✏️ drawings

2024-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Ritual by the moonlight

Decolonize

Birthday

Berlin Night, 24 Jan 2024 (a sketchy drawing inspired by "A Roman Holiday" by Frank Skipworth c.1889)

Study, 22 Jan 2024

Two gals working on software and reading books in space, 29 Dec 2023

Death in bikini, 12 Jun 2023

Nostalgia, 05 Jun 2023

Merveilles, 30 May 2023 (as a part of a project to recreate merveilles logo in a creative style</a>)

🧑‍🚀 07.01.2024 - weft - a software system for small spacecraft

2024-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

weft</h3>
The last month while messy was quite fruitful in {friend, vibe}-driven development. I have started working on a software system with Marieke</a>. 
Primarily just to try out her tid (system information bar)</a> and adopting it to run on Mac, then modifying her application to be gemininini (a gemini browser)</a> to actually working together on stammer (an interface library)</a> that sprung from extracting parts of tid. 
This whole journey came under an umbrella of a system that we called weft</a>, from a weaving allegory.
We are doing this for fun, but also to have a very custom, minimalist software for everyday use and a system to build this software upon. In this sense it is somewhat similar to uxn</a>, another ecosystem tailored to specific needs but less close to things like collapse OS</a>.
Weft is also a story based ecosystem, one that imagines a life on a spaceship, with a small crew of queer people (cyborgs why not), deep within cyberspace at the same time. So it transcends the software we wrote, spills into the cyberspace, via images (like the in the header) and via one-day-projects like a room of ones own in space</a>.

images</h3>
weft logo:

tid (from Marieke's sourcehut page):

a room of ones own in space:

gemininini (wip):

the first secret

2023-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

This is a secret page, meaning that is unlisted.

I copied this idea from Marieke</a>, to share some thoughts for an even smaller audience than the main page.

End of transmission for now :)

About

2023-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

Hey,

TLDR I am Maya. I am a trans woman, software engineer, emigree, wife, hopefully soon to be a German citizen, proud union member, and vegan.

In my life I feel in a constant flow of change, I knew I will move from my home country, I knew I need to stop eating meat, and I know that "work is a work is a work" so I don't get upset when it's time to move on from a job, I knew I will change apartments often, never feeling too attached to one place. This changed a bit when I realized that I am trans. On one hand, it put me in a spiral of new changes but on the other hand, it allowed me for the first time to start caring about myself and my personal space. In the words of Timothy Morton, I view myself as weird, in a spiral.

I do care about others, and by that, I mean other humans, other animals, and other alive and not alive beings. I believe it's better to not disturb or do harm to anything, just leave it be, if it's a person or a forest. I don't believe anything is more important than the other. So I am very much against hierarchies. I am also quite radically pro-ecology, I believe in buying 2nd-hand and I believe in animal liberation by any means necessary, shout out to Animal Liberation Front 💚 I believe in therapy and healing. I love to have friends and I love to have a life outside of work. I don't believe capitalism can be saved or that it should be saved.

To follow my beliefs I live as a vegan, and I try to limit my purchases and general impact on the environment. I work as a software engineer, and when I can I try to influence the decisions to decrease the carbon footprint of projects I work on. When I can I also support unions' efforts. Apart from that I believe that the Web consumes way too much energy, that's why I try to make this website slim (more in the link below). I also work on my software tools to make it consume less energy, but also for fun, and to learn (checkout my projects on the homepage).

~ About this page</a>

~ Take on ethics</a>

> Are you in Germany? Join ver.di union</a>

> Are you trans and in Germany? Check out this legal temporary ID card with chosen name and gender (no need to be a citizen of Germany)</a>

🎹 My listening list (music, podcasts)

2023-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

Most of the links are to spotify

post-punk, post-soviet, synth-pop, soulful-pop</h3>

Fuck buttons</a> </li>

Shortparis</a> </li>

Убийцы Crystal</a> </li>

Electroferez</a> </li>

Стереополина</a> </li>

мой друг магнитофон</a> </li>

The Violent Youth</a> </li>

IC3PEAK</a> </li>

Luna</a> </li>

Foilar</a> </li>

Monetochka</a> </li>

My</a> </li>

Vollny</a> </li>

Molchat Doma</a> </li>

Nürnberg</a> </li>

Utro</a> </li>

Buerak</a> </li>

My playlist Новая-Новая волна</a> </li> </ul>
hip-hop</h3>

Bambu</a> </li>

P.O.S</a> </li> </ul>
podcasts</h3>

Tech won't save us</a> </li>

PlasticPills</a> </li>

Rev Left Radio</a> </li>

Immediatism</a> </li> </ul>

📖 My reading list (psychology, sociology, feminism, diaries, prose)

