Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)

check it out: https://web.archive.org/web/20060117004220/http://reddit.com/

if you look at a lot of this stuff now, it’ll be assigned to a subreddit called “/r/reddit.com”

i had signed up to see if I am a match, which i would have donated if i had been selected. please show me where i mentioned actually donating bone marrow.

a lot of people aren’t old enough to remember that when the digg exodus happened, reddit didn’t even have subreddits yet. it was just links on one page, and we built our little subculture in the comments of each thread. that’s why there is such a culture of commenting before reading the article (if at all) — it used to be a big, disorganized blob of chatty nonsense, much like Fark or MetaFilter were at the time too.

reddit is a lovely example of how tech companies from 1995 to 2020 fell into success and figured out what their product does later down the line. to quote homer simpson when asked what his tech company does, “we’re a website that sells computers… or… a computer that sells websites, I haven’t decided yet.”

i actually knew one of these powerusers in the early 2010s. he had leukemia, and i signed up to be a match to donate spinal marrow for him. i visited him in the hospital a bunch. he hasn’t acknowledged me since. that was a real bummer, but, i tend to see friends where they don’t exist so that might be on me.

i am a little bummed that i got permabanned just because i was so close to all of the reddit founders and early employees. i personally prevented alexis from getting arrested for trying to openly smoke weed on the street in pittsburgh when it was still the kind of thing that got you put in prison for a few years if your skin is darker than popcorn.

steve huffman in particular is a shitter and always has been. think of that kid you knew growing up who would make up that his dad worked at SEGA and that Goku was going to be in the next Sonic game — that’s spez, still, to this day. he is “mr. namedropper.” steve, genuinely, i do not care that you saw Beyoncé at the airport.

ETA: since people are being weird about phrasing, i signed up to be a match. his alias back then was Dacvac. i literally sat in bars and watched him mod /r/pics on an iPad. believe me or don’t, i’m just some schmoe online after all.

I am a professional designer with two decades of experience and I gotta admit, you’re smoking crack if you think GIMP (the project that is almost entirely held back by its stupid name) is superior to Photoshop.

It might be able to get the job done for small tasks, but it is not a serious tool for serious people. I’m sorry. I’m as pro-FLOSS as anyone can get, and even I recognize that right now there’s just no competition in the design department. Affinity is Mac-only, and comes with its own problematic aspects.

Meshtastic, baby!!

All my IT and InfoSec friends have called me alarmist for suggesting even the possibility of a GFW of America, but every day that passes, it looks more and more likely to happen, doesn’t it?

Start practicing circumvention techniques now, y’all, while it’s still legal and cheap to do so. Learn amateur radio. Learn Meshtastic. Learn all the different censorship-resistant VPN technology out there. Host your own websites or services for friends, family, or your community. It doesn’t make it impossible, but it does make it hard, and fascism is nothing if not lazy.

Google Pixel 9 Pofessional. It’s the slightly cheaper version, on account that it got a little burned at the factory.

I guess, but you will lead a lonely life if you can’t find common struggle with people in different scenarios than our own. We can easily lose our soul with these endless purity tests — for some reason, Leftists, progressives, and liberals seem to be constantly on the lookout for the next Jesus Christ, who will just simply energize voters by consequence of, I dunno, magic or some shit.

Neil Young is still a working musician who needs to get his face and music in front of as wide and as general of an audience as possible — why wouldn’t they be where people are? That’s what makes this stand so important. Homie needs Facebook and Insta and still said no.

Well, it’s not like Ted Nugent is writing any new music. He probably doesn’t have anything better to do anyway.

YouTube blew up the year I went to college and got access to a T3 line. 🤤 My school had pretty robust security, but it was policy-based. Turns out, if you are on Linux and can’t run the middleware, it would just go “oh you must be a printer, c’mon in!”

I crashed the entire network twice, so I fished a computer out of the trash in my parents’ neighborhood, put Arch and rtorrrent on it, and would just pipe my traffic via SSH to that machine. :p

Ah, and the short era of iTunes music sharing… Good memories.

Ah I am not sure. I just assumed it was W3C.

My unpopular opinion is that Flash was perhaps one of the greatest media standards of all time. Think about it — in 2002, people were packaging entire 15 minute animations with full audio and imagery, all encapsulated in a single file that could play in any browser, for under 10mb each. Not to mention, it was one of the earliest formats to support streaming. It used vectors for art, which meant that a SWF file would look just as good today on a 4k screen as it did in 2002.

It only became awful once we started forcing it to be stuff it didn’t need to be, like a Web design platform, or a common platform for applets. This introduced more and more advanced versions of scripting that continually introduced new vulnerabilities.

It was a beautiful way to spread culture back when the fastest Internet anyone could get was 1 MB/sec.

Honestly it’s a little staggering how much better web video got after the W3C got fed up with Flash and RealPlayer and finally implemented some more efficient video and native video player standards.

<video> was a revolution.

i am old in terms of internet years, and Bill Gates really is living proof that billionaires can essentially destroy the lives of thousands and thousands of people to gather their wealth, and then spend the autumn of their years choosing which countries or causes get a splash-out of the unfathomable excess, like a little kinglet.

i am happy his money helped fix stuff in the world. but that’s called “catching up to what has been expected of you for 60 years.” he does not get a cookie for working out of the Andrew Carnegie playbook.

the mergers & acquisitions leviathan eats yet another beautiful thing, just like it ate my precious linode.

i just wanted to drop my personal favorite self-hosted git alternative, Gogs (gogs.io). i have very modest git needs (i just need a place to host code and interact with the git client), and i think it fits the bill well.

i am not associated with it at all, i just want folks to know that self-hosting your own git service has really never been easier or better; there are so many good options, like a similar project, gitea.

if you are uncomfortable with exposing your home network to the internet, you can use tools like tailscale funnel or a reverse proxy server like caddy and a $5 VPS from any cloud host of your choosing to obscure your home IP, while still keeping the storage and the brains somewhere closeby.

imo, the only way forward for all of us to stay safe is to keep repeating a simple mantra: “let’s go back to making websites.”

If you say so. I’m just trying to be helpful instead of offering scare quotes.

There is a cool self-hosted version of Perplexity out there now, called Perplexica. It can be configured to use Ollama (local inferencing) and your own, self-hosted SearXNG instance to do the actual search and collation.

I have been using it for a week and it really works.

Funkwhale works nice, but honestly, I am a big fan of just using mpd and piping the audio over a networked speaker, but I’m a simple boy with simple needs.