The World’s Last Internet Cafes - I featured this article in last week's newsletter issue #125. In some ways it's strange that the internet cafe era is coming to an end because it feels like only yesterday to me that the trend had started. In reality though it's been a while since mobile phones have become pervasive. I hope we find a way to carry on the community aspect of these spaces. I know there are co-working spaces, but we also need spaces that aren't specifically for work, where the vibe is more casual. restofworld.org #
2023/08/01 #
Today’s links:
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The U.K. Government Is Very Close To Eroding Encryption Worldwide - There is a related argument in bitcoin that the base layer should be completely open so that you can see inflation bugs being exploited. With full privacy, the argument goes, you would never be able to discover the bad stuff going on. I'm undecided on this topic, I can see reasons for both. I'd like to know which would be better in a scenario where people needed to escape enslavement? If you were enslaved by people who were using encryption, would you want backdoors? Also isn't it a moot point if it's possible to enslave people in the open? Isn't the at infiniti scenerio for allowing encryption backdoors something like that bizare film where people are secretly inhabiting John Malcovich's consciousness? Except with AI it would happen to everyone all at once, and then who knows, like a massive consciousness traffic jam apocalypse of race conditions. What is the one thing that absolutely has to be solved by this technological decision? I would have thought averting enslavement, but are there even worse scenarios? It's such a difficult problem.www.eff.org #
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Is Jamstack Officially Finished? - Brian Rinaldi looks at the current state of the Jamstack movement. The thing I liked about the Jamstack movement was that it gave a name to static file websites, but made it a bit grander, so you could imagine a whole ecosystem of futuristic technologies. The important thing was no longer the database it was the code repository. It seems to me that repos are a more stable building block, because ultimately it's just files. That doesn't mean databases are bad, and actually it's a great idea to use databases in your setup, but the focus is on the repo. Around the repo you can build a whole lot more than just the website. It would be great if there was a term that communicated this idea, because 'static sites' doesn't really do that, whereas 'Jamstack', even though it's imperfect, sort of kind of vaguely does. remotesynthesis.com #
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My Journey Away from the JAMstack - Jared White replies to Brian's piece. He goes into a lot of detail, highlighting that the term Jamstack became so broad as to not mean anything. It just got way too confusing. This part rings true to me - "What Netlify gave us originally was a vision of how to deploy HTML-first websites easily via git commits and pushes". It's about git, files and repos everything else flows from that. The database is an enhancenent. www.spicyweb.dev #