2023-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

Currently reading:</h3>
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari</a>
Discipline and Punish, Foucault</a>
Gender Trouble, Judith Butler</a>
The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le Guin</a>

Started, should come back:</h3>
Walden, Henry David Thoreau</a>
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Susan Faludi</a>
Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton</a>

Plan to read (random order):</h3>
Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come, Amy Ireland</a>
The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Nick Land</a>
On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations, Sadie Plant</a>
The Gendered Cyborg - A Reader, Fiona Hovenden, Linda Janes, Gill Kirkup, Kathryn Woodward</a>
Écrits, Lacan</a>
A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari</a>
Difference and Repetition, Deleuze</a>
The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord</a>
Collapse Vol. III: Unknown Deleuze, Robin Mackay</a>
Collapse Volume II: Speculative Realism</a>
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir</a>
A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf</a>
Writing and Difference, Jacques Derrida</a>
The Luddite Rebellion, Brian Bailey</a>
Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard</a>
The Spectacle of the Void, David Peak</a>
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon</a>
CCRU: Writings 1997-2003</a>
Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, Leslie Feinberg</a>
Mythologies, Roland Barthes</a>
Infinite Resignation: On Pessimism, Eugene Thacker</a>
Wampir, Maria Janion</a>

Maya Karabula-Stysiak

2023-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

Hello, my name is Maya. I work as a software / web engineer and I am located in Berlin. I have primarily experience with frontend technologies (React) but I am no stranger to backend (node, asp.net, ruby on rails) and adjecent topics like tracking, testing, devops.

Below you can find some more information about my work experience.

1. Contact</h2>
Linkedin</a>
Github</a>

2. Articles, demos</h2>
React integration with Azure and ASP.NET core [medium]</a>
Our experience with Azure Active Directory B2C [medium]</a>
Open vCPE & SD-WAN Solution powered by Cloudify - UI [youtube]</a>

3. Recent work experience (full on Linkedin)</h2>
Contentful, Senior Software Engineer (currently)</h3>

Helping to ship a new application (Merge App) to major customers, leading the development of parts of the said application (eg introducing a way to integrate it with CI/CD).</li> </ul>
Merge App on Contentful</a>
HelloFresh GO, Senior Software Engineer</h3>
HelloFresh GO is a company that started as a project within HelloFresh

Developing from scratch b2b application for dashboards and invoices, user management system with Azure AD B2C, internal application for customer support, a mobile-first website for b2c clients in companies and hotels with payment integration, UI components library</li>
Both Frontend and Backend, as well as some DevOps</li>
Testing with automated setups and evaluating user experience with feature flags and HotJar</li>
Training and overseeing more junior developers</li> </ul>
HelloFresh GO website</a>
Heyjobs, Software Engineer</h3>

Working on the visual interfaces for web applications facing B2C and B2B clients.</li>
API and features on the backend.</li>
Testing - designing solutions for integration tests, unit tests, A/B testing, and tracking.</li>
Additionally I had experience with setups on AWS and Google Cloud.</li> </ul>
Heyjobs website</a>

👩‍💻 JSWM - javascript window manager

2023-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

TLDR what is jswm</h3>
Jswm is an application that can run on a web engine eg a web browser, that creates a virtual window management system. It has support for jswm-"native" apps like 2D image viewing (soon 3D too) but with time I have decided I want to introduce emulators to this app. So far I have added apps that are running with uxn webassembly version, and started some work on bringing gameboy emulator, my big goal is to bring X11 or Wayland emulation and run native Linux apps.

