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There was quite a kick when the engines spooled up. I flew mainly SFO/LAX to SYD and the few minutes of full thrust you just kind of sat back in your seat and didn't try to do anything.

Was going to make a similar comment…most systems programming was in PL/S or PL/X on 370/390 architecture (regardless of the O/S). AIX and OS/2 were mostly in C. AS/400 in RPG. There were some oddball programs in APL. And thousands of internal "tools" in Rexx.

GML dates to 1969, SGML from the 1970s. Internally we used something called BookMaster which kind of? looks like a precursor to HTML (you had :p. instead of <p>, :li. instead of <li>). There was an effort circa 1990-1991 (as TBL was developing HTML and HTTP) called HyTime which was an SGML application focused on hypermedia. HTML killed that fairly quickly.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Goldfarb who shepherded GML/SGML and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_La...

Ah, yes, the Zapata Petroleum -> zap.com phase of the bubble.

Just seconding this…people have a starry eyed view of the dotcom boom but there was a lot of waste and outright fraud. A lot of theoretical improvements to business processes were lost because…the businesses didn't want to change their processes.

Is it just the classic (1996-1997 era?) SYN-ACK attack?

Most of my domains are at PairDomains (no nonsense UI, but also limited TLDs). Have become a recent convert to Porkbun after Godaddy blew a renewal (on a TLD Pair doesn’t support).

No. I don’t know that “the public” worried about anything with respect to the Internet. There was a lot of hand wringing by various thought leaders about porn, adult content, porn, more porn, inappropriate communications, porn, and finding someone to blame for various social ills that the Internet amplified but didn’t really cause. I think a lot of us were incredibly naive about the feedback loop of using engagement driven advertising to compensate the creation and distribution of content (which is more a Web 2.0 thing than a dot com era thing).

If this cycle is anything like the dot com cycle, there will be billions of dollars in capital invested in AI “stuff”. Data centers, various LLMs, derivatives of LLMs, shells of derivatives of LLMs, and other tangential things that claim to be AI. Eventually some anal retentive shareholder activist will ask some pretty basic questions about return on investment, the wisdom of investing so much in capital that depreciates rapidly, the actual value of all of this.

Truth be told, a lot of the predictions from the peak dot com era came true, it just took another decade of technology development and the widespread deployment of broadband. The hype cycle inevitably outpaces the market reality by several years, even if elements of it are true.

And a lot of the “efficiencies” of moving commerce online simply got appropriated by new middlemen. Amazon, Google, Apple each take their transactional vigs. Hard to argue that the current advertising supported media market is efficient when the most successful sites have to meter access to content with subscriptions (and chum ads that burn your CPU).

UBI? Not going to happen in an allegedly capitalist society like the US. We're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires who resent paying anything to support someone else's lifestyle. Far more likely to eliminate entire categories of jobs and careers.

It’s curious to me that the investor class will pour billions of dollars into “AI” over the coming years seeking to replace labor costs instead of investing in improving the efficiency of the existing labor pool. In some ways this is like the outsourcing/offshoring rager the investor class had over the past thirty years (that was the thing people should have worried about in the 1990s but did not). In the goal to shave pennies per share of costs and juice market returns we wiped out entire job categories and industries in the US. Sure, we got cheaper devices and other manufactured goods, but ignored the social costs.

So, what will happen next? It’s a big muddle. If you’ve spent billions investing in various LLM processing systems, can you reasonably expect to generate revenues and profits from the very people who are now unemployed or underemployed due to the very LLMs/AIs/algorithms you’ve invested in?

No, IIRC the Port Authority owned the land but leased development out to a developer, Larry Silverstein. Coincidentally Silverstein leased the rest of the WTC complex from the PANYNJ in July? 2001.

One million buildings…that's residential, commercial office or retail, and other (factories, storage, etc).

There was still an antitrust case in process against IBM in 1981 when the PC was launched, it would only be dropped by the US in 1982. I started in 1990 and the fear of another antitrust case pervaded everything through the ten years I was there, even after the earlier consent decree expired.

Problem one is they do not honor the conventions of the web and abuse the sites. Problem two is they are taking content for free, distilling it into a product, and limiting access to that product.

Do the AI training bots provide free access to the distillation of the content they drain from my site repeatedly? Don't they want a free and open web?

I don’t feel a particular need to subsidize multi–billion even trillion dollar corporations with my content, bandwidth, and server costs since their genius vibe coded bots apparently don’t know how to use modified-GETs or caching, let alone parse and respect robots.txt.

I think the reasoning would be much simpler: more and more services and personnel working in those services are becoming mandatory reporters through legislation and regulation.

Personally, it became too much of a hassle to maintain. Comment spammers would whale on your comment systems, so you either shut them off or offloaded to some third party. If you ran Google ads it always seemed to take more effort to stay in Google's good graces than you’d actually earn. The one month I earned $200 Google suspended my ads account over seemingly trivial issues (that had been on the site for…years). If you wrote anything slightly controversial you got to be the target of people who really, truly, believe the worst thing in the world is to have an opinion different from theirs and your job should be forfeit as a result. Or maybe your life.

