I wouldn't call the old stuff social networks. What made social networks a new thing was the social graph of connections becoming the information architecture of the content rather than topics. You found stuff (or it found you) by person rather than subject.

Usenet was topic based (eg reddit seems closest these days), mail lists were usually topic based, forums were organised around topics etc.

I had forgotten just how much I hated that inescapable song in the 80s. Definitely close to my worst song ever. There's plenty of 80s pop that I've softened my views on as I got older and even started to grudgingly appreciate, but not "we built this city".

I don't think I'd even recognize a single Taylor Swift song. I plan to keep it that way, currently she's just a name and a face to me, knowing her music would probably only cause me to dislike her unfairly.

Eh. Swift isn't my cup of tea; you're much more likely to find me at an industrial metal show. However, she's crazy talented, and her music is well-produced and wildly catchy. She's really good at what she does.

Along those lines, I'd never pay to see Britney Spears perform, but "Toxic" goes hard.

Their music shouldn't make you dislike them. It's not objectively awful, not by a long shot. If anything, just acknowledge we're not the target audience and move on.

> She's really good at what she does.

I too try to avoid falling into the all-too-typical trope of reflexively hating on what's broadly popular just because it's popular. While I'm also not a big fan of Swift's music, I agree it's consistently very well executed. I also think she deserves genuine respect for remaining both artistically and financially successful for well over a decade without imploding like so many pop stars seem to. I suspect this requires both intelligence and strength of character.

Yeah I know. Because I just don't like pop music, and having understood she's got a reputation as really talented, actually hearing her music only risks downgrading my impression of her. I'm fine with being out of touch/irrelevant.

My kids (and their friends too) don't listen to current music either, so I don't get much exposure to it.

I'm a metalhead and never been much of a Taylor Swift fan, but important people in my life have been for the last almost 20 years so I know a decent amount about it.

I think her earlier music really demonstrates her talent. Well. Again, it's not my favorite, but it is genuinely really well written, creative, and well performed. Her newer stuff after she switched to more of a pop sound, I have a very hard time finding the talent. If I didn't know some of her work already from the earlier days, I would absolutely not recognize the talent even if it sits there in a latent form.

It feels like you’re afraid to listen to it in case you end up liking it.

Rhetorical question: Can you ever fully be sure you have the regex you wanted?

Writing regexes by hand is hard so there will always be some level of testing involved. But reading a regex and verifying it works is easier than writing one from scratch.

My overly snide point about regexes was that most of the time "verifying it works" is more like finding and fixing a few more edge cases on the asymptotic journey towards no more brokenness.

Yeah I agree with that! 100% test coverage seems impossible when every part of the regex is basically an if condition.

I'm old enough to have seen multiple golden ages / phases of the internet and was thinking about pointing out every era has one based on your age.

But then again, I kinda suspect there's some deeper truth going on where your mentioned golden age might be one of the last though?

Yeah, the ubiquity of smartphones and the rise of Facebook and Instagram (post-acquisition) as an open platform for advertisers versus mostly for early adopters/enthusiasts really killed the "fun" of the internet.

Also, I remember how many different frameworks and "rich internet application" technologies existed back then (Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Apple QuickTime, etc.). In many ways, the internet was a much more diverse and a much more 'unpredictable' place back then.

> really killed the "fun" of the internet.

The original eternal September[1] predates my entry to the internet by a couple of years, but the cycle repeats eternally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Yeah, I'm of the same vintage. Never really felt eternal september impacted the newsgroups I frequented as they didn't appeal to AOLers, and felt it was exaggerated. But it feels real now with engagement metric following content creators and influencers, and the way platforms enable it now.

Your talk at webstock back in 2008 is what originally got me interested in OpenID.

Computer banks to rule the world.

Makes sense to me. Part/most of the appeal of coding 6502 or z80 for a retro platform is just how deterministic and predictable they are down to the clock cycle. AI is the opposite.

Not reasonable at all... it's Corporate Summer Holiday around here.

You take that back!

Yeah that was going to be my answer too. They're some of the few books I've actually remembered stuff from.

The absurdity and slant on looking at things helps keep life in perspective (wasn't trying reference the Vortex there).

I remember occasionally when really get absorbed in it, that strangely the absolute absurdity almost starts seeming plausible.

And, I start seeing the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation all over the place now....

Hard agree on the global Ruby import issues. I remember inspecting large custom Rails or Capistrano codebases in pry and having thousands of names imported. That and monkey patching had me wishing for Python with imports only having module scope and being a lot more explicit.