I just hope they won't move toward the "oh, you use encryption? Let's see how it protects you from solitary in jail" step too fast.

And no, I'm not sarcastic, I'm worried.

It's being used for what it's very good at. That means very little applications (although there are some), on a different scale, and certainly nothing that can promise a quick buck for free. Basically, empty promises just farted out.

Most of the real world usage were bogus, either because they did not actually work as advertised, or because they had lots of negative properties for businesses (imagine a system that would try to prevent fraud if done well… nobody wants that). There's also the issue that a lot of "funky, interesting stuff", once you filtered out the bad and the ugly, were just… less efficient, less useful versions of what we already used to do.

There are still people clinging to it (and the recent fuckery in the US might revive that… although for all the bad reasons), but the press moved forward to the next thing.

It's not even that. Porn is just a bystander here. The first step is put in place a very large framework for making some form of verification mandatory on arbitrary services and sites under the guise of whatever (terrorism, child protection, and extremely niche content are good candidates). Once it's in place, it becomes the new normal very quickly.

Then, as the government, you suddenly have the power to extend the provision of said system to whatever the fuck you want. That's where things gets funky, and not the good kind.

They just need to get the fuck off of people's life.

And it probably should be. We could even have a set of small plates embedded somewhere for quick swapping on demand.

I like computers, but having an individual computer to run a single drink display really is overkill. At least use one to drive all the labels simultaneously, if you still want the ability to display nifty animations of liquid flowing above the actual liquid actually visibly flowing.

Oh, sweet summer child. Of course you can ban them. Lawmakers don't always care about the technicality of things, because in most cases they don't have to.

You can't prevent VPN from existing, and short of a very tightly curated whitelist of services, you can't prevent people from actually using them, sure. Unless you're on the side of the state, the Law, and the enforcement. In which case, you can. A blanket ban on VPN usage is the perfect gateway to "we've seen traffic from your house toward a known VPN server, so, blam, arrest". And it does not have to stop at known server.

Given the regular tries to outright ban encryption, this is the perfect venue to mass target encrypted communications. Depending on the wording, the mere presence of unobservable traffic could be enough for an arrest.

If what I'm saying here sound dystopian to you, just remember that not only most of this was actually tried (and aborted) time after time, but also that until quite recently, the general public actually using strong encryption was illegal in many places, including our western countries, and experiments to make state spyware mandatory are also a recurrent thing (which might take hold with the "ID verification through your phone" apps soon).

Because THEY decided that THEIR opinions are better than everyone else's, so YOU have to listen to THEM, willingly or not.

Something something free speech and all that jazz.

You dropped this

/s

My next level is going back to that. Not with a huge CRT or a full-blown hifi system, but a nice place with a screen, some offline way to play music/audio, a few books maybe…

Fuck them.

React can do SSR, too. The issue is that some sites actually means nothing if not dynamic. It makes sense to have SSR and sprinkle some JS on the client for content delivery, no issue there.

it’s not a hard concept, people.

Depends. Webapps are a thing, and without JavaScript, there isn't much to show at all.

Websites that mostly serve static content though? Yeah. Some of them can't even implement a basic one-line message that asks to turn on JavaScript; just a completely white page, even though the data is there. I blame the multiple "new framework every week" approach. Doubly so for sites that starts loading, actually shows the content, and then it loads some final element that just cover everything up.