PaulHoule

What gets me is how much the people who advocate for the "open web" have completely incorporated the values of Facebook and Google.

Like there's that anime girl who harasses you when you visit so many open source web sites that just continues the pattern of being harassed by cookie dialogs and consent dialogs and pop-up ads and being asked for your email address and of course there is Wikipedia which is doing more and more of the same.

Another web is possible but web populists don't really believe it.

Just to get started, bots have been better at filling out CAPCHTAs than humans for a long time. I knew someone who got his site hacked by Russians circa 2008 because he published a neural network in freakin PHP that could read them. Anubis causes humans stress, slows down task completion, probably raises peoples blood pressure, and cumulatively causes a great deal of harm to users the same way Cloudflare's system does. Bots can use async or virtual threads and not even have to hold on to a stack while they are waiting for this bullshit, clicking on buses, etc.

CAPTCHAs, cookie banners, and of the that crap should be an automatic F grade on WCAG and should make web sites immediately liable for ADA lawsuits with triple damages.

Yep, the first version of DOS wanted to be "like CP/M but on 8086 with a 640k address space" so it had drive letters and the second version wanted to be "like Unix but single user and with a funny memory model" so it had nested directories!

Well, there is no concept of "the current directory" in the UI of explorer.exe the way there is in CMD.EXE or Bash. You can have multiple directories open and none of them are privileged over the others.

I think of cultures of command line programs: the node ecosystem very much has the idea that a program "lives" in a a certain directory and you're always going to work with that program in that directory. This is convenient in a lot of ways but... say you are writing a data analysis program and you want to put it on your $PATH and then cd to the place where your data lives and do your work there?

Well... I'd say that

Many of those "accidents" are not really accidents: I've seen two kinds of ways sites engineer those "accidents"

(1) many sites, like phys.org, have crowded and confusing layouts that try to trick you on clicking on an "x" or something to close an ad but really clicking on the ad, there's a lot of deniability on this on mobile where the touch accuracy is poor

(2) a few years back there were a lot of sites which seemed to always change the layout when you were trying to click on something in the sidebar, anandtech was one of the worst, i could swear they were watching the mouse events and predicting the click events. this stopped all of a sudden, could be Google put the smack-down on this behavior

"All clicks are click fraud" is related to the dead internet theory.

Well, when I do see Mormon missionaries coming I do tell them my story about how "After Quetzalcōātl came to teach Americans how to grow corn he went to teach people in the Middle East about spirituality" and that "He's really a dinosaur, and that impact 66 million years ago was no accident but an engineered collision of a space colony off the Yucatan peninsula (like what happens in Gundam!), the remaining dinosaurs live in large space habitats out in the Oort Cloud."

That is a joke of course and is much as humor is a part of my practice [1] I don't believe or or expect anyone else to believe it.

Overall I believe in ritual as a technology, that the things people say about religion are fiction but the the things they do are real. I led a small group of students to what I realized later was the highest spot on our campus and we did a simple ritual and experienced immense joy in simply pulling something off in a group and more later when it primed me to see something really sacred in watching the moon rise over an unspeakably profane commercial strip.

My green witch wife would totally say witchcraft is about manifesting your dreams and to me the esbat rituals for the new and full moon are about making and keeping commitments, Steven Covey kind of stuff, really applied psychology. [2]

[1] ... introducing a crude hammer as "a ritual tool my wife gave me on condition that we can only call it 'the hammer of whammer', my wife says that ritual tools gain powers through being used and... this has been used, it has a legendary origin story which I've been sworn to secrecy about"

[2] ... and those of you who say I digress too much are wrong this time, modern pagan practices are very much modeled after the nearly universal practices that your (more or less distant) ancestors practiced in their village before the Empire [3] showed up with its soldiers and scribes

[3] ... the Romans, the Shang, the British, the contemporary world system, what they have in common is that they send in stormtroopers and blow up your planet if you try to resist

So? Lots of organizations do retreats with a similar cost, though certainly that kind of pricing put events out of reach of most people.

At the top page of that site I saw a lot of pictures which reminded me a little of the "Witch Camp" gatherings that the Reclaiming movement puts on which are an education in ritual that costs a fraction of what the above organization charges but these are non-profit gatherings run by very lefty people.

Something people don't talk about enough is that icons on mobile just blur into each other and all look the same. I mean, if you blow them up and look carefully they look different but when you are scanning for an icon on the phone it is like searching throw a junk drawer. Looks like Apple is trying to do the same for the desktop.