Story behind it</h3>
In my day-to-day job, I am working as a web developer. In most companies in Berlin, that means working on a Mac. This is not too bad, a lot of the terminal tools are available for macOS as well which is great. What is less great is that it's not so easy to replace window manager on the newer versions of macOS, but I don't want to say goodbye to keyboard-driven tiling window managers like i3 and bspwm. There are two main options that I have tried:

To install for example bspwm one needs XQuartz, it's possible to set it up but then it works only with X11 apps, not native mac ones. I also could not get X11 apps to render properly on retina screens.</li>
An alternative is to use apps that run alongside standard macOS window managers, things as Amethyst and Yabai. They modify the position and size of the windows, but they don't replace the management so it can be clunky and slow sometimes. I can however recommend Yabai as an ok option for daily use.</li> </ul>
> how to set up bspwm with XQuartz</a>
> Amethyst</a>
> Yabai</a>
My solution</h3>
I have another idea. It's a bit cursed but it's quite pleasant to work with so far. I spent most of my time working with Firefox, terminal, and nvim/vscode, sometimes I need to also take a look at images. And i like keyboard-driven flows, tiling window management, etc. What if I would be able to have a terminal, file management, image viewing, etc inside Firefox, just as another tab? This is what I called JSWM, a Javascript-based window manager that is a web app with simple implementations of window management, key bindings, and apps like a terminal (with ttyd) and image viewing. Most of the other things like editing and file browsing I can do via the terminal.
> ttyd - Share your terminal over the web</a>
Todo</h3>

Terminal app</li>
Moving windows in free float mode</li>
Moving windows in stack mode</li>
Resizing windows in free float mode</li>
Resizing windows in stack mode</li>
Image app </li>
https</li>
Video app (use case for wasm with vlc)</li>
Dmenu app</li>
App / Widget imports</li>
cli that communicates with a deamon</li>
skhd connected to cli (example)</li> </ul>
Repository</h3>
> https://github.com/mayakarabula/jswm</a>
Presentation</h3>
Opening an image from the terminal

Runing uxn piano application

Screenshot

🪟 Szklo - 3D engine or reinventing the wheel

2023-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

Some time ago this year I started writing my 3D engine in JavaScript. Reinventing a wheel to learn how it works.

show edges, vertices</li>
support OBJ files</li>
support faces with normals</li>
support controls to zoom in/out</li>
support controls to move around</li> </ul>
Below is a presentation of the progress:
Suzanne

Cube

About this page

2023-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

The Web is using way too many resources, it's better to make websites slimmer. You can find more on my opinion in this post:

💛 25.08.2022 - Documents were not supposed to be Turing complete</a>

Tech side</h3>
Following my take that most websites should be simple documents. I write this website as a set of Markdown documents that I convert with a script to HTML and Gemini format. For some spice, I add CSS and meta tags to it. Later on, I host the files with simple HTTP and Gemini servers.
This decision puts very specific restraints on what I can add and what not. But this is great for me, I can just sit down and write a post and publish it, I don't think too much about SEO, layout, videos, or ads. I use almost only text and images.
Currently this page is using Zola static site generator
Zola</a>

Nostalgia</h3>
I started making websites in the early 2000s. What I liked about the old Web were the communities that sprung up in different spaces, some were bound with real-world locality eg for Polish fans of some bands, and some were more international. I have met my first girlfriend this way, and a few friends as well. Back then I created a fan website with Microsoft Frontpage about a German rapper Sido and a Russian rapper Seryoga. It didn't make a lot of sense but who was there to stop me. I miss that mess.
Small Web</h3>
This nostalgia for the old messy Web brought me to the small Web. A community that lives on in these small spaces, outside of mainstream Internet. It's mostly still on the Web (although there is also Gemini which is running parallel to the Web), so it's easy to access. Come visit if you want.

⚖️ 23.10.22 - Take on ethics

2023-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

Some simple definitions from wiki

In moral philosophy, deontological ethics or deontology (...) is the normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules, rather than based on the consequences of the action </blockquote>

In ethical philosophy, consequentialism is a class of normative, teleological ethical theories that holds that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for judgment about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct </blockquote>
I am personally leaning towards deontology in terms of ethics. But it's a question that I struggle with for years, is there a coherent ethical basis for my decisions? I am vegan, before vegetarian because I think it's wrong to harm other beings, human or not. I am generally in support of socialism because I believe everyone deserves a good life. How to derive this set of beliefs without having an external framework like religion? Well, for me it's going back to consequentialism and borrowing parts of it to form general views. My point is when I decide to buy soya instead of meat I am not directly involved in the killing of an animal, but I pay someone who has already done it, so I support the butcher, indirectly to continue what they are doing. However, I also know that my personal choice does not have these consequences, one person generally does not determine the course of industrial production; and crucially I just don't know what the consequences of my actions will be. I don't know the future and to speculate on the impact of daily choices I think is void of substance. That's why when I make a decision I don't think as much of different consequences, like "do I support the butcher? will me not spending 2 euros here change anything?", "if everyone eats less meat it will be a huge step for animals and the environment", I don't want to base my ethics on something that speculative. This is where I just say that I don't want to participate in harm, whatever the reason or consequence, will it change anything or not.

