30 years of an public domain web

david wolfpaw

Issue # 🤷

1 May 2023

Reading time:

4 mins

The World Wide Web became public domain 30 years ago, on 30 April 2023. And it all went downhill from there 😅

Joking, since part of why the web became the ascendant way to access the internet until the rise of siloed phone apps is because it was an alternative to Gopher, which started to charge licensing fees for use. As we well know now, users will always choose the free option online, and technologists will always choose the systems that they can freely modify.

I love to make things for the web. I love to share the things that I make. I’m even trying to turn that into a job of its own now, outside of direct client work!

The web has done so much for me in my life, but I have to acknowledge that it has done a ton of harm too. Anywhere that humans can congregate, we will find ways to denigrate and attack one another.

I believe that the web has overall been a net good. I can’t imagine a technology surviving for so long without people finding genuine use and value. There are ups and downs, but I just try to do my thing to add to the ups and decrease the downs.

📚

Crooks’ Mistaken Bet on Encrypted Phones – Ed Caesar, New Yorker

This article is barely about the phones. It is more about police forces seizing drugs. And then just tosses in a quote from a cop about how users need to stop, to make demand lower and make supply end. Since that clearly doesn’t work, even acknowledged elsewhere in the article, why not shift to stopping policing of drug users, and making them legal?

Nintendo’s Copyright Strikes Push Away Its Biggest Fans – Will Bedingfield, Wired

I used to stream on Twitch a bit, including several Nintendo games. I wouldn’t try to make any of my own content around their products though, since they’ve always shown themselves to be very litigious toward the people who like and buy their products the most.

Palantir Demos AI to Fight Wars But Says It Will Be Totally Ethical Don’t Worry About It – Matthew Gault, Vice

oh yeah, this can only go well, nothing to see here.

📽

Down the Off-Grid Rabbit Hole…

Gasp! Capitalism in my off-grid content? As likely as you’d think!

Four-Byte Burger

A new Ahoy video, and a neat creation

The Rise and Fall of Replika

When I first tried Replika it didn’t use ChatGPT, but was also meant to be trained on your own messages to make a bot to be you. Not one for you to RP with 😅

Why Does Every Culture Have Myths About Trees? | Fate & Fabled

Because trees are everywhere that cultures are and have you not looked at a tree and thought, “yeah, that’s pretty cool”?

Venture Bros: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart | FIRST LOOK | adult swim

Excite! Bummed that the show was cancelled, but glad that we get some continuation.

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Level Clear! – (Official Music Video)

But what happens after you’ve saved the day and gone home?

A.I. and Stochastic Parrots with Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru – Factually! with Adam Conover

We are so quick to call computer programs smart, that we don’t realize we’re just calling ourselves dumb 😅

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