Yep, try writing a Gemini client, I just did, it feels well.

For easy things this comes up in Google https://tcljava.sourceforge.net/docs/website/index.html . I was playing with LEGO TBH. EDIT: … in those years

Yes. In 2001. Not just proper design of all the system and all the solutions in it was possible, it was there in flesh, and it was on the market, and it was visible, and the world went the other route.

Literally all of it, engineers sometimes can design logically complete systems, and great engineers sometimes do that with amazingly enormous systems, and one of such people took part in inception of BSD Unix, Internet, RISC and Java, all of them. How the Web should function has already been thought through.

TBH in my childhood I complained about Java applications being slow though.

But with a typical modern website that complaint seems dishonest in retrospective.

OK, I guess I’m just blabbering because of boredom.

A cross-platform environment for applications where fetching them is conveniently automated is not a bad thing.

Using something not intended for that goal is a bad thing. And making it the same thing as the Web.

I’m also confident that Sun went under because of overestimating the pace of industry development, but not its logical direction. When Java was only in the making, it was intended for this exact purpose. Cross-platform, easy development, transparent internals, all that. Designed for it to be possible to make a JVM for almost anything.

It’s so unfair really, they should have won before failing. They are going to win with nobody understanding they won.

In countries like SK or even Japan I’d consider the opportunity that it’s not bribes, just culture. Where average Western European person thinks pluralism is good because of living and letting live, average Middle-Eastern person thinks pluralism is good because it makes their enemies complacent, and average SE Asian person thinks it’s bad because we need order. One can add average Central-Eastern Europeans thinking monopoly can be deserved and it’s practically better if morally worse.

OK, a bunch of stereotypes, sorry.

Try Tk. It’ll be faster or as fast as that, I guarantee that.

I really don’t miss Flash,

Standardized “Flash”, well-sandboxed and separated from the browser itself as it was, would be a good idea though.

to reinvent the ActionScript3 environment and make the entire web depend on it.

Unfortunately the separation part they “solved”.

All these new features exist because websites replaced every single program most people used. Web browser now have to be capable of doing anything pretty well.

Which means that simple cross-platform scripting languages with graphical abilities should have been more popularized.

I discovered tcl/tk for myself recently and it’s just wonderful. A 12 years old me would be capable to learn it, if I knew about it.

What the web browser does well is a sandbox to protect you from all the tits and dicks and “pay us 42 bitcoins” messages. People are afraid of running programs from random sources, but not of visiting random webpages.

So the products they need are a simplified web browser and a sandboxed environment for running things downloaded from it. What we have. Just separated, cause the former is too important to be affected by customer requirements of the latter.

While true, some things we want to simplify are sometimes as simple as they can be.

But saying that, I’m thinking of Java, not of the Web. Java is really a wonderful creation.

Just - sometimes when learning new things I understand that yes, I was right and some thing is too complex and it’s just that, but sometimes that it’s optimal and the “simple” way is even more complex.

IMHO the Web solves two goals, which should be separated. Global hypertext services and serving applications executed on client in a sandbox. The latter is far more complex and demanding for security and efficiency and features, but the former is far more important socially.

Maybe the former should rely upon a simpler and easier technology, like Gemini, and the latter be a kind of applications like an address book or a 2FA application. Where you see a list of imported connections, press “run”, and then over a standard protocol fetch the actual executable application to run in a sandbox. What the Web in practice already is for most people, untied from a global hypertext system. So that we’d have both.

I mean, it’s pretty normal to open magnet links in a different application, or download an RDP connection file and open it in an RDP client.

OK, my brain is asleep.

So I spent two days hacking together a Gemini client script in tcl/tk. It’s near 700 lines already, some of those are dead weight (client certs, stuck cause pki module in tcllib doesn’t know of hashing algorithms newer than sha256), but it’s usable for reading pages, viewing images, saving either and answering prompts, with basic history. A fully functional client is supposed to be doable in 1-2 days in like 200 lines of code in something. So it’s a clumsy mess.

And yes, it feels like it’s a lot of what we need web for. Suppose I got client certs working and this were a Gemini service. I’d follow a link saying “post something”, I’d type this comment into a prompt and send the request, and on the next update it would be here, right under CN from my client cert used as nickname. One could have such links under every comment. One could build threads.

So maybe yes.

Russia and China are not communism btw. :shocked Pikachu:

Still ruled by descendants of communists who took power in those countries, though.

Strong deja vu with Russia. I thought the expansion strategy of Putin’s relatives\friends won’t prove successful in other places.

OK, nothing new, these things were in every second movie from 1960s-now touching upon power and governments and mafia. Just something went wrong, either in the balance or we see more.

Perhaps, in part, because the power disparity between military, police, and a civilian gun owner makes personal guns little more than display pieces.

So it’s better to let it grow more, right?

Gun ownership is a hobby. Most of the dialogue around them is theater. Those who enjoy guns own far more than is needed for ‘defense’, because it’s enjoying ownership that they’re actually defending.

That’s obvious, hard to do a lot of what you don’t enjoy if you can avoid it. Of course it’s theater. Most of the dialogue around karate is theater. It still somewhat prepares one physically for various events.

I wrote a Gemini (small web) client in the last 2 days, of course it’s theater, I don’t have a modus of using Gemini yet, but it was useful. At least I have a client convenient for me personally, I’ve gained some experience (ok, it’s a simple task, but), some self-confidence.

With guns - of course it’s mostly a very cool toy, people also do historical fencing with swords. But they also learn things about military history and something about using small arms. Better than nothing, sniper rifles still have a place in warfare, even if typical “assault rifles” are almost like a bayonet in WWII, still has uses, but very secondary.

Learning is the root of any achievement. Learning is helped by joy. Why should this be different for defense?

Looks awesome on the photo, but I guess I have better uses for such money and night sky and trees for enjoying what I see.

Also lower refresh rates are not such a terrible problem when it’s not a CRT blinking in front of you.

Grainy look is kinda fine. That’s about the “compromises” part.

So a cheaper one I’d probably use. Being part of some dream computer to be useful in transport, while walking, at home, with battery life longer than nuclear fallout effects and unbreakable box and EOL date of the kind castles in Europe have. Otherwise nah, many other things to break my eyes against.

steals their life savings

Everything new is a forgotten old, Wallenstein’s turn.

But yeah, more such stories, more rougher reactions.

I think Lemmy public will reconsider their gun rights stance after a couple of years.

I dunno, but there were plenty of volunteers. Eastern Armenian is far from a dead language after all. Especially when comparing to Icelandic or Welsh. Those are awesome languages too, though, alongside Coptic and Assyrian.

Trying to help Duolingo add Armenian is something I’ve read about in 2018 or something like that, and it’s still there. They are very firmly not interested.

A bunch of USB sticks and external drives turned on and checked from time to time with rare files I need.

Walking along I guess. Bringing some tea.

Because it’s work compared to not wearing them. Something overloading you and not even getting any work done. But OK, everyone is different.

So they’ve killed themselves before adding Armenian.

Makes sense.