Modern Web Woes - I'm mad at the internet

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TieRod said:
Recently I felt a desire to look up the Official Food Pyramid again to see what Trump did to it. Most of the results dump me onto realfood.gov featuring a series of angry text with a nigger telling me that America has a problem. I then noticed, that this is actually a Super Bowl ad. Something about this didn't seem right.. So I did some digging around, and found out this whole setup was created by the " National Design Studio " , some new office Trump created at ndstudio.gov . Wikipedia says the NDS was created by Airbnb co-founder and board member Joe Gebbia, who was introduced to the job through the Department of Government Efficiency. A super bowl ad runs like $10 million and this doesn't seem like an efficient use of my federal income taxes.

I am doing some more digging on this and finding a lot of strange (((connections))) that shouldn't surprise anyone who knows to check Early Life first. I was well aware that Trump and Musk were twitter-fying the US government but completely changing typescripts and forcing nu-web bullshit on all US gov't promotional campaigns is distressing. This was already a problem with Obama and Biden, but this is next level slop.

I will probably make a thread devoted to this when I have enough stuff screenshotted and backed up. This shit reeks. It's radioactive glownigger cringe and i dont like it
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Halfway through 2025 is when a lot of shit started to glow for me and things didn't seem right with this Trump admin.
 
TieRod said:
I am doing some more digging on this and finding a lot of strange (((connections))) that shouldn't surprise anyone who knows to check Early Life first. I was well aware that Trump and Musk were twitter-fying the US government but completely changing typescripts and forcing nu-web bullshit on all US gov't promotional campaigns is distressing. This was already a problem with Obama and Biden, but this is next level slop.
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We went through a similar thing decades ago with robo-caller spam. At first these scam and phishing services would cold and spam call every single number trying to get people to waste their money on whatever the fraud was. Then they started using publicly listed numbers paired with names to fool people further. And instead of the government regulating or criminalizing these calls they decided to co-opt them and have political robo-calling spam all year round.

Now we have a President posting A.I. slop every day using social media.
 
The Robo-Call situation annoys me more. Instead of fixing it, the government just chose to shut down the POTS instead. It started with Obama's 5G plans, and he told everyone (like my parents) that everyone would be happily "transitioned". For most, that was getting a letter from AT&T telling them their line is getting physically cut off and their end of service date. Then Trump came in and, instead of reversing it, he completely stepped on them and now their entire rural mountain town has 0 phone or network hookups. Everyone was told to go get a Starlink as if 80+ seniors who can't figure out a DMV Kiosk can do that. Millions of people voted for Trump so he would STOP the california tech takeover, not enable it.

A different path was possible. Past tense. People don't trust their phones anymore. It's increasingly the same for cars and it's the same "transition" excuses. My parents aren't trannies. They're in their 80s and have a difficult time finding Start and Run through all the Windows ads. I could rant further about the amount of times I've seen an older person just get completely lost in Microsoft AI Menus (what I call Bing/Gemini/Siri -assisted slop chats) trying to find where their USB drive is. So guess what happens when your car needs to update, and the driver doesn't have a cell phone or punches in an AT&T Rural Service Provider (10-10-321) number. The whole thing immediately chokes, breaks, and we told to take an Uber ..which requires a Smartphone.

This isn't a problem for younger people, but Trump was asked to stop this or at least improve the deal. Some of these people are still on New Deal era Rural Phone Service poles, which the government doesn't even keep records of anymore. This is what gets me the most worried.

oh, and I found this piece of truly ancient history. 28 years old and, thanks to the Internet, might as well be talking about classical greece or some other lost civilization:





All of this will be destroyed about four years from now when 5G happens. When the FCC re-allocates the spectrum again, they're probably also going to make changes to PTSN regulations to allow 6G planning to begin. 6G is the actual human microchips, connected medical devices, smart cars (eg, electronic plates/tags .. and plate scanning) etc. Obama really started all this and I know many people in real life who were counting on Trump to stop it.
 
TieRod said:
People don't trust their phones anymore. It's increasingly the same for cars and it's the same "transition" excuses.
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This is a bit of an aside, but related.

There was an old car guy talking about what he called "mechanically totalled cars". This is where basic maintenance/repairs become uneconomical. He videoed himself walking through a scrap yard, and there were many new vehicles (less than 5 years old) that were "mechanically totalled" because very basic things had gone wrong with them, outside of warranty, that are too expensive to repair.