🐰 06.10.2022 - Jswm + Uxn

2023-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

The Uxn ecosystem is a clean-slate personal computing stack, created to host small tools and games, programmable in its own unique assembly language, made of 32 instructions. </blockquote>

It was designed with an implementation-first mindset with a focus on creating portable graphical applications, the distribution of Uxn projects is akin to sharing game roms for any classic console emulator. To learn more, read about the uxn design, or see the technical documentation. </blockquote>
> uxn</a>
I very much like the philosophy of uxn and the applications that were created so far with it. Sharing small apps as ROMs remind me of cartridges for Game Boy.
> List of some of the apps written for uxn</a>
That being said, I also have a project of my own, jswm. While it does not introduce a new language or stack machine emulators it allows me to have a contained workstation. There I can run a terminal, calendar, video player, VS Code, etc, and many things that I can bring myself with JS and WASM.
~ jswm</a>
But what I would love to achieve is to run uxn ROMs within jswm. This can be done generally, either with WASM or with uxn emulator written in JS. In the image at the top you can see Noodle and Piano running with webuxn in jswm.
> uxn5 - uxn emulator in js</a>
> webuxn - web runtime for the uxn (wasm)</a>
Both uxn5 and webuxn have their limitations. Uxn5 has only partial implementation and while webuxn can compile and run uxn programs it only works with an old version of uxn [1] and migration to a newer one is not trivial. An extra thing to consider is that uxn5 is written fully in JS while webuxn uses wasm and is partially written in C.
> [1] roms built with latest uxn aren't working</a>
But I am not discouraged. I am learning now uxntal (uxn assembler language) and I plan to either help with implementation of uxn5 or update webuxn. Not sure yet which one although I am more leaning towards uxn5 since it's written in one language and Devine has kick-started it.

👀 an initial look at running x11 in the browser

2023-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

So what are the options to run x11 in the browser? The closest thing I have found (that is currently working) is to connect remotely to a running X11 server. It can be a server, a docker container, or other similar things. Then we can run Xpra or VNC to connect to it with a browser. So technically we are not running X11 in the browser but just having a window to X11 server. Does it work? Yes. Is it what I am looking for? Not really.

youtube video on accessing x11 server remotely</a>

xpra</a>

Xpra running in jswm

The limitations of such solutions are that I am running just whole another virtual system with its own disk volume and a desktop on top of it. So to integrate it with jswm I would have to write interfaces.

The next step for me would be to look into CheerpX.

> tweet about cheerpx</a>

Xorg + xeyes running on CheerpX, our X86 virtual machine for WebAssembly. Another milestone toward running anything in the browser. Xorg itself is running virtualized in CheerpX. The browser provides Input/Output devices for Xorg in this case. </blockquote>
It sounds interesting, although I am worried that this approach would cause a massive memory spike if I run a couple of apps alongside each other that each spin up X11 server.

◼️ 14.10.2022 - Hey Malevich, how are you?

2023-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

I love avant-garde art from the early 20th century. Especially from Eastern Europe and Germany - constructivism, bauhaus, and etc. In particular, I very much like art by Kazimierz Malewicz (Казими́р Севери́нович Мале́вич) and El Lissitzky. Their art was like cutting away the cancer of the old world and starting a new better world. A sort of tabula rasa of white canvas with a white square in the middle. They could do it then indeed as it was the revolutionary time, society was reshaping itself. Nowadays the world is not revolutionary, painting over the old would be rather escapist.
I was thinking recently about suprematism (an art movement started by Malewicz) that is described in Wikipedia as

