I believe there are mostly people who think they are good. And as the proverb goes the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I guess it must be the same that make people think they must deliver freedom in form of bombs all the time.

Let's not forget that Galileo Galilei studied at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, that Mendel (Mendel's Laws) did made his discoveries in a cloister and books, translations and libraries on pretty much everything for a really long time was pretty much only done within religious institutions. And for the longest stretch those were Christian Catholicism and Islam.

The Vatican Observatory also is an important source of high quality papers.

I mean one of the primary things Christians and Muslims based they believes on are books. So many got in touch with it. And that's not even touching the whole architecture, arts, philosophy department yet.

The fact that in thousands of years of history there have also been a couple of really dumb people in charge that were paranoid or wanted to distract from their failures and got mad or scared when someone challenged their world views isn't exactly surprising. Looks like no matter how good a large enough group of people gets their will always be idiots messing things up.

I guess when you look back as much as the people in Vatican appear to do I guess you see patterns. Technology and science (race theory, chemical castration, ...) or simply "progress" are often used to justify acts of evilness. Just like religion, democracy, freedom and what not.

That said of course there's still die hard anti-science creationists. But talking to a very religious person once it seems that there is simply also a lot of philosophy around science. Eg. there was a big bang (fun fact, a theory started by a religious person) and the universe simply didn't exist for an infinite time there must have been some cause for it. And unless that cause is some kind of infinite cycle it also must have started somehow and even though I do not share that believe there is a notion of a deliberate start in there. That won't make me a religious person, but it won't make them an atheist either. So I guess that's fair enough.

What I wanna say with that is that the science vs religion trope is as true or false as democrats/republicans or other groups of people are opposed to science. They all are when they are confronted with something they don't like. I think the HN comments section is the best proof for that. ;)

Also atheist here. Just not the kind that doesn't even know the difference between knowledge and beliefs.

> I know that a lot of people who are into privacy topics would immediately willing to buy a round to celebrate when a politician who voted for these laws dies.

> The hate among privacy-minded people for these laws, the politicans who voted for them and the judges who judged in the name of these laws is insane.

I don't really understand what you are saying or maybe are implying. Are you saying I want to see people dead? Are you saying everyone who is privacy minded secretly wants people to die?

What does a judge have to do with laws being passed?

Or do you mean something completely different?

I mostly just wished that I could post like you and I do right now on a personal website on a personal server without putting my home address on it. Basically for the same reason nobody seems to have it in their "About" here. Not sure why that should make me "buy a round" if someone dies.

Also wouldn't make much sense to be complaining about a law and then have a problem with laws being exercised. If one would not care about judges exercising laws, why would one hate them? Seems all a bit strange to me. Also never saw any privacy minded people like that are that hateful. Sounds a lot more like mafia or something. And there often the people seem to be kind of in the open, just like many extremists. So I guess they don't care about privacy?

In countries where websites need an "imprint" (see the wikipedia article linked by someone else)

> Is it required for registering ccTLD

It's required for "publishing" something and websites are considered that. The idea was I think to be anti fake news, but I never understood why for websites you couldn't just go to the provider and have it turned off.

> would it be available by WHOIS?

Not completely sure how you mean. With whois there are many providers that allow for privacy options.

> Is it enforced

Not sure.

> and how, if you make make your site on another TLD but are clearly a resident of that country?

I think it's not hard to get around, but having to break the law to put a website on the internet without putting everything out there is just saddening. I don't want to break laws, just cause I'd get away with it.

Just to clarify. It's not emulation in the sense it's slower or something. They call it compatibility layer, which is better, but also nobody knows what it means.

This is simplifying a bit, but it's essentially "Linux is just a kernel" so the interface is just Linux syscalls, so the FreeBSD kernel when executing a Linux binary simply answers like Linux (so it has those system calls). How this is used in practice is that on your file system you have Ubuntu/RedHat/... "installed" (so the files and the file hierarchy are lying there) and you either directly or in a FreeBSD jail execute things in there or the binary you have.

I don't know how well it works in the present but in the past that means you could simply download the Unreal Tournament 2004 multiplayer demo or Enemy Territory or other games and just play them as if you were running Linux, 3D acceleration and all, without VM without real emulating, just the kernel providing what a Linux kernel would provide.

