Author: harold

This is why people get fed up with the media. Two years, a million dead and you come up with this headline? That’s pretty outrageous.

I like to scroll Reddit here and there and it always makes me think of Digg, because it’s the exact clone. For some reason though I never ever hear about Digg, even in nostalgia-filled culture.

Digg was huge during the mid-2000s. People will say that Reddit is way bigger now, but they forget that the entire web is WAY bigger now, too.

Digg was about as big as Reddit is today in terms of influence towards dorks, nerds and geeks. But also, it was a rather brand new concept.

The voting system hadn’t really existed at that scale on the internet before. It attracted millions of folks, curating pretty well discussions, as we know.

Living in France at that time, for the first time ever online there was a platform with interesting content and tons of people reacting to it. Just like Reddit later, comments quickly became what Digg was all about.

I learned so much about US/UK/AUS culture. Vocabulary, idioms, places, etc. It was so interesting and I laughed so much at comment threads. I remember a few times absolutely rolling on the floor. You know, when your sides hurt so much you keep whining “stahhhp, just staaahp”. It was addictive.

Then the HD-DVD key thing happened. I have screenshots of my old Netvibes page.

It was WILD. They started moderating heavily and that was a wrap. Reddit looked like a terrible clone and I became one of those Digg refugees. Reddit was so raw and poor at that time, it wasn’t looking like it would become the behemoth it became.

But here we are with the same dorks, nerds and geeks albeit more international now. Same social patterns.

And the same questions.

(screenshot taken on July 2021)

I’m here to simp on my man Dejounte Murray and yes, I’m banned from Twitch.

DJ has never stopped improving. It’s so great and potent to see the progress year after year.

Yes, the Spurs are not doing so well this year, barely making it to the play-in. But they have so much poise. DJ is a beast and, he still has room to improve. Meanwhile the team is playing this 18 year old, Josh Primo, who is absorbing knowledge like a sponge right now and might even get a little taste of playoff intensity in his first year playing in the NBA. The Spurs are allowing all the growth possible for their players, it’s beautiful.

Organizations that foster growth and potential are pretty all right in my eyes.

You already know what that screams: G R O W T H (the stem has gotten bigger than the trunk lmao)

It is now in bloom and wet wet. And at this instant, my mind is deviating.

This man makes me want to jump on my board right now.

I already see folks on the sidewalk smirking at my mask.

See you in the ICU when you get BA.2, boo.

“Remember Picasa? There is no native application that still comes close to it’s feature parity. But sadly it was discontinued in favour of a cloud application: Google Photos. What happened with Picasa also happened to millions of other applications around the same time Picasa was discontinued. The applications we use to run on our PC have moved to cloud.”

Why You Should Start Self Hosting | Rohan Deshmukh (rohanrd.xyz)

I loved Picasa. It was beautiful, ran super smoothly and was very useful. Yes, the pictures were on my local drives but they could have been online as well.

What mattered was that the software I was using to edit my pictures was a native app.

I think the fact that apps have moved to the cloud is detrimental mainly because we have *so* much computational power locally. Having things online is not bad per se . But software –the processing and editing part of interaction- needs to be local, forever.

In 2006 Picasa would run perfectly on a single core Pentium M. Today we have so much more computational power in a basic computer that I don’t even want to do the math. It’s probably five or eight orders of magnitude more, if not way more. Phones have 8 CPU cores now! I mean. Gross.

And we use that power to spin browsers to do and re-do and re-re-do what native apps did better. It’s absolutely ludicrous. It was in 2012, it still is the case in 2022 and even more obvious: I have a 2004 Win32 native RSS feed reader that updates and displays feeds far faster than anything I’ve ever seen.

There’s something wrong when 15-year-old tech is better in pretty much every way.

We need native, solid and full-featured apps more than ever. I’m begging you, programmers. We want to consume less electricity and use our computers as best as we can while enjoying some privacy? We need those mid-2000s software/apps with once-a-year update if any, back. Right now.