"the supremacy of pure artistic feeling" rather than on visual depiction of objects. </blockquote>
(First I will start by saying that I am not educated in fine arts, I haven't studied art by Malewicz and others, so these are just my random thoughts.)
Fair enough, the first part of this paragraph describes it rather clearly, but what about the second part? What does it mean to go away from the visual depiction of an object in visual art like painting or photography? His art is also described as not representational (so abstract) and non-objective (as in there are no objects). I don't think that this is possible unless we say that "abstract" objects like squares are not objects, but they are indeed based on real objects, they are approximations of a square window or a cube of sugar.
Then I thought well, Malewicz was not writing in English, he was from a Polish-Belarussian family, born in Kyiv, Ukraine, lived later in Russia, and collaborated with people from Germany and France. He wrote in Polish, Russian, German, and perhaps in other languages (I am not sure). So what were his direct words in this regard? Let's start with the name of Malevich's pamphlet

Die gegenstandslose Welt </blockquote>
The word 'gegenstandslose' has a couple of meanings, it can mean irrelevant, pointless, without subject, or non-objective but 'gegenstand' means also resistance. Word 'Welt' means the world. I think it's far more layered and poetic than simply non-objective art. In this pamphlet, we can read

seufzte die Kritik und mit ihr die Gesellschaft: Alles, was wir geliebt haben, ist verloren gegangen: Wir sind in einer Wüste ... Vor uns steht ein schwarzes Quadrat auf weißem Grund! [..] Das schwarze Quadrat auf dem weißen Feld war die erste Ausdrucksform der gegenstandslosen Empfindung: das Quadrat = die Empfindung, das weiße Feld = das Nichts außerhalb dieser Empfindung. </blockquote>

the critics and the society sighed: everything we loved has been lost: we are in a desert ... In front of us is a black square on a white background! [..] The black square on the white field was the first form of expression of non-objective sensation: the square = the sensation, the white field = the nothing outside of this sensation.” </blockquote>
"Everything we loved has been lost: we are in a desert" this sounds like an expression of desperation, the old world is lost, and I think it's fitting with the word Gengenstandslos.
Another thing I get from this quote is that it's the sensation that is non-objective, not the painting itself. The sensation of course is subjective and thus it's not objective. It's beautifully twisted, the sensation is not an object and it's not objective as well. I think that this is the way to get art that is not of object and non-objective. So we get a private Malevich's sensation, impossible to access for us, we are outside, in the desert.
White on white, Malevich

El Lissitzky


🏳️‍⚧️ 28.09.2022 - Poland still breaks my heart after leaving it behind

2023-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

So a few days ago I have learned by accident that to change my gender in my Polish ID I would have to have a divorce with my wife. It is because Poland does not recognise marriages between people of the same gender and is vehemently opposed to the idea.
I knew about the next step that would be suing my parents in court to say that they assigned a wrong gender at birth, but how would they know how I feel before I could have spoken a word.
Both of those steps are horrible and should not be required. It is pushing us, trans people, into conflicts with family. Why do I need to explain to my parents that they would have to go to court in a case that I would bring against them, with absurd claim that they could have known before me. And even worse, I would need to legally end marriage with my wife, sign the documents that our relationship has ended and that we don’t love each other any more, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
I feel like doing this would be admitting that I agree with this process, that it is ok for us to be treated this way, but it is not, it is immoral.
I will not do it. I will wait a bit longer to get German citizenship. In that time I think the new law should be already in place in Germany. It is making it simpler to update the documents, in contrast to Poland - no need to sue parents, no need to have a divorce. Afterwards I will drop Polish citizenship, no more asking for being treated like a human.
Germany unveils plans for simpler legal gender change process (dw.com)</a>
“I hate you Poland” by Czesław Śpiewa, from The Book of Polish Emigrants</a>


🤖 14.09.2022 - Thought on posthuman condition

2023-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

Societies are run by machines, just like Deleuze said; and how Plastic Pill has very well summarised in his pod episodes, links below. Machines are systems that classify people by different properties and later exercise control over them, look to Foucault on how different systems oppress and control people to adhere to norms. Some systems have evolved to use access control rather than direct discipline, eg design infrastructure that promotes one mode of transportation. In the end, whatever way systems apply to us, they see us as sets of properties rather than subjects, now we are negated. In this sense, capitalism is posthuman, because it is changing the subject from humans to processes. We as humans can only have a human-oriented view of the world.
I think that the negation of human subjects is just a coincidental result of post-modern systems evolving. The answer to this negation should be a negation of negation. Thinking of a humanistic system, humanistic socialism as Fromm put it, ergo has humans as subjects. Simple enough but I think of moving away from discipline and control to enabling and sustaining. Only then we can go a step forward to another posthumanism (post-posthumanism maybe) that is more livable and life-oriented.
Further reading:
Pill Pod 74 - Post Posthumanism</a>
Pill Pod 78 - The Posthumanism Manifesto</a>
Deleuze - Control Societies & Cybernetic Posthumanism (Plastic Pill)</a>

