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a man slumped on his desk, from 'The Sleep of Reason Produces
      Monsters'

Oblomovka

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Archive for February 6th, 2016

2016-02-06

Thanking Hyperlinks For Their Service

Tidied up the sidebar a bit here. Happily deleted the Google Ads (what a strange and distracting experiment advertising proved to be. I mean universally, not here, where I think I got $10 or so across the decade. Entirely undistracted.). I felt sadder cutting down all the links to other people. The people are still here, but the destinations are long gone. I’ll replace them soon I hope, but I didn’t like the smack of anachronism a link to another person’s dead webpage had. That said, looking through some of the older blog entries here, maybe the Web and the Unixy way I had of looking at it was always a nostalgia-tainted vision of the future. Like we were recapitulating the dreams of the Seventies in an attempt to shove away the grip of the present. A short circuit.

I get the same generational cross-patch feel watching J.C.R. Licklider speaking in 1986. You can’t quite place where Licklider is in time here: he’s an old man, over 70, talking about man-machine prosthesis and virtual reality goggles as though they were ancient experiment. But you know that everyone there was looking in a straight line to the future, bucket-brigading these ideas out of the past, smuggling them past all those Eighties DOS boxes.

Those moments are disorienting, when a new future finds its secret history. When all the Rubyists began to find a joy (ha) and a history in Vim, a tool built for a different world; when young artists find themselves veering toward skills thirty-years gone instead of what they are supposed to learn in college. It’s not just about fashion, it’s about a second victory of an old school, on the verge of a total eclipse. There is a political analogy here; right now there always is with me.

(The other thing that’s caught my eye is differences in writing style in 2001. I’m possibly reading too much into a drily factual blog entry, but does even Glenn nowadays write like Glenn wrote then?

Permissionless society

I’m tentatively excited about keybase’s new filesystem, but I wonder if some of that excitement is simply because their directory structure — where I have a /keybase/public/<identifier> hierachy that can be mounted by anyone, and a /keybase/private/<me> folder that is synced only between machines I attest as controlling — maps so well to the structure I’ve been trying to use in my own home directories for, gosh, over a decade.

The top-level directory in my ~danny/ has a Private and a Public folder. The Private directory is encrypted, and is linked into by a menagerie of symlinks whenever I find something that I wouldn’t want the world to see, from configurations to tax documents. The Public folder, in theory, contains everything I wouldn’t care the world seeing. My ideal was that I’d just share ~/Public on a webserver, and I’d try to err on the Public side. In practice, I’ve never actually been brave enough to open up all of ~/Public. Too much private stuff gets emitted, even accidentally. As I was writing this, for instance, I realized that I had half-written a script that could be used to derive a relatively important password, and it was still slumped around in Public (I’ve always tried to keep all my ongoing code repositories on the Public side). Just the idea of  auditing the vast stash that has mounted up in there has lead to me growing ever more cautious.

I wish there was some middle ground between those two folders. But there isn’t, and that’s the world we live in. Unless I should mkdir ~/Obscurity one of these days.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.