In the latter years (even pre–LLM bot feeding frenzy) the number of bots inhaling content over, and over, and over again overwhelmed the perfectly normal bandwidth limits.

At least with social media it's someone else's dime paying for the hosting and security apparatus. You still get the brigading and pile–ons and death threats.

It’s 1997. The executives in the boardroom have heard about this AI thing and have tasked the managerial class to make sure they have an AI plan to execute for FY2025 and FY2026. Shareholder Rights Activists are demanding that companies have an AI strategy. There has yet to be a Netscape moment though the ever larger capital raises by OpenAI and others may be the Netscape moment. Money is pouring in even though there’s little measurable benefit yet.

There will be a couple of tells when the bubble is popping: the Shareholder Rights Activists will flip to demanding companies execute the executives who implemented the wasteful AI strategies that they demanded, and “AI” companies will take over all of the ad slots for the SuperB*wl.

The only way I succeeded was to argue with real numbers and costs. The business side liked to frequently claim that we did $XXX in business every minute using the web site, so I started using that (if the web site is down for an hour, we lose 60*XXX in revenue, right?).

Get the burden rates for staff, calculate the realistic costs of doing DR preparations and exercises vs the realistic costs of recovering from an actual incident.

Factor in loss of staff (for whatever reason).

You can dig up the costs from other companies but you can only make it real to management if you use data and numbers from your own enterprise.

Make it a documented, financially driven business decision that they cannot ignore. They may well decide not to invest in DR/continuity prep. In that case, document your activities and start looking for new employment, they do not value the business enough to invest in protecting it from absolutely predictable, let alone unpredictable, I/T events.

I was spouse–adjacent to Google for many years and really admired their DR/continuity work and exercises. I don't know if that's written up anywhere but it really seemed to be embedded in their operational philosophy (at least up to 2020, my semi–inside exposure to Google ended then).

1. SSL 2. 57

I'm not in the city at the moment to check but they seem to take it down or shift it when there's going to be construction in an area. With the Gansevoort Pier rebuild and Little Island it wouldn't surprise me if they shifted where the wire crossed West St further South to avoid the construction.

I don't think that's a current map, the eruv web site shows much more of the island covered (including much of Hell's Kitchen): http://eruv.nyc/#map

See http://eruv.nyc/#map for a more current map (circa 2023).

Correct link is: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-06-06/miami-s-d...

Netscape tried dynamic email with Communicator in the 90s…somehow I still have the sample "Airius Airway's 401k Contributions Worksheet" with JavaScript embedded (Gmail obviously ignores it). IIRC no one, and I mean no one, took advantage of it.

My better half uses various AI services (paid, mostly) to either stub out documents or presentations or to distill and summarize gobs of information. They're fully aware of the shortcomings and we've seen some absolutely hilarious misfires but they're generally finding it to be a useful time saver.

To any Googlers/Xooglers in the crowd, there's an awesome opportunity to take the improvements made to Moma search in the past decade vis a vis security authorization / authentication / access controls and combine them with "AI" analysis of enterprise information and documentation.

No. I found it frustrating that so many BASIC programs had odd quirks or dependencies on one platform that I couldn't figure out how to mimic on whatever I was programming on (first a MicroVideo Interact, then an Apple 2 with Integer Basic followed eventually by AppleSoft Basic). I used to type in programs from the Creative Computing compilation books and hit various roadblocks because some of the programs would rely on commands specific to paper tape or the specific digital tape (not home computer cassette) drive in use.

I was a Notes user inside IBM in the months before the acquisition. It was so, so much better than anything IBM had on the desktop, either as a product or the many internal hacks. At the time IBM had OfficeVision/2 perennially under development to replace PROFS on Windows and OS/2.

I think that some of the changes in Notes 4 were good to make it more usable inside a large organization, but many things like adding a web server and IIRC some sort of Java subsystem? turned it into bloatware. And some of the changes were prompted by IBM’s disastrous internal rollout of Notes, which had more to do with IbM internal messaging culture and less to do with any flaws in Notes.

Is the PDF of this available anywhere, pub.usgs.gov appears to have been DOGEd.

I’ve been doing web sites for thirty years, robots.txt is at best a request to polite user agents to respect the server’s desires. None of the malicious crawlers respect it. None of the AI crawlers respect it.

I’ve resorted to returning xml and zip bombs in canary pages. At best it slows them down until I block their network.

I know, but outside the US the role is considered head of government.

There was an election in November 2024. The center–left candidate, Harris, lost. The reactionary–conservative candidate, Trump, won.

Unlike many other countries, the President is both head of government and head of State in the US.

The President of the US has always exercised control over foreign relations. The President can negotiate treaties but they must be ratified by the US Senate to take effect.