🐵 21.10.22 - Szklo update - added obj support

2023-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

So I wanted to do a bit of work around the 3D engine again. I plan to add support for drawing faces.
But for now, I have added support for importing the obj files. Below example of importing the famous Suzanne.



🐿 01.09.2022 - Flora & Fauna

2022-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

I had this thought, being now on vacations in the centre Germany that here it makes sense to learn trees, birds, flowers and mushrooms. Because there are plenty, they are indeed a part of the village. Animals are casually going around the rented house.
Being a city girl that I am I get spooked by the noises of birds and animals being so close. When my wife and I were watching a tv series Wayward Pines we heard noises. We were totally sure that one of the small fellows got into our living room. Long story short it didn’t, it must have been on a porch, but we have called the owner to help us check the property. 🙃
Wayward Pines on IMDb</a>







💛 25.08.2022 - Documents were not supposed to be Turing complete

2022-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

It starts with a meme</h3>
Some time ago I have seen a meme about JavaScript and the current state of the Web, that the documents were not supposed to be Turing Complete. Which is a call out of how unnecessarily complex current websites are - a ton of scripting just to display a page with an article, news, a product, etc.

Ok, but what is Turing Complete, and what is a Document? (if you know then skip this paragraph)</h3>
Turing Complete means more or less that a system can solve any computational problem, things such as addition and multiplication but also more complex like math for 3d graphics, and many more. A document is a shared piece of information on the Web, like a blog post. Coming back to the meme, it means that websites were supposed to be pure text and not systems that can solve any computable problem.
JavaScript is in fact Turing Complete</a>
CSS is Turing Complete too</a>
So, is it true that documents were not supposed to be TC?</h3>
WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project</a>
Long story short yes-ish. If you read WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project by Tim Berners-Lee, which I recommend, you can find this:

The project will operate in a certain well-defined subset of the subject area often associated with the "Hypertext" tag. It will aim:

to provide a common (simple) protocol for requesting human readable information stored at a remote system, using networks; (…)</li> </ul>
The project will not aim (…)

to do research into fancy multimedia facilities such as sound and video;</li>
to use sophisticated network authorisation systems. data will be either readable by the world (literally), or will be readable only on one file system, in which case the file system's protection system will be used for privacy. All network traffic will be public.</li> </ul> </blockquote>
Ok, so human-readable format, no fancy stuff like sound or video, no authorization. Current websites have certainly moved from that initial state. What I get from the proposal is that the documents were supposed to be text with links to other documents. Does not sound like a computational system, fair enough, not Turing Complete.
We have moved on, we have “fancy multimedia” like video and audio, and we have the authorization, who cares? Is it just nostalgia?</h3>
It is partially nostalgia, wanting to come back to simpler times that happened when we were younger, classic humans. But it’s not only that.
Added complexity certainly gave us amazing possibilities but it also allowed for things that we were probably better off without like intense personalized tracking, popup ads, and blog posts that load very long where the important part is just the text.
And, some people care, for example, the aforementioned Tim Berners-Lee thinks that the Web needs a mid-course correction because it spreads a lot of fake news and hatred, this is very closely correlated with tracking of users’ behavior and profiling.
Tim Berners-Lee: The World Wide Web - A Mid-Course Correction</a>
I think that the problem is both technological, political, and also ecological. It is a problem that the politicians, agencies, and corporations want to spy on us but it is also an ethical problem for engineers that we enable this to happen by building the tools.
Good old days?</h3>
Let’s have a quick look and the nostalgia part too. Was the Web nicer before? Free of tentacles of the corporate world?
Yes and no. No because the dotcom bubble happened very soon (1995 - 200) after the World Wide Web was publicly available (1993). So very soon an important part of the Web was the business. And yes - because parallel to the corporate world another space was created, one of blogs, Geocities, irc. I very much recommend Tech won’t save us podcast for insights into the early Internet and how it was shaped, eg recent episode:
How the Modern World Shaped the Internet</a>.
I find it interesting that already in 1998 said:

