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made you look

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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2024

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  • Then don’t get me started about how the www subdomain itself no longer makes sense. I get that the system was designed long before HTTP and the WWW took over the internet as basically the default, but if we had known that in advance it would’ve made sense to not try to push www in front of all website domains throughout the 90"s and early 2000’s.

    I have never understood why you can delegate a subdomain but not the root domain, I doubt it was a technical issue because they added support for it recently via SVCB records (But maybe technical concerns were actually fixed in the decades since)



  • They’re “file like” in the sense that they’re exposed as an fd, but they’re not exposed via the filesystem at all (Unlike e.g. unix sockets), and the existing API is just mapped over the sockets one (i.e. write() instead of send(), read() instead of recv()). There’s also a difference in how you create them, you open() a file, but connect() a socket, etc.

    (As an aside, it turns out Bash has its own virtual file-based wrapper around sockets, so you can do things like cat a remote port with Bash, something you can do natively in Plan 9)

    Really it just shows that “everything is a file” didn’t stand up in practice, there’s more stuff that needs special treatment than doesn’t (e.g. Interacting with TTYs also has special APIs). It makes more sense to have a better dedicated API than a generic catch-all one.




  • Existing JPEG files (which are the vast, vast majority of images currently on the web and in people’s own libraries/catalogs) can be losslessly compressed even further with zero loss of quality. This alone means that there’s benefits to adoption, if nothing else for archival and serving old stuff.

    Funny thing is, there was talk on the Chrome bug tracker of using just this ability transparently at the HTTP layer (like gzip/brotli compression), but they’re so set on pushing their AVIF format that they backed away from it.



  • What’s the problem with that, though? Systems like that are pretty much guaranteed to be isolated from the internet.

    Because things break down eventually, and when it comes time to buy replacement parts you discover that they’re effectively impossible to find. Then instead of having a nice, planned transition period you’ve got like a weekend to cobble together something to get it working again.