tudbut

good evening.

technology is a strange thing. it has the potential to outlast you by decades, and yet most websites die within their first year on the web or so.

glitch.com is dead. it used to be a site that allowed you to write html and nodejs apps in your web browser and people would be able to see it update live. live coding is nice, a free and accessible web host is even nicer.
and now it is dead. it lasted 9 years, already longer than many. its creators sold it about 4 years ago to fastly - a typical corporation. and now it has shut down; the creators own websites have migrated by now of course, and still look relatively personal; one even stole my all-lowercase writing style.

i am in a position of incredible privilege, even though no single thing can be considered the reason for it: i have a server, i have the skills to keep it running, i have the time to do so, i have money for a domain and hosting and i can even run my own instance of most things i use (git, nextcloud (i hate nextcloud), chatmail, most things really).

it turns out most people cannot do all of this, and each one is a part of why my website still exists. i do not depend on a web editor, i do not depend on a free service, i do not depend on vibe coding, i do not depend on help from others with admin shit.

i think more people can do this and afford to do this, but certainly not all; and this leads me to believe i should perhaps host other people's websites for them sometimes. just html+css, no nodejs, nothing fancy. unfortunately my privilege ends at storage. i cannot afford to host a website for more than a small handful of people because it requires lots of storage. i dont even struggle with the ram or cpu part, its just the storage. i dont have enough storage.

i am believing less and less in the myth that technology is forever. maybe some of it is, but one day the sun may feel a bit hilarious and all storage media that isnt an optical disk or maybe a magnetic low density media is dead. i find it remarkable how much people live in ignorance of it. i have decided that i will consider it sometimes, but i have mostly decided that data death is inevitable so i should just let it happen when the world decides. this is a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy because i could prevent it, yet i choose not to because it will happen, but well: i will die too, and then i can no longer prevent it. i occasionally burn things i find important on DVDs. but thats about it.

maybe i need to embrace death more and delete my backups that i still cling to without ever sorting through them, because the code i wrote those years ago doesnt matter and the best it can do is make me nostalgic, which would be extremely bad. and yet i cling and i cling and i cannot press delete and i keep telling myself i need to keep it and sort through it and find it and feel that horrible nostalgia that i hate.

i have many devices, two of which would conventionally be considered "good": ridiculer and consumptionhell, but consumptionhell (a T470p) has a battery life of an hour on a good day, and ridiculer is stationary. thus on most days i make do with portable compromise, an X260. it has a broken down arrow and hashtag key. i make do, because it is the thing with the highest portability * power * usability i have, but it is a compromise, because none of these are very high for it. i also have an X270, which is better in almost every aspect, but i do not feel attached to it like i do to portablecompromise. i should be using it, but giving up this half-thrashed thing before it dies naturally feels exceptionally awful. thus it is not going to happen.

i will probably be getting a T14 for free somewhat soon, but i still do not feel entirely sure i actually want it. i do want it, but using it would mean giving up on portablecompromise.

i will almost surely do it though, because unlike the X270, this T14 will actually present a very tangible improvement to basically everything about the computer.

sometimes i see others using hellishly inadequate devices and consider whether it makes sense to acccept a new laptop at all. and indeed for a majority of the time, what i have works perfectly, i make do. but then come things like game jams, times where i need a full game to recompile and link within a few seconds or fall behind significantly; and then i realize why i asked two people to give me whatever old laptop they as professional company admins will next get their hands on that would otherwise see a dumpster or someone else.