Hacker News: aethertron

New comment by aethertron in "AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart"

aethertron — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:15:35 +0000

Seems a bit silly, though. More economical to paint (or draw, or cut-and-paste, or whatever) one original, scan it, then print many copies.

New comment by aethertron in "Mycoria is an open and secure overlay network that connects all participants"

aethertron — Thu, 08 May 2025 16:26:29 +0000

Does my computer get involved when person A sends something illicit to person B? As a normal user on the internet, no. That's between them, and the law only deals with them. With certain decentralised anonymous systems, the answer is different. Now there are legal liability issues, at least.

New comment by aethertron in "1M Users"

aethertron — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 15:16:00 +0000

Not to downplay my personal importance (=make an ostentatious display of humility, lol) I can work on art and projects to express the importance of other things in the world that aren't myself.

New comment by aethertron in "Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites"

aethertron — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 17:23:23 +0000

I would simply throttle those requests. Update comments once an hour. Or once a day. Not everything needs to be realtime.

New comment by aethertron in "Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees"

aethertron — Mon, 20 May 2024 15:03:46 +0000

What's that thing? Much harm is attributed to Tinder and I don't know how to boil it all down to something that would be a positive for jobseeking.

New comment by aethertron in "Hyperworlds – Web Replacement Projects"

aethertron — Wed, 08 May 2024 12:37:29 +0000

How large should Google have been allowed to get, before kicking it off the net?

New comment by aethertron in "Hyperworlds – Web Replacement Projects"

aethertron — Wed, 08 May 2024 11:37:42 +0000

A commons is indeed vulnerable to collapse though bad management. So it won't take care of itself, but needs deliberate effort and coordination to maintain. If we want to keep the open web, can't we put the necessary work in?

One challenge for web-enjoyers is it's not obvious in a consensus-making way where 'weak points' that need help are, and what's an acceptable loss (say: video on the web. We can post raw video on a webhost. It's expensive, so no one does. And most video content is crap, so who cares - let the platforms have that?)

New comment by aethertron in "Hyperworlds – Web Replacement Projects"

aethertron — Wed, 08 May 2024 10:43:27 +0000

Where are you seeing signs of a web replacer? Native apps? Or big social media platforms built on the web, that replace the need (for mose users) to 'touch' the base web layers directly?

It would be sad if those bury the web and bury our rich, free open platform paradigm.

If a good decentralised open thing replaced it instead, cool.

New comment by aethertron in "Hyperworlds – Web Replacement Projects"

aethertron — Wed, 08 May 2024 10:36:16 +0000

Ted Nelson's critiques are good. Tech/Culture needs critics. Ted also tried being a culture-tech builder, and Xanadu just didn't work out. Despite several attempts, lots of resources spent...

Its ideas probably influenced Twitter. Because they were good ideas. Could've been independently discovered in the Platonic space of ideal tech-powered media too...

Yes, great social collaboration happens on Twitter. A bunch of inane squabbling and criminal threats too.

New comment by aethertron in "The Antisocial Network: How the 90s Internet Died Like Diaryland (2014)"

aethertron — Wed, 08 May 2024 08:26:22 +0000

Forums should have separate layers for the object-level discussion, and meta-discussion. Then people can zoom into a peculiar grammatical detail that takes their fancy, but the main thread of a topic can keep going uninterrupted.

Then if a grammar discussion comes to a conclusion (as decided by the forum owner/editor-in-chief) it gets enforced on main threads thenceforth.

(my reply would go on the meta layer)

New comment by aethertron in "HDMI Forum does not allow an open source implementation of the HDMI 2.1 spec"

aethertron — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 10:07:33 +0000

Trademarks are there to protect consumers from dishonestly represented goods. If I buy some display tech marketed as "HDMI-compatible" but unlicensed, and it works with my other HDMI equipment (say, its maker reverse-engineered the HDMI spec), no one has been defrauded.

New comment by aethertron in "Permutation City (1994)"

aethertron — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 15:58:48 +0000

It's up there for me. But I liked his Schild's Ladder, which plays with some of the same ideas, even more.

New comment by aethertron in "In Praise of Buttons"

aethertron — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 16:39:24 +0000

Even better: physical buttons that feel like buttons.

My lamp and my earphones have 'touch buttons'.

New comment by aethertron in "Where Have All the Websites Gone?"

aethertron — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 15:51:09 +0000

Facebook has user-run groups, so there are at least 3 levels of moderation/rules there:

  1. National law
  2. Facebook TOS  
  3. Group rules

But the legislative power, to to speak, at the group level is quite weak. They can further restrict according to some values, which is fine as it is. Freedom of association. They can't control the UI.

New comment by aethertron in "Where Have All the Websites Gone?"

aethertron — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 14:25:21 +0000

I am pro open web. I like the remix-ability of its tools. But walled gardens are easier to use, as they've invested in design, and designed for non-power-users. Open web enjoyers need to build better tools, and/or accept that it's going to be a smaller domain of the tech-savvy, or try to raise the technical abilities of the general public (perhaps via better tools?).

New comment by aethertron in "Where Have All the Websites Gone?"

aethertron — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 12:08:04 +0000

The advent of commenting did mitigate the lonesomeness of independent blogging. Then social media sapped away much of that social energy, returning blogging to its natural state of solitude. Bloggers can try to nurture community, but it's a hard task. Maybe the advent of reader-funded blogging will re-energise the practice. I hope it will.

Disqus seems good on paper. Seems something like Disqus is in a position to facilitate content discovery: it has ads so it could also add related or recommended links to other stuff in the ecosystem.

New comment by aethertron in "Where Have All the Websites Gone?"

aethertron — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 10:53:25 +0000

A personal site is a lonely place. That's why blogs, after an initial burst of creative energy, languish. People nowadays seeking online to fulfil their social inclinations go elsewhere, to the platforms better optimised to harness that social energy.

Another reason blogs have languished: discussions come to an end, a point of exhaustion. When everything that's there to be said, has been. Retreading old ground is not the same as posting original thoughts. Different qualities of people do these things.

New comment by aethertron in "GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have one-time fee license"

aethertron — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 16:10:09 +0000

Find that good artist then either:

1. pay them to make art for the game you want to make, or

2. work with them for free to make the game they want to make.

Good luck.

New comment by aethertron in "How blogging is different from tweeting"

aethertron — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 13:00:56 +0000

The ephemerality is the reverse to how it should be. A tweet from 15 years ago is probably still there. A blog's domain name might have expired, so its posts are lost.

So bloggers should copypaste the other blog posts they like into their own blog.

New comment by aethertron in "Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio"

aethertron — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 11:17:08 +0000

There is no such thing as streaming without downloading.

With DRM it's possible for platforms to offer streaming, which necessarily involves downloading, but without consumers retaining streamed content on their devices in a usable format, and that's an acceptable deal for some content people. But there are always going to be potential circumventions, especially if these devices are general purpose computers. We can have have computers we control, or effective DRM (= computers that somebody else controls).

DRM bad.