pgl (u/pgl) - Readit News

I couldn't quite put my finger on the building you can see through the window. I managed to find an address for the cafe (48 High Street) and it clicked after I opened up streetview. It's the corner office block next to the mini roundabout on the High Street: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4075868,-0.3077591,3a,75y,96...

If you spin around in Streetview you can see the building that must have house Cyberia itself to the left of what is now Fillies Kingston. You can also cycle back in time to the earliest Streetview shots in 2008, at which time the cafe must already have closed down, and is next to a place called Bar Elvissa.

In case you're interested, my Googling also resulted in this brief conversation on Mastodon between other apparent previous frequenters of Cyberia Kingston: https://mastodon.social/@ade/109405408248074169

pgl · 9 months ago

Hey, thanks for that Mastodon link. I think I remember at least one of those guys. I think that building over the road is nothing of note - just some generic commercial real estate.

pgl commented on Remembering Cyberia, the first ever cyber cafe vice.com/en/article/world... · Posted by u/DamnInteresting

dagw · 9 months ago

I worked at Cyberia's second location in Kingston in 1995

Wow, now there is a blast from the past! I hung out there quite a bit in 1995-1996. That was also the first place I used the actual internet (as opposed to BBS's or CompuServe), shortly after it opened. I can probably thank Cyberia for at least a small part of my future career success.

pgl · 9 months ago

I probably served you coffee at the time, then, brilliant. It was definitely the place I fell in love with the internet - I ended up leaving school early because it.

pgl commented on Remembering Cyberia, the first ever cyber cafe vice.com/en/article/world... · Posted by u/DamnInteresting

n4r9 · 9 months ago

Very cool! I'm acquainted with Kingston but had no idea about that aspect of its history.

This NYT article from 2004 states that it's the world's first: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/02/business/worldbusiness/th...

There's also a stock image website with photos from the Kingston branch in 2001: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-internet-at-cyberia-cafe-k...

pgl · 9 months ago

Hah, amazing! That brings back memories. The PC where the guy with the red t-shirt is sitting is where one regular used to come in and send out his erotic fanfic. He'd bring in a floppy disk that he'd set up at home and always seemed to have problems getting it to read - so we'd have to go over and help him out all the time.

pgl commented on Remembering Cyberia, the first ever cyber cafe vice.com/en/article/world... · Posted by u/DamnInteresting

pgl · 9 months ago

I worked at Cyberia's second location in Kingston in 1995, before getting hired by Easynet to do tech support on the top floor of the building where Cyberia London was located. It was an interesting time! This article captured the energy pretty well - but there was a whole lot going on at Easynet as well at the time, too.

FWIW, I think the claim was always that Cyberia was The UK's first internet cafe. At least, that's what I've always said.

pgl commented on Marshall Brain has died wral.com/news/local/nc-st... · Posted by u/bsagdiyev

pgl · 9 months ago

He was such an amazing guy. We got to interview him on our tiny podcast[1] after we reached out and he so happily joined us for half an hour. His book, Manna (which is $0.99 to download from Amazon[2] or free on his website[3]) is still one of the most fascinating and interesting visions of the future that I've come across (although I don't totally agree it's the only reasonable option).

What a loss.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o

[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-...

[3] https://marshallbrain.com/manna

Edit: Fixed "free to download from Amazon" - it's not

pgl commented on Peter Lowe's Blocklist pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/... · Posted by u/trms

pgl · a year ago

Well, thanks for posting but that page is way out of date! I don't think I've updated it for... 15 years now? The data itself is kept fresh though: https://pgl.yoyo.org/as/serverlist.php

pgl commented on Goodbye, clean code (2020) overreacted.io/goodbye-cl... · Posted by u/kiyanwang

fauigerzigerk · 2 years ago

I think the pushback is against certain recipes that seem too absolutist. "Clean Code" is the title of a famous book that defines clean (among other things) as:

"No Duplication

Duplication is the primary enemy of a well-designed system. It represents additional work, additional risk, and additional unnecessary complexity."

So according to this definition, removing duplication is synomymous with simplification, which is simply incorrect.

Removing duplication is the introduction of a dependency. If this dependency is a good model of the problem then this deduplication is a good abstraction and may also be a simplification. Otherwise it's just compression in the guise of abstraction.

[Edit] Actually, this quote is a reference to Kent Beck’s Simple Design that appears in Clean Code.

pgl · 2 years ago

I love this part: "It represents additional work, additional risk, and additional unnecessary complexity", because it could be "refactored" into "additional work, risk, and complexity". I assume it hasn't been, because (in the author's opinion) it communicates the intended meaning better - which might be the case with code, too. "Well-designed" is subjective.

pgl commented on Fun with DNS TXT Records thoughts.theden.sh/posts/... · Posted by u/theden

pgl · 2 years ago

I did some research on TXT records a little while back, that might be of interest: https://labs.ripe.net/author/pgl/the-joy-of-txt/

pgl commented on Mullvad Leta: A search engine used in the Mullvad Browser mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/... · Posted by u/pnt12

keyle · 2 years ago

I'm sorry but besides your first point, what is substantial in the claim that they have a commitment to privacy?

Also why would I trust them over Google?

pgl · 2 years ago

It all comes down to trust in the end, but over time I've come to trust Mullvad more and more. One particular example that sticks out to me is that they ended subscription based billing, specifically because it required them to hold customer information that they didn't want to have.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/6/20/were-removing-the-opti...

You can see an example of their lack of data retention from a post about when they were raided - there was nothing to find.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/4/20/mullvad-vpn-was-subjec...

Their blog is a good place if you want to get a sense of what they're like as a company.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/