I just read unixsheikh's article on how tech news websites today can be overwhelming to the average reader [1]. I've mentioned it on a note a few days ago, but I do think that modern website design have become more about creating eyecandy and great first impressions rather than actually presenting information.

While unixsheikh didn't explicitly mention it, I think that a good contributing factor as to why technology news websites can feel overwhelming that they just have a bad site design. For example, loading the homepage for The Verge will show you how content-lean modern technology news websites have become:

Look at my scrollbar, that's a lot of page space to scroll through and I don't think there's a lot of content down there either.

[1]: https://www.unixsheikh.com/articles/do-you-feel-overwhelmed-trying-to-stay-up-to-date-with-the-latest-tech-news.html

I just read unixsheikh's article on the fragile nature of Linux development and how *BSD can be simple and robust solution not only for companies but also for individual users. It's a great article and I'd highly recommend it if you have a few minutes to spare and you're interested on learning more about the differences between Linux and *BSD.

LINK: https://www.unixsheikh.com/articles/why-you-should-migrate-everything-from-linux-to-bsd.html

Wait, I thought the earth was cooling.

Discord is a plague.

Yes, I'm aware there are security implications on making programs that let people do stupid things.

A better phrasing could have been:

"Programs should let people make mistakes."

I think programs should let people do stupid things.

Hot takes and drama will always attract eyeballs. That's how tabloids and clickbait sites have worked and will continue to work. What nostr promotes is an open protocol, not a cure for human nature.

If you don't want to see hot takes and drama, you can probably design either a relay or a client that can filter for notes with an "unusually high engagement" numbers.

The same goes with spam and scam bots. It's not the responsibility of the protocol to filter them. Doing that will open the floodgates to what made corporate social media the way it is.

Filtering should be done on an individual level (i.e: client and relay implementations.)

That difference alone makes nostr wildly different than corporate social media.

An open protocol will always suffer from that. However, it doesn't mean that clients and users can't do anything about it.

This Twitter v. Substack Notes saga is quite funny to watch unfold.

We can lead a horse to the river but we can't make them drink.

> This writer- and reader-first model represents the future of the internet. Any platform that benefits from writers’ and creators’ work but that doesn’t give them control over their relationships will inevitably wonder how to respond to the platforms that do.

> Very soon, we’ll launch Notes, a large investment in providing writers with an alternative for growth outside of traditional social networks. Notes is designed to drive discovery across Substack, giving writers and readers the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links.

It boggles my mind how these two paragraphs are in the same article.

I guess Nostr needs more publicity.

It would be nice to have a Seamonkey-like Nostr browser that has a consistent design language across different post types.

I think one of the great things about OpenBSD is that it's simple enough that even a non-expert like me can understand, on a conceptual level, how the operating system works. If only it can be as fast as a Linux machine, though.

1. Latest security advisories and news (a la Dark Reading but for bitcoin stuff), privacy and security tips and case studies of when a threat model fails.

2. The pump and dump defi stuff.

3. I'm not sure. I have yet to subscribe on a bitcoin newsletter.

I think the interpunct (·) takes the cake for the coolest name for a punctuation mark.

Wow, some public relays are filled with explicit material. I think I will just set the ones that I'm following to write-only.

I've just looked over the Unraid's overview page and it looks promising. I'll see if I can deploy it in my home network.

Also, it would be really neat to set up a server that can deploy VMs and host network services on the fly. I'm still not sure how to approach it but I think the simplest way is to use vmm(4) in OpenBSD and host either Alpine Linux or another OpenBSD inside it.

I kind of regret setting my file server up in Debian now. Oh well, I still have an old board lying around. I just need to get that thing in a case and I can try getting OpenBSD inside it. Hopefully, I will be able to write about it once I actually get myself around to getting a case for it.

I would really like to get my hands on a PDP 11 just so I can play around with minicomputers and run ancient software on them. Though I don't think it is possible to get one in the Philippines. I'm not even sure if DEC sold their things here.

Until then, I will probably just stick with OpenSIMh.

A few days ago, I found myself browsing one of those "modern" websites. Those eyecandy-rich but content-lean websites that try to be sleek with animations and fading text. I think they're trying to make it look and feel like a magazine but I don't think they're doing a goob job of it.

I grew up during the period between the internet becoming "the information superhighway" and just before social media hit mass adoption. During that time, "getting online" can be prohibitively expensive and as a result, not a lot of people did.

Back then, magazines were my internet. They became my portal to "what's happening" in the things that I'm interested in. They're often content, and ad, rich and they pack a variety of information about slightly tangential things that you still might find interesting.

I was and am still amazed at how efficient they were with page space and how they can make it look seamless and easy to read. Maybe it's a characteristic of the medium but I think it's a bit of a fool's errand to make the computer screen behave like a magazine.

Fancy eyecandy can look impressive but they don't really last beyond first impressions. I don't think anyone would like going through that fading scrollthrough text more than once.

In my opinion, if there's anything to get from late 90s magazines it is not that your webpage should look and feel like a magazine but rather to think about your medium and find a way to make the best use out of it.

Hey, thanks for reading. I think it's possible to do something like this on Nostr. I'm not that well-versed with the protocol but it looks like you can do it either through the client or the relay.

Adding a small, local cache inside a client could make it more resilient and delay-tolerant. That could help in catching any posts that you might have sent offline and the client can just rebroadcast the contents of its cache once it's back on the network.

I think a more interesting, and bodgy, approach is having a private relay talking to a public-facing one. The public relay can take any messages from a specific npub key and store it until the private relay requests for it and vice versa. At that point, you're basically redoing POP3/SMTP though. It's interesting to think about that though.