Exactly. Some people don't have anything to say, and don't care about writing either. They just want attention, clicks/views, ad money, or followers. Others are passionate about something and want to share that passion, or just want to write for their own sake and it's just a bonus if someone else gets anything out of it.
As the internet fills with slop, it'll only get harder to find the people who actually care about what they're putting online and not just the views or the ad revenue which is a shame because those are the types of people who make the internet interesting.
This is true for simple UDP, but reliable transports are often built over UDP.
As with anything in computing, there are trade-offs between the approaches. One example is QUIC now widespread in browsers.
MoldUDP64 is used by various exchanges (that's NASDAQ's name, others do something close). It's a simple UDP protocol with sequence numbers; works great on quality networks with well-tuned receivers (or FPGAs). This is an old-school blog article about the earlier MoldUDP:
Another is Aeron.io, which is a high-performance messaging system that includes a reliable unicast/multicast transport. There is so much cool stuff in this project and it is useful to study. I saw this deep-dive into the Aeron reliable multicast protocol live and it is quite good, albeit behind a sign-up.
Strictly speaking, you can put any protocol on top of UDP, including a copy of TCP...
But I took parent's question as "should I be using UDP sockets instead of TCP sockets". Once you invent your new protocol instead of UDP or on top of it, you can have any features you want.
I would not understand the last two sentences. Sidle? Tromp? I don't think I've seen these words enough times for them to register in my mind.
"Strode", I would probably understand after a few seconds of squeezing my brain. I mean, I sort of know "stride", but not as an action someone would take. Rather as the number of bytes a row of pixels takes in a pixel buffer. I would have to extrapolate what the original "daily English" equivalent must have been.
English is hard, even for native speakers. But it's also wonderful! English loves to steal words from other languages, and good writers love to choose the right word. It's like having an expansive wardrobe and picking just the right outfit for every event.
Bad writers, of course, pick a word to make them seem smarter (which, of course, often fails). That's what the OP was complaining about: using a fancy word just to impress.
But "stride" is not just a fancy version of "walk". When a person strides they are taking big steps; their head is held high, and they are confident in who they are and where they're going.
"Sidle" is the opposite. A person who sidles is timid and meek; they walk slowly, or maybe sideways, hoping that no one will notice them.
And "tromp," of course, sounds like something heavy and dour. A person who tromps stamps their feet with every step; you hear them coming. They are angry or maybe clumsy and graceless.
> English is hard, even for native speakers. But it's also wonderful! English loves to steal words from other languages, and good writers love to choose the right word. It's like having an expansive wardrobe and picking just the right outfit for every event.
Very true. Take this passage:
‘I am called Strider,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Master – Underhill, if old Butterbur got your name right.’
In an early draft Tolkien used a different word as the character was originally a hobbit, rather than a long-legged Ranger:
‘I’m Trotter,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Mr — Hill, if old Barnabas had your name right?’
You can always choose uncommon more descriptive words
In spanish you could say "repare algo" ("I fixed") or "parapetee algo" ("I Jury-rigged") and plenty would not know of the cuff what the second one means
People either know, look it up or figure it out via context
- Hosting a website is not so easy for the average person, even the tech savvy person, specially if you try to learn it now using the way large websites are developed.
- Static site blogs lack interactivity: people can't comment on your blog. You have to post a link to Twitter or HN (here!) and interact with people over there.
- Static site blogs also don't usually let people "subscribe" by email or whatnot, so unless people bookmark your website or follow you on Twitter, they are not going to find your content.
P.S. this is a problem area I'm trying to work on, at least on the technical front.
I would counter your three assertions with a few thoughts:
- there are now literally thousands of ways to host personal websites, even if we’re not in the LiveJournal age anymore
- there are also several services out there to host comments (many of which I tried over the years before I realized the absence of comments was a feature, not a bug)
- RSS is still a thing. Very much so. My site publishes a full RSS feed, and I have at least as many individual RSS GET requests as for the rest of my site, bar the homepage.
The counterpoint is that not having the ability to comment means that the author avoids the anxiety of not having anyone comment on their blog. Or worse still, having to filter out the negative comments.
No comments are normal if no one can comment.
Personally I've learnt that anxiety removal leads to a healthy life.
There are also tools like giscus[1] which allow comments on static pages but only for folks logged in on third party services - such as github in the case of giscus.
> - Static site blogs lack interactivity: people can't comment on your blog. You have to post a link to Twitter or HN (here!) and interact with people over there.
This is not really an issue at all, more like a feature. Posts that provoke discussion or are otherwise interesting get HN discussions. Posts that don't get traction also don't require a comment field. Free moderation and signal boosting.
I'd also recommend putting an email address on the website (but not your main address). That also tends to promote high-quality engagement with readers directly.
> Hosting a website is not so easy for the average person, even the tech savvy person, specially if you try to learn it now using the way large websites are developed.
It's easier then ever. Shared hosting with cPanel has enabled anyone including my mother to host a website, blog or whatever.
A blog doesn't need to be an abstraction of JavaScript libraries and frameworks tucked behind Cloudflare. Just make a CRUD application and you have a blog. It yes requires knowledge but it's not hard. With LLMs now running the internet it's even easier than before.
Nice story but the places I've seen that make use of services, there's never a "1 server -> 1 team". It's more like 20 services distributed among 3 teams, and some services are "shared" by all teams
I think it was around 2015 when everything was basically AWS and Kubernetes
The turning point might have been Heroku? Prior to Heroku, I think people just assumed you deploy to a VPS. Heroku taught people to stop thinking about the production environment so much.
I think people were so inspired by it and wanted to mimic it for other languages. It got more people curios about AWS.
Ironically, while the point of Heroku was to make deployment easy and done with a single command, the modern deployment story on cloud infrastructure is so complicated most teams need to hold a one hour meeting with several developers "hands on deck" and going through a very manual process.
So it might seem counter intuitive to suggest that the trend was started by Heroku, because the result is the exact opposite of the inspiration.
We need a kernel native distributed file system so that we can build distributed storage/databases on top of it.
This is like building an operating system on top of a browser.