💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 733 captured on 2022-03-01 at 15:24:07. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-01-08)
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I'm watching the first significant snowfall of the season in these parts. It makes sense in a "don't in/pro-voke Murphy's Law by talking about something" kind of way given having told a couple people yesterday how it had occurred to me the white cover of snow hides the far more dreary deathy remnants of autumn.
I've been attempting to find another job through so-called "CodeSignal", which uses a rather unforgiving proctoring system to mitigate cheating. But it's been too unforgiving for whatever about our household data situation that apparently drops too often for said system's liking.
And it's not like we experience drops much in other apps leveraging networking. But it's sort of a "don't even so much as blink" situation with their cheat-voidance system.
So I'll try one last ditch effort consisting of using a USB-C to Ethernet adapter I just ordered, which hopefully works with my somewhat old Acer Chromebook.
But I'm not expecting much, as online continues to morph at free-fall pace from usefulness to a cesspool of OMG LOOK WHAT I JUST DID WITH HTML/CSS/JAVASCRIPT hard-ons....
All I can do is nod.
As Github's trending page declined from interesting hobby projects to (what I now perceive to be) big tech status reports, and Gitlab proved to not be the freer alternative that people wanted (take a look at their sponsors), I began to despair.
The final nail on the coffin for me was the loss of the search function on pastebin last year, which used to be a treasure trove of juicy information.
When did it all go so wrong?
I look back to the silver age of the internet as if it were only a fever dream, promising a better tomorrow as it empowered anybody with a keen interest in learning something new.
Sure, I could put on my elitist hat and say the internet empowered people who shouldn't have been empowered, let alone let anywhere near a keyboard, but the internet was never a friendly place to begin with and trolls always a had a room they could troll.
I guess that's the thing I miss the most: room, space to breathe, to ask an honest question and to get a detailed reply in return or get told to go to hell, instead of now trying to attract an answer by asking a more popular question instead of the one I actually wanted to ask.
There's fear there. Fear to say the wrong thing to anger a hive mind that used to be flat hierarchy of reasonably like-minded individuals, and is now... well no one knows whats driving popular opinion on these sites any more, but it certainly isn't the users anymore.
I'm waiting for a real community-based internet to rise up again. Something I can connect to my neighbours with, and they can connect easily back. Something involving resource sharing to build trust. A community garden of sorts if you will.
Bartender I appear to have wandered outside into your garden during my tirade, and I must say - your roses smell fanstatic.