A couple of weeks belated, but happy 30th birthday to the release of Netscape’s 0.9 public preview, which in many ways signaled the birth of the popular Web (yes, the WWW had already existed for a few years, and Mosaic was the first browser that brought along images, but the non-commercial free availability of Netscape catapulted their browser onto so many desktops so quickly in 1994).
Also this post reminds me that I first learned HTML as a teen in 1994… 👴
I’m currently reading Christopher Alexander’s (et al.) A Pattern Language, so this essay from Erin Kissane was timely — she turns her attention to how these ideas of patterns affecting the spaces we build and live in apply to our online homes as well, and the ways that these spaces haunt us (and we haunt them):
Maybe for you, it didn’t start on Twitter. Maybe was forums or the blogosphere or Reddit. Maybe it was Facebook with terrible people from high school or TikTok with people who hate you for liking a thing, or not liking it enough. But we built the machines around our weird amygdalas and then we went inside them and now the machine is no longer confined to a stack of software + policy + vibes; we carry it in ourselves. We haunt each new place we enter. We can feel this happening in our bodies, which is why touch grass is so accidentally real.
We shape our structures and afterward our structures shape us, but the we of the first clause and the us of the second are not the same.
The secret heart of every panopticon is not the all-seeing-eye, but the confessional.
A great read, and the side anecdote about engineer Vic Tandy‘s linking of 19hz infrasound to ghostly sensations is a rabbit hole worth pursuing!
“Eileen, pace yourself. It’s only Scrumspan. We’ve got three lightmodes to go before good-binge.”
Lots that I agree with in this post, including this short paragraph that speaks to both the web3 of 2022, but definitely reminds me of what excited me in the early days of learning about the WWW:
People should have ownership and control of their data online. Users should be able to connect to services and then move between them freely without having to ask permission from any big tech companies. Creators should be fairly compensated for their work. Communities and movements should easily be able to form groups and collaborate together to achieve their goals.
Over on Tedium, a nostalgia bomb roundup of 10 image file formats that time forgot. I wouldn’t say that BMP or even TIFF are exactly forgotten, and VRML seems like the odd one out as a text-based markup language (but definitely in the zeitgeist this month with all of the nouveau metaverse talk), but many of these took me back to the good old days. Also I didn’t know that the Truevision TARGA hardware, remarkable for its time in the mid-1980s with millions of colors and alpha channel support, was an internal creation from AT&T (my dad worked for AT&T corporate back then, but all we got at home was the decidedly not-remarkable 2-color Hercules display on our AT&T 6300 PC). JPEG and GIF continue to dominate 30+ years later, but it’s interesting to see what could have been, if only some of these other systems jumped more heavily into file compression…
Modern basic implementation and hosting of the venerable RFC 742 Finger Protocol — share your contact info and plans like it’s the 1970s!
Working the NY Times crossword, AOL and MSN and Juno and NetZero pop out as weird things to see show up as current-day answers. Granted they make easy crossword fill for the editor, and I guess it’s not that much different than the other archaic jokes and in-references that you’re expected to keep track of (OLEO, OONA, OBI, IBO…), but dotcom-era corporate names just seem more dated than most of the other topical references. The evolution of clues for these answers, though, is pretty interesting, as can be seen here in AOL’s case.
The Quartz folks made this list using a home-grown crossword clue/answer historical lookup tool, which is definitely fun to play with! Hmm, according to this tool, web in the WWW sense didn’t show up until 2000, dotcom didn’t appear until 2001, blogs exploded in 2005, and USENET continues to show up with surprising frequency. Crosswords are weird.
(Via Kottke)
In other insect news, a case of life imitating (well, at least acting similar to) network transmission protocols:
This feedback loop allows TCP to run congestion avoidance: If acks return at a slower rate than the data was sent out, that indicates that there is little bandwidth available, and the source throttles data transmission down accordingly. If acks return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly.
It turns out that harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) behave nearly the same way when searching for food. … A forager won’t return to the nest until it finds food. If seeds are plentiful, foragers return faster, and more ants leave the nest to forage. If, however, ants begin returning empty handed, the search is slowed, and perhaps called off.
(Via ACM TechNews)
The Internet has become self-aware, but thankfully it just wants to spend some time scrolling Tumblr for cat videos. From the NY Times, How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000:
[At the Google X lab] scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors, which they turned loose on the Internet to learn on its own.
Presented with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos, what did Google’s brain do? What millions of humans do with YouTube: looked for cats. The neural network taught itself to recognize cats, which is actually no frivolous activity.
(Photo credit: Jim Wilson/The New York Times)