I figured this was one of the best ways to do it. That way I'm letting people that were significant to me live on forever, one random HTTP response header at a time.
That's really nice. I hope you don't mind, but I run this website https://climbing-history.org/ and have borrowed your idea, except for climbers who have passed away.
The thing that struck me about "GNU John Dearheart" was how it feels like it _really_ deeply captures hacker culture, like Pterry wasn't just referencing the culture, but that he really got it. Which is remarkable, because he gave me that impression about many, many topics. Such a loss.
Terry loved his characters in a way that's hard to express - unless they were pure evil (and he had a few) he did his best to understand their motivations in such a way that he came to portray them sympathetically.
This is most noticeable in his caricatures that became characters that became badasses over multiple novels; the Watch has a few of these, but there are others.
Yup. Vimes going full-on berserker mode while screaming "Where is my cow?" should, by all rights, be extremely silly. Instead, it sent shivers down my spine.
When clacks got introduced, the description of people who just enjoyed being there and spending time on coding messages and talking to unknown remote people.. well, it felt like early internet, fidonet, perhaps AM radio amateurs.
It really seemed like Pratchett knew something of this niche cultures, way more than I expected.
On the flip side it is so crushing that the Cluely guys go to fancy school to help people cheat and, essentially, get away with not reading. I can't imagine an ethos so short sighted, not least because the technology they use was made by people who love science fiction and did a lot of extremely difficult homework their whole lives. These guys are the opposite of hackers, they're just hacks.
And to what end? To make less money than their moms do in internal medicine?
> In Terry Pratchett's science-fantasy Discworld series, "The Clacks" is a network infrastructure of Semaphore Towers, that operate in a similar fashion to telegraph - named "Clacks" because of the clicking sound the system makes as signals send.
Surely named "Clacks" because of the clacking sound the system makes.
"We're obligated to inform you that this site uses cookies to do things like maintain your session and deliver personalised content. We also use third-party services from partners such as Google, who may also place cookies on your computer.
Without cookies this site cannot function correctly. Please allow cookies from this website, otherwise features may not work."
Amusingly, that's not true. The only cookie they send is Google Analytics, which has zero value to the user. The site works fine with it blocked.
Chill. This is the defacto statement, they probably just copied it from somewhere.
GA was the only way to get a simple page count view without setting up a database or a backend system before we switched to serverless cloud step function lambda craziness.
Seems like a passion project, and they just wanted to know if their work was used. I give people the benefit of the doubt on all of this when it's a small site.
No it's not. It's dealing with the red tape of EU cookie legislation.
Do you want to know how many human years my last company had to devote to regulation? We could have built a hundred startups with all that effort.
I'm not saying GDPR right to be forgotten and data dump/portability isn't important, but it comes with a steep cost that everyone pays everywhere. So much time and money was spent on it. Easily billions of dollars.
It's been a while I heard about X-Clacks-Overhead. I added it to my own page to commemorate everyone I lost along the way. After reworking my site from a custom blog engine to plain web, I forgot to re-add the custom headers. Thanks for the reminder today!
There are also browser extensions, which show when a website broadcasts the "X-Clacks-Overhead" - header.
(I used to administer a laser link. go on, ask me why they aren’t very popular)
I spent a lot of time working out how to create low powered laser transducer, capable of working on something battery powered.
This is my favourite part; very real.
I think you're right; I suspect Terry would have been tickled by the header, but if there were any physical world implementations I think he would have been overjoyed. One of my favourite Terry stories is of him making his sword, which feels similar.
for a while I thought I might go to one of those uniquely nerdy colleges where they let you fuck around with dorm infrastructure.
i back-of-napkin'd a whole packet-over-laser relay system based conceptually on the clacks that'd give every room/station its own serial-interfacible (up|down) link. you could link buildings out of windows and stuff. horribly impractical and prohibitively expensive, but the kind of thing that could only happen in a university on-campus environment.
I love the idea! But to be true to the original, shouldn't the message be self-propagating?
> [...] header that can be transmitted from server to server [...]
How so? In HTTP, there's always one client and one server. Am I missing some way to make this sticky or self-propagating, e.g. browsers or other clients that will cache received headers and then send them to other servers?
Readit News
I figured this was one of the best ways to do it. That way I'm letting people that were significant to me live on forever, one random HTTP response header at a time.
This is most noticeable in his caricatures that became characters that became badasses over multiple novels; the Watch has a few of these, but there are others.
It really seemed like Pratchett knew something of this niche cultures, way more than I expected.
He was definitely an early adopter of the internet, (and e.g. very active on alt.fan.pratchett), so that's no big surprise.
And to what end? To make less money than their moms do in internal medicine?
Surely named "Clacks" because of the clacking sound the system makes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Niclas_Edelcrantz
Also UK used a system close to that. And a lot of countries along Europe developed their networks with different signaling devices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappe_telegraph
The stations were more elaborate and there is even a recorded instance of a secret signal being passed on illicitly:
https://blog.franceinfo.fr/deja-vu/2017/10/10/le-piratage-du...
Amusingly, that's not true. The only cookie they send is Google Analytics, which has zero value to the user. The site works fine with it blocked.
GA was the only way to get a simple page count view without setting up a database or a backend system before we switched to serverless cloud step function lambda craziness.
Seems like a passion project, and they just wanted to know if their work was used. I give people the benefit of the doubt on all of this when it's a small site.
Do you want to know how many human years my last company had to devote to regulation? We could have built a hundred startups with all that effort.
I'm not saying GDPR right to be forgotten and data dump/portability isn't important, but it comes with a steep cost that everyone pays everywhere. So much time and money was spent on it. Easily billions of dollars.
And the cookie stuff? How useful has that been?
There are also browser extensions, which show when a website broadcasts the "X-Clacks-Overhead" - header.
One day I noticed that it disappeared, but then it returned, so someone on the inside cared and brought it back, that made me smile :)
I need more time and motivation to make a full network though.
I think you're right; I suspect Terry would have been tickled by the header, but if there were any physical world implementations I think he would have been overjoyed. One of my favourite Terry stories is of him making his sword, which feels similar.
i back-of-napkin'd a whole packet-over-laser relay system based conceptually on the clacks that'd give every room/station its own serial-interfacible (up|down) link. you could link buildings out of windows and stuff. horribly impractical and prohibitively expensive, but the kind of thing that could only happen in a university on-campus environment.
Perhaps something like IPv6's Hop-by-Hop Options can be used to pass names with every packet?
Or, even better, we can use LoRa repeaters for something close to the actual clacks network.
https://github.com/clacks-overhead/clacks-protocol
> [...] header that can be transmitted from server to server [...]
How so? In HTTP, there's always one client and one server. Am I missing some way to make this sticky or self-propagating, e.g. browsers or other clients that will cache received headers and then send them to other servers?