A model of the Zuckerberg house. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg said "the age of privacy is over" and a few years later bought the four houses surrounding his own because he just suddenly got a thing for local real estate?
This exhibit looks fun, but the ironic thing about this article -- this article about surveillance and privacy -- is that it uses one of those Javascript libraries that tracks every mouse click you make to deliver statistics back to the site about which pieces of text were highlighted most often.
Is that still ironic? Or is it just obligatory? I can't even tell any more.
Remember when the web was functional with Javascript turned off? Yeah, neither do I.
"This web site requires that your eyes remain open for the duration of the commercial." I think I might have seen a TV show about that.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
"An off switch!"
"He'll get years for that."
"B-But... how do you expect me to publish my writings without loading 100KB+ of jquery, angular and multiple UI libs?"
Only 1000KB+ of jquery? You obviously need more jquery in your life.
Tufte talks about the data ink ratio of information reports. There should be a similar focus on bytes per datum on web pages. Worst I've seen so far is 500Kb per 32 bit integer. I haven't yet measured the amount of bytes received from calottery.com just to get six doggone bytes of data but expect that one to also be high.
On the other end of the spectrum, here's a very efficient report of South Bay reservoir capacity: http://alert.valleywater.org/rescurr.txt : It's not even a web page, just a text file. Loads in a snap. I'll bet even Tufte would approve. Even more amazing when you realize it is published by a government entity.
Maciej Cegłowski has words about that.
Yeah, but he's also got a bunch of irrelevant graphics alongside. The bloat!
Hey, only slightly off-topic, but do you still have a copy of Coupland's "The Past Sucks" essay lying around somewhere? It seems like archive.org won't serve it to me anymore they retroactively honor robots.txt (which I know they have good reasons for) and my usually decent search-fu is absolutely failing to find it anywhere.
Let's try another scenario: you're in Paris in 1703, thoroughly sick of sidewalks covered with poo, vomit and human heads, and you figure maybe it's time to visit Los Angeles-maybe get a tan, eat macrobiotic for a while-catch a nap on a United 747 flight over Greenland, Baffin Island and Manitoba. But wait...Los Angeles doesn't exist yet! There is no Charles de Gaule Airport on the Parisian outskirts-and no 747s, either. Seattle and the Boeing factory remain but a dream of a dream of a dream. Also: no vegetarian in-flite meals. The only constant in the Parisian equation that exists is the eternal wretchedness of Paris, itself. Lucky you. (snicker snicker)
However, if you want to risk scurvy, slavery, peritonitis, malnutrition, musket shots, polio or torture, you can always simply sail around "the Cape" in a frigate or some such other delightful craft. Ooooo! Just look up 'fun' in the dictionary and you'll see a picture of you spewing bile from a galleon's bridge while One-Eyed-Jacques gives you the lash and hauls you back down into the slave galley. Vitamin C? Perhaps I might interest you in today's special...half a moldy onion: har har har!
Oh, but I forgot-books, and hence dictionaries-are pretty recent inventions in 1703. The only people to really have books yet are the rich and the clergy, currently also enjoying the new bourgeois pleasures of mirrors and tulips.
1703.
Gee.
What a fun place. Go visit it for me. Send me a post card. Lucky you...(Not.)
I keep thinking of the past and all I can think of is how lucky I am not to be there. I am perennially baffled by people who sentimentalize eras that can only have been utter torture for those who had the misfortune of being born into them. Even the much-heralded, sex-drenched 1960s look like a real dump upon retrospect: cars stank, people didn't take care of their bodies, photocopiers were like Trabants and just try and find a push-button phone to enter your answering machine's access code. Ugghh.
Next time somebody annoys you by romanticizing some hell-hole of a previous era, listen carefullyÑyou'll hear any number of caveats being placed on their projected experience: "I have to be rich"; "I have to be a member of the ruling class"; "I have to have all my vaccinations"; "I have to have my contact lenses"; "I have to have my appendix out first"; "I have to have my Discman and my Ultra Lounge CDs." Tell these people to keep their gobs shut. Say to these annoying people, "Hey kids-the past wasn't like a trip to Waikiki: the only sure thing about the past is some ghastly disease, carnage, toil that defies all description, starvation, and boredom of a sort that makes waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles seem like Disneyland on heroin."
