Danny O'Brien writes personal essays on technology, internet culture, copyright, and AI, along with pieces on mathematics such as Galois.
Commenters single out his Galois post as their favorite writing on the topic and pull quotes from his posts on online culture.
From what I gather from Oblomovka[1] [and based on my own memory of this period]:
It was a place where the primary early users of the Internet did not frequent, but could be something an ordinary person would be exposed to out of necessity. (Think, maybe some service that lets one send faxes via email; notably you'd need to create an account and spend money.) But, at some point, this reversed, and ordinary use cases dominate - online banking, e-commerce, school - such that even finding the original sort of content that comprised most of the Internet can be very difficult.[2]
As an example, cooking recipe websites in the early Internet contained cooking recipes - no stories, no SEO optimization - and then sometimes at the bottom of the page participated in some sort of link exchange with other recipe websites and perhaps a page hit counter. This was an Internet for the technologist, and one might find their way there from a BBS, IRC, email, word of mouth, or early search engines that naively indexed keywords, or you know, by surfing a webring. These sites seldom existed for any sort of commercial gain and were often a hobby project.
Today you could reasonably expect to find your way to a cooking recipe site via a search engine where each recipe has been SEO optimized with a nonsense story and you might be prompted to log in with Google or create an account to view the actual recipe. The target audience are the people who are the norm and would have been those visiting the…
Back in the day, I really enjoyed reading Nat Friedman's blog (yes, he of Novell/Ximian/MS/GitHub fame) about a broader system called Dashboard which provided a sort of live querying of your data based on activities you were performing at the time. It's mentioned on Slashdot at https://developers.slashdot.org/story/03/07/27/1849258/nat-demos-dashboard but sadly his blog does not appear to be archived anywhere.. if anyone has any more info on it, do share as I was fascinated by it at the time. Maybe once he has wrapped up at GitHub I could gently prod him about it.. :-)
(Found a blog post from 2003 where someone actually described it as "a system wide Rememberance Agent"! https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/07/12/nats-dashboard/)
Danny O'Brien has picked out a great quote on this issue:
> "It’s not about whether it’s porn or not porn. Those commenting on people’s supposed hypersensitivity to nudity or bodies are completely missing the point. It’s about presenting women as ‘the other,’ not ‘us.’ It would have been just as offensive if all the women shown were domineering mothers in aprons, shaking their fingers and threatening with rolling pins."
http://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2009/04/28/how-to-be-edgy/
Interesting comment quoted here: http://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2009/04/28/how-to-be-edgy/
It’s not about whether it’s porn or not porn. Those commenting on people’s supposed hypersensitivity to nudity or bodies are completely missing the point. It’s about presenting women as ‘the other,’ not ‘us.’ It would have been just as offensive if all the women shown were domineering mothers in aprons, shaking their fingers and threatening with rolling pins.
Danny O’Brien’s blog post A Touch of the Galois is my favorite writing on Galois,
> Flunked two colleges, fought to restore the Republic, imprisoned in the Bastille, and managed to scribble down the thoughts that would lead to several major fields of mathematics, before dying in a duel — either romantic or political — at the age of twenty.
https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2012/09/11/touch-of-the-galois/
Cute. I remember some anti-spam outfit trying to "protect" emails with a copyrighted poem in the headers: http://www.oblomovka.com/writing/habeas%3A_the_antispam_haiku.php3
I wonder how far back in OS(X) it dates?