This is exactly what happened to me. I had a modernish car (2012), and the number of electronics failures was driving me up the wall. Every single failure on the vehicle was due to sensors. Each sensor is £200-£300.
The final failure where I said 'fuck it' was when I had the front driver's side headlight bulb blow out. What should have been a £50 bulb replacement turned into requiring a new light cluster for my vehicle, costing £1900. The entire vehicle was worth £1500-£2500, and then it had to have a computer pair the lights to the vehicle at the dealership because it required calibration, which I cannot do myself.

Because of this experience, I bought an old Land Rover which can be repaired indefinitely. There are no digital electronics (other than the radio I fitted) and no ECUs.
The electronical problems I do have can be fixed with a can of contact cleaner or a soldering iron.
TieRod said:
So guess what happens when your car needs to update, and the driver doesn't have a cell phone or punches in an AT&T Rural Service Provider (10-10-321) number. The whole thing immediately chokes, breaks, and we told to take an Uber ..which requires a Smartphone.
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All of this infrastructure is so fragile and prone to failure. There are often no fallback mechanisms or redundancy. e.g., Jeep bricked their 4x4s with an over-the-air update. I don't understand how an update to an infotainment system could ever be allowed to interfere with the core functionality of the vehicle.
 
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Paul Revere Pantry Raider said:
CANBUS is fickle despite it's design to not be, and it's been around for a couple of decades. It wasn't unheard of a rogue radio pissing off ABS around 2004.
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This is why I bought a vehicle with nothing but analogue electronics from the 1960s/70s that I can repair myself. I just got fed up with weird problems I couldn't fix unless I had a specialised computer. All I need most of the time is a £10 multimeter I bought at Aldi. If you try to explain this to any of the EV absolutists, you will get funny looks.

I read this article on HN sometime last year. According to this most of these companies don't own the whole software stack, and thus they are having a bunch of issues integrating all the tech together. I frequently found this, BTW, when having to deal with parts of the stack I don't own on a normal software engineering project. Almost all of the pain points are from parts of the stack I don't own.
 
TieRod said:
6G is the actual human microchips, connected medical devices, smart cars (eg, electronic plates/tags .. and plate scanning) etc.
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Prediction:
6G is going to have a stupidly short range, be terribly unreliable, but be "good enough" to replace 4G. Then they are going to reuse 4G bands but make slight changes to the protocol that 4G uses. These changes will inceease speed and carrier capacity by at most 10% but it will also use more power, have a shorter range, and be incompatible with most older devices. This will also be called 6G, and it will regain enough of 4G's lost functionality to keep most people happy.
 
⚞⛇⚟ said:
Prediction:
6G is going to have a stupidly short range, be terribly unreliable, but be "good enough" to replace 4G. Then they are going to reuse 4G bands but make slight changes to the protocol that 4G uses. These changes will inceease speed and carrier capacity by at most 10% but it will also use more power, have a shorter range, and be incompatible with most older devices. This will also be called 6G, and it will regain enough of 4G's lost functionality to keep most people happy.
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This description is 4G -> 5G. The 6G rollout will probably be better for pre-6G devices, which will only be 5G devices exclusively. 4G is basically gone anyway, at least if you go far enough outside town where all the 4G towers were, litterally, torn down because their (((owners))) are too cheap to rent poles from AT&T and the past five Presidents deregulated utility poles.

6G's problems are all the Smart Devices Stuff which it is explicitly designed to do. Instead of connecting your smart devices (doorbell, glucose monitor, ankle bracelet, credit card, car) to the network through apps (ring, dexcom, scram, klarna, tesla) the 6G network chip will do it automatically. Which means it cannot be shut off. 6G is explicitly made for implants, off the top of my head Tractive (for animals), Nx2me (dialysis) and MyCareLink (aka Medtronic pacemakers) which will send life-saving medical information directly to Drs or anyone else without any ability to shut them off besides tinfoil hats.

This is where it won't always work, and people will probably die. Much like most car crashes (see Nader v. GM), Google's monopoly, Facebook allowing children to upload photos, and most AI any harm will be labelled as Necessary For Progress. The technology won't be fully fleshed out until 7G in the 2040s. By then, your car will have a 6G chip, 6G IMEI, and mandatory registration to an (((ISP))) for registration to the DMV. Any criticism of this will be closed.