As I scribble these words into my journal and then transcribe them into my Compaq 400mhz Presario, I imagine I'm warm inside the cabin of a American Airlines Boeing 737 over the...Bermuda Triangle. This is a patch of real estate that is, at least in theory, somehow less locked into 'time' than is any other part of the planet. This is where Atlantis was supposed to have been located-that is, if you follow Atlantis. This is where US military bombers from the 1940s vanished without traces, where the Undead now navigate wonky time streams-where one looks to the sky to see the spectral forms of clean cut young bombardiers named "Al" and "Chip," prisoners of another, different, time architecture.
American artist, Jenny Holzer, once wrote, "The Future is Stupid." I beg to differ. I think the real truth of the matter is, "The Past Sucks," and might add to the, "The Future Probably Isn't as Bad as You Imagine it to be."
Even 1998 is, in its own, subtle way, a better place to be than 1997. Just try and find inexpensive 56k modems or a new Beastie Boys single twelve months ago. Good luck, bud. The fact of the matter is, the future is the only place you want to be.
And as if you have a choice, anyway!
The future is invariably better than yesterday. Cleaner, safer, more progressive, more democratic, culturally more dense, and with a wider range of intellectual options than any point in time that may have preceded it.
So I can only hope that should my particular American Airlines 737, by accident or Fate, enter a wrinkle in time here above the breathing aquamarine lagoons of the Bermuda Triangle-and crank me around inside its peculiar little chrono-Moulinex-that it will spit me out even further into the future-into a place where our current 'present' seems barbaric-where the diseases and privations of 1995 seem as silly and ridiculous and dreary as 1802 seem to us now.
Personally, I believe in progress. I believe in tomorrow. I believe in...excuse me, Mr. Flight Attendant, but what's that shimmering arc just ahead of the jet, up ahead in the near distance? It looks unlike anything I've ever seen before. Oh my-we're going to fly right into it!
Whatever the future may be, please, just drop a brick onto the Accelerator pedal, an get me there, now. Enter the shimmering arc.
...
I found that when I searched, but it's actually someone's idea of "updating" it for 1998. Thanks for looking though.
That's funny. Your memory is clearly better than mine.
Just curious, updated how? Was he not originally typing on a 400 MHz Compaq?
Here is a copy I saved from http://www.coupland.com/1_09.htm on 19-Aug-1999.
The edits in the copy you found are weird -- they don't strike me as "some punk tried to make it more relevant" so much as "this is a later revision by Coupland", since the changes are so minor, like replacing "Tetris" with "Playstation" and "1995" with "1998".
Well, that's truly horrific.
It was the 90s...
...and there was time for Klax.
Once I realized that Medium and sites based on Medium's code basically bring my browser to its knees every time I try to browse away from one of them or close its tab, I've become phenomenally less interested in reading stuff on Medium.
It doesn't bog down on my ipad, so it must be that some tracking script blocked by easylist but not by 1blocker is getting blocked, but the site insists on waiting an eternity for the nonexistent script to report back.
Or they've managed to so overload their desktop site with bloated javascript that my poor old core 2 duo machine can't handle the job. Or both.
Anyway, yeah, medium is evil.
There is a fat big lie about JavaScript.
Most of the pages where the real content is text actually do work without JavaScript, they just don't want to admit it. Why not? Because then someone could notice that no-JS experience is actually better… (Yes, the page you have referenced does show me the text just fine without JS)
Many pages work fine even with all the CSS blocked — and fine means «strictly better than the same page with any subset of JS and CSS enabled»
"Most" is overstating the case. Any time I have tried the experiment of, "I will turn off Javascript for the day and see how that goes", the experiment lasts about 90 seconds.
You are completely right.
But «most» means just more than half, after all. And then the question is about what sites are visited (and some of the sites work for me without JS only because I also block their stupid CSS that requires JS to make the text width more than zero).
And yes, a way to toggle JS on and off effortlessly is needed to benefit from no-JS browsing of sites like Medium without suffering elsewhere.
by using multiple browsers from different vendoes, 1, 2 and 3.
1: noscript, no cookies
2: js, no cookies
3: js, private browsing
i get to look at all the sites
imap for email and then throwaway longs into 3 for throwaway comments
i.e. the worst of all possible worlds, but it works
fat finger is fat today
Java ... script? Mouse? What are these new-fangled contraptions? Lynx doesn't seem to understand them, but it handles text just fine.
Go home, RMS.
Does RMS have a home, or is he still couchsurfing?
But... that page is functional with Javascript turned off. I'm running NoScript, it's readable, looks good, loads quickly.
The last time I checked one needed to download about 10 MB of data (IIRC) to just read no more than 140 chars on the web. Biggest irony of all.