/rant on I think CloudFlare is the direct result of the enshitififcation of development work.

People write an insecure app in Express/Flask/whatever, deploy it to the internet, then bolt on Cloudflare as a WAF and add Datadog because they have no idea what’s happening under the hood or limited themselves with their up-front choices.

This is marketed as progress. /rant off

But there are valid use cases like you mentioned. And it’s the enshitifed sites that fund that free tier.

There’s some irony about the Fediverse going through a centralized service, but I don’t know of a better free answer. A cheap answer might be a VPS with Caddy and automatic Lets Encrypt, but it’s not turnkey.

Even if Illinois was feasible, I don’t think I’d want that. I’d rather fix the system. And quit dancing around the issue of Puerto Rico statehood.

I think it depends what’s on your phone. I don’t use mine for email or banking; it’s 2FA, phone calls, and a map. I’m using a Galaxy S8 that I purchased in the summer of 2017, and I don’t get any updates any more.

If I had bank account information or access to other sensitive data I’d be a lot more concerned.

My biggest problem is apps that stop working. My carrier doesn’t support my phone with their voicemail app, for example.

Children playing in the distance. It brings me back to happy, simpler times.

You can always end it later, so stick around a little longer and see how things play out.

So many things!

We moved to a new house a couple of years ago and I mapped out the whole property, put it into LibreCAD, designed the space, and have been planting/building it since then. I now have thousands of plants, over 1000 unique types, and a vegetable garden in our 1/3 acre lot. I’m very proud of it, but don’t really know how to best share it with the world (or if anyone cares).

I also have a web site that I’ve been building forever, lots of little programs, things like my irrigation system built from a Raspberry Pi, my homelab, all of the plants that I start from seed in the spring for the garden (thousands under grow lights with heated mats), the hydroponic system… I’m sure there’s more.

I started a created a company in 1995 to do web stuff for a very niche market – I guess now it would be called SaaS. It never really completed or became a money-maker, but it’s out there and I still work on it.

First I had problems with IP theft – I had lots of original photos that people took. Then datasets and articles I had written were copied, so I focused on trying to stop that. Then I found myself spending too much time trying to deal with SEO, then x, then y… It was always a game of wackamole, trying to figure out how to keep ahead.

Throw in the ebb and flow of life’s challenges and it always seems like time, money, health, or some combination thereof seemed to come up at just the wrong time (is there ever a good time?)

I’m still plugging away. It’s thirty years later and I’ve retired from my 9-5, so hopefully I can make some real progress.

Julian Assange, Edward Snowden…

I think it comes from America’s roots – America was founded on liberty and freedom, and to some extent, questioning authority, and I think since then it’s been somewhat cyclical with socioeconomic changes.

It’s also part of the American mythos that is perpetuated in film and music. We have superheroes like Batman, Spider-Man, Green Arrow, western heroes like Zorro and the Lone Ranger, movies like Star Wars, The Hunger Games, Bonnie & Clyde, shows like Mr. Robot…

Inuyasha often said he was evil and played the tough guy so he would be left alone, but he was usually compassionate and had a soft side.

His aren’t. A pair of high-end massage guns so they can massage each other at the same time instead of taking turns. BowFlex adjustable dumbbells. Not a gadget, but a new Tesla Model S and charging port. There’s an Amazon Echo Show in a few rooms…

I’m not saying that he shouldn’t buy those things – I’m saying he has a different mindset than I did/do, but I do believe that my mindset makes it easier to get by financially.

Sorry it took me so long to respond. I was stuck in an infinite loop and had to reboot.

No, I’m not a bot. Check my post history.

When I went to college I had saved every penny that I made. I went to a community college for two years under an earned scholarship and worked during that time; then I transferred into a four-year institution that required three years of classes. I paid for the first two years with my savings and part of the third year with a loan. I continued on to grad school and took research/teaching assistantships to provide a salary that covered housing, but received free tuition as part of the deal.

My first semester at the four-year school was way harder than anything I was used to. At community college I had coasted along, but this required effort. Paying for it myself out my bank account made it so much more real, and I decided then that I was going to do better because I sure as heck didn’t work so hard all those years just to throw it away.

We paid for most of our millenial child’s college. He ended up dropping out of college a couple of times and always spent too much money. He’s now married with a wife and child, and together they make more money than my wife and I did combined up until a few years ago. They’re still living paycheck-to-paycheck but have to buy every new gadget.

Our two Gen-Z daughters just went off to college. They will probably graduate, but they also don’t understand the value of money. They didn’t want to work, didn’t want to save… They get a scholarship that pays a monthly stipend, and they burn through that as it comes in. Their college decisions were based on things like “is that campus pretty?” “is their cafeteria food really good?” regardless of the cost. They refused to do community college.

What’s my take? These three kids have a sense of entitlement and a need for immediate gratification that I didn’t really see in my generation. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the result of bad parenting (we adopted the two younger ones as teens), and I see it with co-workers’ children as well.

Does that mean that every Millenial or Gen-Z is like this? No. It just means these three definitely are. But they don’t get much pity from me when they complain and it was the result of bad choices. I chose my college path based on value: scholastic and economic. They chose their path based on social and sensory reasons.

I’m not sure where you’re getting your information.

I work there, have worked there for nearly three decades, and I can tell you that it’s not the case.

(Also, it’s just NCSA for trademark reasons, without ‘the’ in front)

It did get a lot of funding from the NSF in the early days, but the federal government didn’t start pushing for public access to research done through grants and contracts until 2013. Before then it was only work done by federal agencies that was non copyrighted.

The National Science Foundation also didn’t start funding Mosaic until 1994, which was after CGI had been released.

NCSA gets a lot of its funding from the private sector with partner programs, the University of Illinois, and the State of Illinois as well.

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I found the whole copyright thing at Wikipedia for this image pretty funny.

Even the simplest research shows that NCSA is a state-funded agency (through the University of Illinois system), not federal. If that image is in the public domain, it’s not for the reason Wikipedia lists.

My worst feeling is “I tried that two years ago but couldn’t get enough people interested, so I dropped it…”

I was a manager, and another guy was a more senior manager in another division. We both did IT. For some reason he didn’t like me and/or was trying to get our services moved to him, so he went to our director every week for over a year to tell him made-up stories about me.

He eventually left after a lot of people realized he was a highly manipulative, but I still hear things that he told people as part of an explanation about why I was passed up “for this” or why I wasn’t right “for that.” It cost me a lot of raises, especially in cases where things were gossiped to other people and the source was lost. Now I’m only a manager in title, but my management responsibilities were taken away.

Unfortunately, I’m caught in a ticking trap – another 1.5 years and I retire with a full pension for the rest of my life. Losing that by leaving isn’t worth it (assuming I live long enough afterwards).

I had this too, but mine went further. Eventually became burning, terrible pain down my arm – worst pain I’ve ever experienced. I spent six weeks on steroids, oxycodone, and gabapentin until I could finally get steroid injections directly into my spine.

Be careful, and get checked out for cervical spinal stenosis. You might be able to do some proactive stuff at this point.

Now my neck always hurts, I can’t feel my fingertips (especially on the right hand), and my right forearm sometimes feels like it’s on fire.