Also "heavy" is very very relative and subjective. You can totally have a tiny FreeBSD and a huge OpenBSD and one could argue OpenBSD is "heavy" because it comes with three window managers, an HTTP server, a full blown SMTPD server, ACME client and a ton of stuff that eg a server install of Debian or Ubuntu doesn't come with. But also if you run eg. ZFS things are heavy of course. FreeBSD has however had a time when it tried to strip a lot of stuff from the default install and make stuff either optional or make things available through ports/packages only.

And also there are surprises to be had with such overviews: Eg. your Lenovo laptop likely will give you a more "out of the box" experience on OpenBSD compared to FreeBSD with things like simple wifi setup, sound often doing the right thing (work, come out the right place, etc.) compared to FreeBSD. Also with stuff like HTTPD with ACME being available in a simple way after install I'd say OpenBSD is easier than FreeBSD.

FreeBSD to me feels a bit more like "it can be everything you want it to be". Ports and packages can be complicated if you just start out, compared to OpenBSDs "just use packages" stance. On OpenBSD things in my experience are more of a "it works or doesn't" and when it works often out of the box and/or with docs, while on FreeBSD it's more like it throws some tools into your direction you can build stuff (poudriere, jails, a build system with many options). So it's really cool if you want flexibility but a bit more like you have to figure out if it's possible and how. But that might simply be because of the use cases I used it for.

That said all of them are real general purpose systems, unlike eg. some Linux distributions. So it's not like "OpenBSD is for routers" even though it often seems like it. There are time when the GPU support is better on OpenBSD than FreeBSD's. But also FreeBSD has official NVIDIA drivers, so it's all not that clear cut.

Work: I need a simple easy to use system that I can configure to meet third party compliance requirements without jumping through hoops. It really excels when you can mostly use the base system there, maybe couple services. For example it's so nice to just have a couple pledge/unveil lines for example in a Go service.

Also super nice for "set and forget" style stuff. For example "I just need a HTTPS server with acme and SFTP". That's something you get out of the box with no third party packages (so everything vetted, pledge/unveil for everything, maintenance just running syspatch and sysupgrade), which is really nice.

Personal: Private mail server, family website, a quick and dirty "watching streams together" service I set up to watch stuff with people not in the same place as I am. prosody to have XMPP for friends and family.

I would NOT use it for "people throw stuff at you" use cases (Linux and FreeBSD do a far better job there). But I absolutely love it for scenarios where you want very very low maintenance. For example that private email server. I don't have time to do big upgrade plans, or "hardening" systems or reinventing the wheel. I cannot afford to do privately what I do in a day job or consulting (setting up or maintaining really rather complicated infrastructure).

I have done that many years with Debian, but the Linux world sadly is a big complex and complicated mess. That's great, when I get paid to deal with it, but annoying otherwise.

And I don't mean that bashing wise. I use Linux, I like Linux, but somehow there is a huge drive to overengineering and then building hacks and weird workarounds that become normalized until it's a proper job. Without wanting to start a flame war, but the whole Docker, Containers, Kubernetes, Helm, Orchestrators, etc. story is a lot of reinventing the wheel and a static executable like a Go service in a container, so essentially coming with a whole Linux distribution even though one never thinks about it that way is just really absurd. That's what executables, processes, etc. were invented for.

And since I've lived through the story and as mentioned make a limit, I understand how that came to be, but it feels like the industry took a wrong turn because it was cool and exciting and then (nearly) everyone decided to use that hammer for everything one could imagine to be a nail. And then the next layer came and the next and the next. But all of them doing things differently. And suddenly to have a Postgres cluster you need Kubernetes, and Helm, but also need to know both PG config and the orchestrator's config, etc.

It's a mess and the OpenBSD people somehow knew that decades before I did.

OpenBSD has a pretty long history of eg. limiting attacks through compile time mitigations while making them more usable for every day use compared to specialized "high security" Linux distributions. This can also be seen in patches of third party software (in the ports (packages) system) that often have patches so the code can live with these limitations.

One example of such a mitigation is W^X. Implemented in OpenBSD in 2003, copied later by Windows, Linux and the other BSDs (incl. macOS).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%5EX

More recently of course pledge and unveil were also added.

