Nice take. Don't let the DEI lead-in sway you from reading this observation about tech moguls trying to reclaim their glory days.

I agreed with a lot in the article, but I was a bit baffled by the DEI name-drop in the opening.

> "... the guys who had big tech startup successes in the 90s and early aughts think that 'DEI' is the cause of all their problems."

Who is the author referring to here?

(I realize that DEI has been rolled back at some companies, and Zuckerberg in particular has derided it, yet I still feel like the author is referring to some commonly accepted knowledge that I'm out of the loop on.)

certainly Andreessen has gone on many public rants about how he thinks dei and other "woke" initiatives are killing american tech innovation. Here's one interview - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-t... About halfway through he really lets it fly

Eh, the rest of us who are really old are reminiscing the Apple ][ or the PDP-11 or the IBM 360 in the case of a former coworker who is pushing 70.

Funny I am known for being a steady, slow and dependable hand in real life but I team up with youngsters to win hackathons, I drive them nuts with my insistence on minimal and viable but my ability to go up on stage and demo something broken and make it look great carries the weekend -- good 'old fashion startup veteran skills.

Still pretty stupid that we as a society have created such a system. We rob the authors and artist of today to pay the estates of those long dead.

It's nice that .NET has kept the number of web frameworks somewhat limited. They had the unfortunate ASP.NET Web Forms, than course corrected to ASP.NET MVC (which was solid but had too many API variations during the .NET core era), and now offer the really slick Blazor framework that lets you use C# on both the server and client... I hope it gains more industry momentum and Microsoft keeps investing in it.

No, no, no! Down Larry, down. Bad dog.

Reminds me of an old Bruce Sterling quote: "politics pulls us together, technology tears us apart". That always struck me as being directly opposite of our intuitions as technologists.

As a species, we need a wider exploration of how to structure online spaces in a way that builds and sustains social capital instead of usurping it. That's difficult to do with out resorting to censorship and ideological totalitarianism. And it's probably not compatible with the ad-funded addiction-driven business model of most modern platforms.

One historical example of note here is Wikipedia. It was a complete failure as a for-profit product, but it skyrocketed in significance when it opened up and adopted the relatively new social interaction model of the wiki.

By far the biggest issue with the internet is the power it represents. And there is no avoiding that when it is by definition a way into the hearts and minds for every person connected to it on earth. It will always be ripe for advertising, for propaganda, for misinformation, because the incentives are just too damned great to not let it be. It was one thing when it was 25 years ago and internet users represented a small fraction of the worlds population compared to today. A fraction that might have gone unnoticed from a certain degree of mass advertising and propagandizing that always seeks to put itself where it can get in front of the most eyeballs, but that is no longer the case so long as so many people use the internet.

I'm not sure what the solution is beyond niche little forums (tribes) that somehow tip toe the line of having the website be supported at all and also not growing too big to be of much interest for advertising and other forms of propaganda. And even then, how do you discover these little tribes? All the discovery mechanisms for internet content today are centralized or gated away from the upstart individual. Search engines, social media, even advertising in the meatspace takes serious capital. People don't have their own sites with webrings linking to other sites anymore. They have social media profiles and even then most people just lurk after highschool and college vs use it to share actual content or ideas. Search engines favor directing you to mass media and social media results for queries rather than small sites and forums.

I feel like what is left of these niche interest and niche forums are doomed to die out in a few generations, since its so hard to actually come up into this world and find these refuges on the web unless you knew about them from years ago when the internet was smaller and signal to noise ratios were much higher. Kids today aren't even interested in using the web, let alone a desktop OS. At least there are still computer science college programs but who knows how long that will be the case everywhere in the chatGPT/cut everything era we find ourselves in.

> Attestation is just a tool. It can be used for all kinds of things and doesn't privilege one side or another.

It priveleges the side that designs and uses it. By and large that's going to be the corporations, not individuals or those acting to maximize their interest.

Unfortunately, evangelical leaders have promoted this as a sort of magic moment when a human begins. The has resulted in opposition to emergency contraception (Plan B) under the perception that it's an aborticant.

I'd add that another advantage of XML is that you get a powerful set of tools that are readily accessible across all "working" programming languages, often provided by first party libraries. Plus a lot of developers (and text editors) know the basic syntax.

Granted, JSON has achieved this same level of universality, but everything else (excepting perhaps CSV files) either suffers from obscurity or from weak/ambiguous/competing specifications.

The dream of semantically rich documents that XML provides (like, say, being able to cleanly interweave MathML, SVG, and XHTML in one document) is unmatched.

I think we'd see a lot more XML usage if it hasn't been over-promised, over-delivered (WS-*), and over-used (enterprise Java). If XML had stuck to its lane (making a schema language like RelaxNG instead of XmlSchema, for one thing) it wouldn't have left such a bad taste in so many people's mouths.

Same. My first play thru I just allotted a large space into which to extend assembly lines if needed, then I brought their outputs back to a central spine from which I could siphon them off for input into subsequent assembly lines. I think this really helped me "feel" the concept of backpressure.

Probably too late, honestly, but still worth trying.

Honestly, FirefoxOS received a lot of flak for not "focusing on their browser", but if it had succeeded it would have been a huge win for digital freedom and privacy.