• 23 Posts
  • 4 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The web can’t be discarded by individuals

    I agree, as a practical matter it’s another heavyweight tech system that we can’t opt out of. Striving to keep client requirements low so that we can get maximum use out of older hardware is great.

    Is your comment is driven by wasteful web design or are you saying that even a lean web service design is still inherently excessive?

    The latter. The web relies on a continuous path of connectivity between the client and the server to function at all. In practice it also requires cooperation on a global scale to make this useful to everybody, whether that’s DNS, CAs for TLS, BGP, undersea fibre optic cables or the big services that “everybody” relies on like AWS and GitHub.

    When somebody says a word like permanetworking, to me that’s an invitation to think small. If you want to create something local, networking offers a lot more possibilities for action than, say, semiconductor manufacturing. Bluetooth chat, neighbourhood WiFi with local servers, long distance email via sneakernet, distributing useful data packages like maps, books and encyclopedic data so that they’re stored close to the people who need them. There’s so much we can do without climate-controlled datacenters.


  • I’ll join the handful of commenters shilling for kagi which has domain blocking and ranking as a first-class feature. It really is wonderful if you have the cash, and hopefully it will put pressure on the advertising-funded search engines to add these kinds of features.

    I’m looking at the word “permanetworking” and my first thought is we could be a lot more ambitious. The web is such a complex and brittle way to access information it feels like a world away from perma-anything. Still, avoiding wasteful use of bandwidth is always a good thing so I won’t prattle any further.