Also in 2003 OpenBSD was also the first mainstream (no research or test OS) that implemented strong ASLR that in 2005 was supported in Linux through third party patch sets.

For a list, see here:

https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html

Many things were later picked up by Linux distributions, kernel patchsets, compilers, etc.

There are more problems though. In the country where I live even if you want to make just a tiny website for family and friends you essentially have to set yourself up for doxxing. You are required to put your real name on, as well as city and in case of something like a blog the whole address.

Which is absolutely horrible, especially if you want to do an honest blog about your life and such and not just trying to do self-advertisement.

I think what Facebook, etc. killed is "pseudonymity by default". Everyone started publishing under their full name and include a photo of oneself, while only a couple of years earlier people were skeptical about things like revealing their real address for online shopping.

That said on parts of the Usenet, etc. it was also common to do that, but way back when internet came into our household, we made a basic little family site. Today that would be unthinkable, because of regulations that are justified with "safety reasons".

Sure, one can get around that. Confirming some blog is by an individual living in your jurisdiction isn't always an easy task, but a big part of the old internet was that you could do the equivalent of going to a pub or a coffee shop, having a conversation with total strangers, on relatively private topics on a first name basis without plastering your private details on the wall for the public and creeps to see. Or for someone who disagrees with your views/sexual orientation/favorite sports team to look you up. Imagine if the KKK had a simple way of doing that.

And there are whole websites dedicated to doxxing and harassing people. Never has it been so trivial to get this kind of information, all because of effectively surveillance laws created under the claim of being made to protect people. As well as for websites to also "rank" you.

All while we can't even manage to prevent banks from moving money to other banks that allow for incredibly shady customers. All while people pretend that it's impossible to find perpetrators of heinous crimes that post photos and oftentimes don't use anonymity software or do so incompetently. All while people pretend that playing roblox or something is the biggest present day threat to children, while being completely fine of spreading photos daily life over the internet, giving a fuck about lead poisoning, climate change, etc.

There are so many laws in place right now that only a couple of years ago China was scolded for and yet politics and media make it sound like the threat is bigger than ever.

It feels like it's time to reverse many of these laws, because these they they are mainly protecting the monopolies and oligopolies of these "biggest websites".

We live in a bizarre world. And it's not like people didn't see that coming. Just nobody cared or cares now, but oh how horrible everything is.

So yes, there are remnants of the small web, but I do think that should they become more relevant again there just will be more UK Online Safety Act nonsense killing the small web for good.

The legal system seems to largely assume that you are a company like the big ones now and it's becoming harder to even if you had commercial interest to set up a presence without the help of the big ones. As outlined things are also a lot harder now for just the most basic private use case.

Other than the job for most programmers having nothing to do with whether they know the outcome, because hopefully they'd never write something like it or clean it up. And IF they found it they'd hopefully test it - given that it appears to be compiler dependent anyways.

Photoshop? I don't think you need much skill.

To be fair though, that's true for every profession or skill.

> I mean, I worked with people who were suprised that you can run more applications inside ec2 vm than just 1 app.

I've seen something similar where people were surprised that you can use an object storage (so effectively "make HTTP requests") from every server.

If you'd know Kubernetes, you know not to use it. I say that as someone who used to do consulting for it.

The reality is that yet again "making money" completely collides with efficient, quality, sane productive work.

For me one of the main reasons to leave that space is that I couldn't really deal with the fact that my work collides with a client's success. That said I have helped to get off that stuff and other things that they thought they needed, that just wasted time and money. It just feels odd going into a company that hired you to consult on a topic only to end up telling them "The best approach for you is not doing that at all". Often never. Like some people thought "Well, if we have hundreds of thousands or even millions of users" and the reality was that even in these scenarios if you went away from that abstract thought and discussed a hypothetical based on their product they realized that they'd still be better off without it. Besides the fact that this hypothetical often was in a future that made it likely that they said they'd likely have completely different setup so preparing for that didn't even make sense.

I think a big thing related to that was/is the microservice craze where people end up moving to a complex architecture for not many good reasons and then they increase complexity way faster than what they actually deliver in terms of the product, because it somehow feels good. I know it does, I've been there. When in reality the outcome often is just a complex mess with what could have been a relatively simple monolith. And these monoliths do work. And in the vast majority of cases they are easy to scale, because your problem switches from "how do we best allocate that huge amount of very different services across our infrastructure" to (for the most part) "how do we spin up our monolith on one more server" which tends to be a way easier to tackle service.