“A lot of people ask me whether I am disappointed that the Web has taken on such a lot of commercial material, rather than being a pure academic space. In fact, I know it could not be universal if it did not allow any form of communication.” </blockquote>
The World Wide Web and the "Web of Life" Tim Berners-Lee</a>
Tracking</h3>
I think that we as engineers have dropped the ball on the Web technologies to be honest. I know very well that usually the tracking requirements and dark patterns come from the top in companies but we should do as much as possible to minimise the harm. As in, we don’t need all that personalised data, and the tendency is to track everything. Seeing if the users are using the product as in intended can also work while tracking very specific events and without personal data attached. If the purpose is to sell products, just track what people that buy product A buy also.
What tracking is also doing is generating a lot of the Web traffic. You first need to download tracking software and then send dozens of requests all the time to track every move. No wonder that websites are slower than they used to be.
Bloat, a lot of bloat</h3>
In the last 10 years the average size of a website came from 750 kB to 2-3 MB now (in August 2022), according to httparchive.org. Which means an increase of around 400%.
State of the Web Report</a>
This is actually partially due to all the tracking and ads trash that gets send along with the proper HTML. But the last 10 years also coincide with the rise of frameworks like Angular, React and Javascript runtime Node.js. While this is a great step towards making complex Web Apps, it also increased the traffic by a lot and it’s also a mixed result for accessibility.
The websites may have more interesting code now, but in the last 10 years most of them have not changed drastically - there are a lot of news pages, social medias, online shops, etc. But what has changed is the complexity and size, that goes up every year. And this is certainly not good for people that do not have access to a fast Internet connection, currently it’s already very hard to use the Web without it. Fancy design is nice, but it’s often not too good for accessibility, eg low colour contrast, hard to navigate via readers etc. What is also taking a hit with such big website sizes is the nature. Power used for the Web is somewhat invisible but all this website that calculate a lot of data on our phones are taking up energy that very often does not come from green energy. This is especially horrible in an adjacent space - cryptocurrencies that burn through energy like fire.
I recommend going to website carbon calculator and checking an estimate to how much carbon websites are generating. Websites like BBC and CNN (according to this website’s estimates) are generating around 140kg of CO2 for every 10k visitors a month. And I don’t mean to say to not go to bloated websites but rather as call to action for engineers.
Website Carbon calculator</a>
What to do</h3>
Personally I have adopted 2 approaches to the current Web. Since I am an engineer that works primarily with the frontend part of the Web I try to push projects to be accessible, open source if possible and to respect people’s privacy. It does feel futile very often to be honest, financial motives always prove more important for companies than any other metric. That’s one of the reasons I don’t think that capitalism can change. Nonetheless, I think a “fight from within” is needed, otherwise it would be much worse, eg except for Firefox and Safari all major browsers are using Google’s engine which creates an almost monopoly on what gets developed and what not. But I think the important word there is “almost”. Also when developing the new projects and technologies I can try to predict and limit harmful usage of the tech beforehand.
The other approach is related to my last point. There are other technologies out there, parallel to the Web that try to correct the wrongs, for example Project Gemini. It does not try to replace the Web but to give an alternative. By default Gemini focuses on markdown and does not allow for dynamic code modification like JavaScript, styling like CSS. This severely limit options to track user’s behaviour, add ads and to create code heavy sites, all this is great. It is not designed to necessarily serve mainstream needs and that’s ok, it’s enough to offer a slower and welcoming place. Feel free to come by to Midnight Pub (gemini://midnight.pub/) or to read the Smol Zine (gemini://gemini.cyberbot.space/smolzine/). If you would like to browse gemini without a special browser you can use my proxy, note that it is work in progress and not everything works.
Project Gemini</a>
Midnight Pub</a>
Gemini to Http proxy</a>
Other place that is partially inside the Web itself is Fediverse, it’s a set of primarily forums, running mastodon (free clone of twitter). There is also tildeverse with simple websites hosted by passionates, check out Tilde Town. I really recommend to watch a recent talk by James Tomasino:
Rocking the Web Bloat: Modern Gopher, Gemini and the Small Internet</a>
Tilde Town</a>
Web Apps can be Turing Complete</h3>
That’s a lot of talking, and in the end I think that documents should not be Turing Complete. However, I also think there is a difference between documents and what has evolved to be a proper Web App. Things that provide a real usability like 3d graphics visualisations or maps, there is certainly place for that and I would treat them rather as applications similar to desktop applications than websites. So both can be true, apps can have more complicated code bases but blogs, news sites, etc don’t really need that much.