Relating back to the thread's actual topic: The "National Design Studio" 's ("" because it's their current operating name, this WILL be changed to obfuscate facts later) exists to make all pre-DOGE, pre-Trump online .gov information archaic and broken by design. If your smartphone can't even read old pre-NDS websites most people won't. There is also the explicit psychological trick to condition people to accept all NDS-compliant sites as Truth and reject all non-NDS compliant .gov sites. This happens with old people who are used to a simple, pre-Trump (and 10 years ago, pre-Obama) web interface just to have it completely changed into some sort of flashy tik-tok twitter queer lookin' signboard. If old people can be tricked then they're not too far off from adapting this and tricking many more people too. This is where AI can be used to introduce fake videos, fake announcements, and literal actual fake ideas. See Trump's recent "alien visit" Truth Social post. ((((People)))) (if we can call these creatures human) like Gebbia want the entire government reduced to this. Something (((they))) can completely control.

Personally, I am of the opinion that official .gov websites should look and appear professional, and assume the user is literate enough to read at a 9th grade level. NDS-compliant sites, as far as I can tell, don't assume literacy past 3rd grade. It is visual slop and it is turning the entire government into a literal TV show, with each government basically being differently themed Departments under a single Government Media Brand. Trump is not the first to do this, and he's not the first to force me to look at blacks, but he is the first to assume the User is Viewing Content and not Reading. I do wonder about the WWE and McMahon angles in all this, which is more research for another day.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
'90s internet: slow but "Wild West" and very decentralized and unique

'00s internet: fast and still "Wild West-y" but start of centralizing

in ClownWorld: almost all centralized... increasing "verification" BS

in DemonWorld: all centralized... need to provide ID to merely use it
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Hot take: The wild west part of the Internet still exists, this site, for example, but this huge normie web that dwarfs the wild west web has sprung up since the late 2000s launch of Facebook and the iPhone. While they're running in parallel, the wild west part is shrinking and aging, because many new users who would be interested in shit posting just use centralized sites like X, Discord and Reddit. Most young people who make their way to the Wild West Internet these days are autistic young men who fall into two categories that are too much of a liability for mainstream sites:

1) Furries flocking to services like Neocities and a surprisingly large number of XenForo forums. Literally 18 - 19 year old puppy dog femboys, sending each other pictures of themselves in pantyhose and shit and probably fucking each other, IDK. These are your people posting Gameboy Studio made furry sex simulators to sites like itch.io, but also seemingly heavily involved in stuff like developing classic game decomps and emulators. Byuu was way too old to be in this group, but same energy.

2) A mix of incels and incel ajacents who got booted off other platforms because they like to larp as conservatives and fedpost a bit too hard. They think only 10% of men their age have sex and blame hypergamy or some shit and if you say they're wrong they post the same 10 infographics over and over. A lot of these are groypers.

Both these groups hate each other, but the reality is they are two sides of the same coin. It just depends on the way the tism hits you.
 
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I had to hack something together really quick for our internal network at work. Basically if you're on our office wifi, you can scan a code on the wall and it connects your to a simple self hosted website that allows you to take a picture of a piece of paper and it's emailed to a computer that runs a script that sorts it into a folder on the company file server based on the date it's submitted.

It rendered fine in Chrome. It rendered fine in Firefox. But good god, what is going on with the HTML form elements in Safari on IOS? I had to make all the actual buttons invisible and use highly stylized labels to make it readable.
 
Never Scored said:
I had to hack something together really quick for our internal network at work. Basically if you're on our office wifi, you can scan a code on the wall and it connects your to a simple self hosted website that allows you to take a picture of a piece of paper and it's emailed to a computer that runs a script that sorts it into a folder on the company file server based on the date it's submitted.

It rendered fine in Chrome. It rendered fine in Firefox. But good god, what is going on with the HTML form elements in Safari on IOS? I had to make all the actual buttons invisible and use highly stylized labels to make it readable.
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Safari on iOS has a lot of rendering bugs. I used to work as a support dev for a large website back in 2014. I build another website for the same company 8 years later. Every single iOS bug was still present that I was fixing back in 2014.
 
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