And nothing stops you from still using everything else if you want. Just because it's a monolith doesn't mean you need to skip on any of the cloud offerings, etc. For some reason there seems to be that idea that if you write a monolith you are somehow barred from using modern tooling, infrastructure, services, etc. Not sure where that comes from.

Especially for the older games you will get a lot more reach. You'd even reach beyond Linux (BSDs, etc.).

Please don't forget that a big chunk of your audience are nerds and that a lot of games run on engine re-implementations by nerds.

It's great that you make a client, but if you really want to offer something that would make people get games on GOG then do something that Steam does not offer, while probably being easier for you.

If that is too much to ask, please, at least do it in an unofficial capacity.

Later I also learned that he is a charismatic dude that can also laugh about his work, which is something I will always appreciate in people. I think he believed bits and pieces he wrote or at least found them interesting overall. A lot of it is just also viewing ancient cultures from different angles.

It's very different from people today that turn everything into a cult and is "us vs them".

Something I cannot stop to notice is how a lot of actual science (not pseudo-sience like what Däniken does) have very fringe ideas nowadays. There is that weird "advanced civilization" context that feels like humans will turn into weird "philosophy robots". The whole "they will make themselves robots" with the idea that somehow that brings eternal life when most even more simple machines don't last as long as humans. There is that weird idea that it will be fine to go on generational ships. There is the idea that people will be fine with simply freezing themselves completely abandoning any contact with any human they ever interacted with. Very weird concepts, but somehow they are essentially "aliens must be like that" when empirically... aliens have been drinking, partying and enriching themselves, waged wars, plundered and raped for thousands of years with essentially no sign for change. You have horrible times (middle ages, world wars) and you have good times (post napoleonic times/long peace, post WW2 and times during Pax Romana). People for thousands of years dream of some world, be it mythical creatures or aliens that somehow are just philosophers and scientists.

This seems almost as absurd. Yet there are people that call themselves scientists and believe those things almost considering them for granted. (the whole Kardoshev Scale is essentially fringe science as soon as you consider it anything but a completely arbitrary scale)

But that's not bad. In fact it's good. The whole dreaming up stuff to motivate to explore more is a strong driver for science. Doesn't matter if it's discovering a new continent, dreaming up machines that allow for global communication, or what could lie hidden in a pyramid. The channels on Mars might have been imaginations, but I am certain if that fascination wasn't there astronomy would be a lot poorer.

And while Däniken had a lot of imagination and didn't apply the scientific method I think that he made a lot of people interested in both the stars and ancient cultures.

I really wished that in today's society there would be more space between science, fantasy and what is essentially charlatans, cults, sects and so on.

Being curious can and should exist outside of academics. And disagreeing and questioning things should exist outside of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccers.

And maybe it should be more than some video game or Netflix series lore.

And I mean curiosity that isn't just endless YouTube video watching, but something a bit more active. There is nothing wrong with challenging truths. Like there is nothing wrong with finding good arguments for abstruse ideas (earth being flat or something) to learn something new. Nothing wrong to come up with "science" behind vampires and zombies.

It's just bad that suddenly you wake up in some weird cult and are shunned for thinking a bit out of the box and using imagination. And for not making clear lines and distinctions.

I hate how a lot of that makes people part of groups or something and how they somehow find their way into politics. It's bizarre and given that this seems to be a somewhat new development I think it's also completely unnecessary. Even with "futurists" and scientists the whole "fusion vs fission vs other ways of power generation" is sometimes a bit weird to watch.

I think a bit more imagination would be a good thing in today's world. Viewing things from different, even fantastical angles would be beneficial. Imagining where things could go doesn't have to be left to hypothetical alien civilizations. There was a time when people thought Esperanto would mean that people could all talk to each other on equal footing. There was a time when the US, Europe and Russia were building space stations together. There was a time when national borders seemed to become less important. From today's perspective a lot of these things seem like fever dreams, and it feels like we're heading into the dark ages yet again.

I'd argue that's not too different for grown-ups. ;)