what you think about https://atproto.com/:

  Algorithmic choice
  
  Control how you see the world through an open market of algorithms.

> Thanks for posting this. Everything old is new again.

Right? It was such a good time :-) You're welcome.

> why usenet couldn't be a viable social media platform

I wonder if identity plays a role here. Centralizing points (likes, retweets, etc) drives people to work on getting attention with their posts, to drive engagement, but also invites troublemakers and controversy.

How was poster identity handled in Usenet/NNTP? From what I remember, it was just a "From:" header and spoofing was easy. Or was there more to it? (Maybe because most posters wrote to their local server which require auth, you could see which server the message originated from and decide if the sender's address matched the server address...? It's been so long.)

If not, then Twitter, Mastodon, etc. all seem to have a somewhat strong notion of identity.

Is this a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September?

The timeliness of this article is that it compares Usenet to Mastodon.

Love this:

> Always look at the date when you read a hardware article. Some of the content in this article is most likely out of date, as it was written on September 19, 2011.

Not only do they have a date on the article (and many posts in recent years simply don't), but they draw your attention to it because it's long ago.

It's such a small but important detail. Instantly increases my trust for the company.

I'm reminded of the thesis that worse is better:

https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

:-)

(christmas tree) + (eyeballs) shows me a turtle: https://tikolu.net/emojimix/%F0%9F%91%80+%F0%9F%8C%B2

(Looks like that combo isn't found.)

Thank you!

I'm having a hard time finding the original title of this story, The Truth.

Prawda?

Googling around isn't helping...

Anyone know?

Hey Peter! Thank you for doing this. I'm a regular reader and love what you do.

Where's the SQLite database written? How do you ensure only one writer is modifying it?

Oh, I had no idea ".." was an operator. That's a pretty cool feature, combined with the "?" to match optional objects.

Thanks for explaining!

Nice and terse :-)

Right, the ".." part was hard to remember because it's something like:

  {
    "entries": [
      {
        "fields": {
          "fileURL": {
            "en-US": "https://..."
          },
          ...
        },
        ...
      },
      ...
    ]
  }

and as you can see the field fileURL is actually an object with another field en-US (with a hyphen) so the jq becomes something like this:

<file.json jq -r '.entries[] | .fields | select(.fileURL) | .fileURL["en-US"] | select(startswith("http://"))'

And later I had to do the same for other fields that ended in URL (websiteURL, etc.)

Anyway, gron made it simpler to get a quick summary of what I needed because it represents every node in the tree as a separate line that has the path in it, which is perfect for grep.

I still use jq more than gron :-)

Agreed, gron is a fantastic tool.

Earler today I was looking at some deeply nested structures which had leaf nodes with a field named "fileURL", and values that were mostly "https://" but some were "http://". I needed to see how many, etc.

cat file.json | gron | grep fileURL | grep http | grep -v https

... and presto, I had only four such nodes.

Would've been a ton more work to get there with just jq.

Here is a spell checker from Peter Norvig:

https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html