images</h3>
weft logo:</p>
</p>
tid (from Marieke's sourcehut page):</p>
</p>
a room of ones own in space:</p>
</p>
gemininini (wip):</p>
</p>

hip-hop</h3>

Bambu</a></p> </li>

P.O.S</a></p> </li> </ul>
podcasts</h3>

Tech won't save us</a></p> </li>

PlasticPills</a></p> </li>

Rev Left Radio</a></p> </li>

Immediatism</a></p> </li> </ul>

podcasts</h3>

Tech won't save us</a></p> </li>

PlasticPills</a></p> </li>

Rev Left Radio</a></p> </li>

Immediatism</a></p> </li> </ul>

Currently reading:</h3>
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari</a></p>
Discipline and Punish, Foucault</a></p>
Gender Trouble, Judith Butler</a></p>
The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le Guin</a></p>

Started, should come back:</h3>
Walden, Henry David Thoreau</a></p>
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Susan Faludi</a></p>
Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton</a></p>

1. Contact</h2>
Linkedin</a></p>
Github</a></p>

2. Articles, demos</h2>
React integration with Azure and ASP.NET core [medium]</a></p>
Our experience with Azure Active Directory B2C [medium]</a></p>
Open vCPE & SD-WAN Solution powered by Cloudify - UI [youtube]</a></p>

Repository</h3>
> https://github.com/mayakarabula/jswm</a></p>

Presentation</h3>
Opening an image from the terminal</p>
</p>
Runing uxn piano application</p>
</p>
Screenshot</p>
</p>

✏️ drawings

🧑‍🚀 07.01.2024 - weft - a software system for small spacecraft

the first secret

About

🎹 My listening list (music, podcasts)

📖 My reading list (psychology, sociology, feminism, diaries, prose)

Maya Karabula-Stysiak

👩‍💻 JSWM - javascript window manager

🪟 Szklo - 3D engine or reinventing the wheel

About this page

⚖️ 23.10.22 - Take on ethics

🐰 06.10.2022 - Jswm + Uxn

👀 an initial look at running x11 in the browser

◼️ 14.10.2022 - Hey Malevich, how are you?

🏳️‍⚧️ 28.09.2022 - Poland still breaks my heart after leaving it behind

🤖 14.09.2022 - Thought on posthuman condition

🐵 21.10.22 - Szklo update - added obj support

🐿 01.09.2022 - Flora & Fauna

💛 25.08.2022 - Documents were not supposed to be Turing complete

✏️ drawings

🧑‍🚀 07.01.2024 - weft - a software system for small spacecraft

the first secret

About

🎹 My listening list (music, podcasts)

📖 My reading list (psychology, sociology, feminism, diaries, prose)

Maya Karabula-Stysiak

Heyjobs, Software Engineer</h3> Working on the visual interfaces for web applications facing B2C and B2B clients.</li> API and features on the backend.</li> Testing - designing solutions for integration tests, unit tests, A/B testing, and tracking.</li>

👩‍💻 JSWM - javascript window manager

🪟 Szklo - 3D engine or reinventing the wheel

About this page

⚖️ 23.10.22 - Take on ethics

🐰 06.10.2022 - Jswm + Uxn

👀 an initial look at running x11 in the browser

◼️ 14.10.2022 - Hey Malevich, how are you?

🏳️‍⚧️ 28.09.2022 - Poland still breaks my heart after leaving it behind

🤖 14.09.2022 - Thought on posthuman condition

🐵 21.10.22 - Szklo update - added obj support

🐿 01.09.2022 - Flora & Fauna

💛 25.08.2022 - Documents were not supposed to be Turing complete

Bloat, a lot of bloat</h3> In the last 10 years the average size of a website came from 750 kB to 2-3 MB now (in August 2022), according to httparchive.org. Which means an increase of around 400%.</p>