I've noticed this – I'm a former software engineer, now a full-time priest. It's been fascinating to reflect on how the base of my analogies has shifted from software/tech to theology/the Christian tradition. Not entirely though, there are many times when I've found resonances in between.
One extension I'd make from your comment is how rich interdisciplinary work can be, because all the resonances between different fields can come to life and some really wonderful creativity happens.
I hope that the next big shift will be to undo the asymmetry that crept into the internet quickly after it first became popular. Let us host stuff at home. Let us run odd and strange and great systems wherever we are. Undo the cloud, undo the capture of the net – I'm old enough to remember when we just had a bunch of boxen under a desk somewhere, and it was pretty great.
I've been thinking lately how nice it was when the Internet had lots of phpBB-like forums spread around. Each one ran by a different server with it's own rules. None of them required your ID or phone number to join. No one really knew who anyone else was in real life. If you got tired of the people one forum you had several similar forums on different sites you could go to. It was fun seeing the kinds of things people would share in that environment. Everyone had the power to be seen, heard and disregarded in a short span of time.
I think of these things like they only exist in the past but I'm sure these places are still around only I don't go to them as much now. Probably because all the useful stuff these days exist in mainly reddit and the stackexchanges.
I too miss the days of phpBB an IPB forums. Circle.so has come the closest to replicating some of that interface / vibe, but as expected, their pricing has crept up beyond a reasonable point for small projects / communities. The answer seems to be something self hosted.
The problem is always discovery. There are lots and lots of little sites out there but without a search engine or directory you don’t know about them. Even back in the day Yahoo had a directory. And once you need such an aggregator, it will naturally create a choke point.
You can still do this, it all still works, technically. You will have a spam/malware/security issues that wouldn't have been an issue back in the day. You will also have discoverability issues - but that hasn't actually changed, if it's just for you or your friends.
This is one of the core usecases of cloudflared (https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared)! Without having a static IP address or dynamic DNS, you can establish a connection between your machine in a private network with Cloudflare. And once a resource is on the Cloudflare network, you can pretty much do anything with it, including routing your visitors to that server and using the full Cloudflare stack including its CDN, firewalls, and Anti-Bot protections.
This project does exactly the opposite of what the GP was talking about. We need to selfhost to be independent of Cloudflare, not dive even deeper into it. cloudflared exists to embrace and extinguish and absolutely fuck that and everything that comes from Cloudflare.
Don't just dream. We can choose to use the ISP that says "yes", or at least a less firm "no". We can vote with our wallets to create a market opening for the ISP that says "yes".
In general, most ISP have a usage agreement posted which prohibits excessive client server traffic.
This is why most NOCs enforce an asymmetric firewall bandwidth limit for download focused customers, and install colo Google/CDN rack appliances.
Most ISP are just the modern retooled Cable company business. Try to stream video off your home platform on a normal service port, and you will hit the caps pretty quickly. =3
> Corporations will redesign their nervous systems to rely on the networks that reach every member of the organization and beyond into the world of suppliers, consultants and customers."
I don't think that's far off from anticipating (in incredibly broad terms) what's in view in this discussion?
I recently set up passkey-only sign ins for a webapp I'm writing using Authentik [0](Python OIDC provider, with quite a nice docker-compose run-up, took only minutes to stand up.) It was surprisingly easy to configure everything so that passkeys are the only thing ever used.
If anyone would be interested I could write it up? I was surprised what a nice user flow it is and how easy it was to achieve.
so many of these Authentication providers have a hockey stick pricing scheme, where the first few users are near free and when you grow you are going to get mugged and kicked in the groin.
I ran into one of these in the very early 00s; was working at a university (back in the days when a couple of people would run all the central servers, running Linux on beige PCs.) We had some anti-spam/AV software that looked at every incoming email hooked into Postfix, and the server kept running out of disk space.
Eventually tracked it down to an email which contained a zip of stock trading data – just the three letter stock code and the shift. It wasn't malicious, it just had an extraordinarily high compression ratio!
A friend had a book she'd written in a Mac version of word from the early 90s; none of the current Microsoft versions of Word (windows, mac, web) would read it, but Libreoffice worked fine, so a little script later using Libreoffice's CLI tools and it was all converted, pretty much intact.
There's still a dearth of support in commonly used open source backend frameworks, too – and, at least after looking a bit the other day, I couldn't find much in the way of documentation on the standard flows. I was hindered a little in searching by SEO spam from various companies offering APIs to deal with users/passkeys for me as a service.
Look at Quarto. Markdown input, basically any output you want, including HTML, PDF, DOCX, PPTX, etc... All from the same input. Reuse text chunks, use variables, templates, and more. Then just run 'quarto render'.
