links.lmorchard.com - #internet

talk: the P2P chat from 1983 that a VPN brought back to life | Andros Fenollosa

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:59:45 +0000

Before the internet, people could already chat. It is a topic that has always intrigued me: how was it possible? As a kid I had already heard about a command called talk, and the most impressive part is that you can still use it today, with no sign-ups and straight from the terminal, even in workplaces where I work over a VPN. It is not dead: it is just that few people know its potential.

Tags: #internet #retro #talk

The Boring Internet (text) | Terry Godier

Mon, 11 May 2026 21:49:30 +0000

Some things need to become enormous to survive. Other things survive because they never needed to become enormous.

Tags: #indieweb #internet #web #webdev

gradient.horse

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 23:44:11 +0000

Honestly I just wanted to play around with gradients. But gradients without anything on the horizon lack something, so I added horses. Since I can't draw horses, now you can draw them. And watch them parade across the screen alongside horses drawn by people you probably wouldn't like. Or maybe you would, how should I know?!

Tags: #internet #nifty #webdev #weird

The Zurich protocol

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:11:04 +0000

They lined up the editors first, zip tying their hands together and leading them into vans downstairs. Then they began to gather the rest of the journalists. Laptops were gathered from desks. The server room, such as it was in the wake of zero trust and enterprise cloud services, had its door kicked in, switches and rack servers ripped out of their frames. One IT support engineer objected and found a gun in his face, the safety off, its owner ready to make them into an example.

Tags: #fascism #internet #journalism #politics #tech #uspolitics #writing

Keynote: The Death of the Browser - Rachel-Lee Nabors, AgentQL - YouTube

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 20:40:55 +0000

In ten years, Internet Browsers may be a nostalgic memory. As enterprises face mounting API costs and integration headaches, a new paradigm is emerging. The internet's evolution from an open highway into a maze of walled gardens and monetized APIs has created significant challenges for businesses—but it has also set the stage for accessing and organizing the world’s information. This lightning talk traces our journey from the invention of the browser to the arms race of scraping for data and access to it to the dawn of AI agents, showing how the challenges of today opened the door to tomorrow. See how technologies refined by the web scraping community are combining with large language models to create practical alternatives to costly API integrations. From the rise of platform monopolies to the emergence of AI agents, this timeline-based exploration will help you understand where we've been, where we are, and where we're heading. Join us for a glimpse of how AI agents are enabling a return to the era of free information with ""the web as the API.

Tags: #agents #ai #internet #llms #web #webdev

The Silicon Valley Stack Doesn’t Work Here: Why Africa Will Lead the Post-Bloat Web | by Paul Allies | Dec, 2025 | Medium

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 23:54:50 +0000

While the West builds for the 1%, Africa has the opportunity — and the necessity — to lead the world in building for the next billion users. We don’t need to catch up to their bloated standards; we need to leapfrog them. By embracing a “back-to-basics” approach — prioritising Server-Side Rendering (SSR), lightweight libraries, and “Offline-First” architectures — Africa can become the global hub for the sustainable, lean web.

Tags: #africa #internet #tech #webdev

I sell onions on the Internet - Deep South Ventures

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 20:23:36 +0000

I’m Peter Askew, and I sell onions on the internet.

Tags: #ecommerce #internet #onions #web

Creating a static website for all my bookmarks – alexwlchan

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:19:04 +0000

I’m storing more and more of my data as static websites, and about a year ago I switched to using a local, static site to manage my bookmarks. It’s replaced Pinboard as the way I track interesting links and cool web pages. I save articles I’ve read, talks I’ve watched, fanfiction I’ve enjoyed.

Tags: #archive #bookmarks #internet #social #webdev

The Internet forgets, but I don’t want to – alexwlchan

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:17:57 +0000

If there’s something online you care about and wouldn’t want to lose, save your own copy. The history of the Internet tells us that it will almost certainly disappear at some point.

Tags: #archive #internet #social #webdev

Being of the Web – CogDogBlog

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:51:06 +0000

If you are “of” the web, you are doing things that make content available, leaving it there, making it findable. Twitter takes place “on” the web (and elsewhere) but the older rings of growth die off as the search is only able to return just the newest few weeks of stuff. Twitter thus creates debris rings of dead web content.

Tags: #internet #web #webdev

The indie web is here to make the internet weird again | The Verge

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 21:29:35 +0000

Depending on how social media changes over the next few years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more people leave and give the indie web a try. Much like vinyl, it will probably never return to its peak like in the pre-Yahoo GeoCities days, but I think there will continue to be a consistent group of people who flock to this side of the internet to escape the modern internet.

Tags: #indie #indieweb #internet #webdev

How to use the internet, 1995 - YouTube

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 05:42:46 +0000

Computer consultant Cory Doctorow predicts video on demand while showing a CBC reporter some of the new medium's features. Aired on CBC's The National on June 19, 1995.

Tags: #cbc #doctorow #history #internet #retro

u/Quick_Butterfly_4571 passionately explains why geeky 80’s kids are confused with ChatGPT : r/bestof

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 19:10:20 +0000

So, it is the vernacular of the first globally connected generation of kids, who — working in tandem and free from constraints, oversight, or rules — developed an epistolary style designed to facilitate belonging by wire to communities that were virtual and spread across the globe. To connect with other lonely oddballs who were thrilled to discuss geeky things. It is the first ever, democratically developed, global, epistolary style and the first consistent style developed in the age of the internet for the internet. We also drew boobs and said vulger things and developed new ways of slinging insults and enraging each other. Like, it wasn't a utopia.

Tags: #bbs #chatgpt #genx #history #internet #retro #writing

Some context on why some 80's kids keep getting mistaken for GPT

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 19:09:04 +0000

So, when you got online, you pulled or copied or saved all your messages, drafted up what was...essentially an essay of a response — trying to anticipate follow up questions or points of confusion. You planned it ahead of time. You studied your ass off to equip yourself with knowledge in the hopes of getting some replies off the same day you read them (it sounds stupid now, but that was fucking incredible — send and receive a letter same day!? Eesh. I am getting old). Also, because communication was fast, but our time was limited, it was more like faster letters at first than it was like texts. It was a horror to waste round trips on misunderstandings — the person you were collaborating with might only get online Wednesday afternoons. If you were ambiguous, you might waste a whole week of progress just by not being clear! So, we were explicit.

Tags: #bbs #chatgpt #genx #history #internet #retro #writing

The death of Glitch, the birth of Slack

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 20:27:20 +0000

Glitch was an unusual, clever, heartfelt game. Within the realm of Ur, dreamt by eleven magical Giants, players created playful new identities for themselves. They designed and clothed their avatars to their heart’s content, delighting in new hats and a rainbow of possible skin tones. They crafted working music boxes and decorated their architecturally-unlikely homes.

Tags: #flickr #glitch #history #internet #retro #slack #web #yahoo