I would definitely read a blog (or just follow up comments) about a technology orientated person jumping forward almost a decade in time and what they find really different.
Are you a professional developer? Has framework churn been an issue?
Yes, been a web developer since 1994. Framework churn is THE WORST. Ugh. Really, nothing in terms of outside appearance has changed. The web looks pretty much identical to when I was locked up in 2013. There are a lot more ads, and way more video ads. The Web uses up waaaay more RAM and CPU.
Development, though, has been a bitch since I got out a couple of months ago. I want to use the latest frameworks, but I'm starting from zero again. None of the old frameworks even exist. I feel like I'm 5 years old again.
The code I've written in the last few weeks has all been very old fashioned! I just needed to get the job done.
I had zero access to the Internet in all that time. The biggest thing I found was TikTok. I fucking love TikTok. From the inside we would see the occasional video on the news, but it just looked like it was to make videos of people dancing, but it's actually fucking awesome for those of us with "neurodiversity".
One last thing - out of the, like, 1000 online account I had... only 2 were accessible once I got out. Wikipedia and eSnipe. Can't get into anything else. Don't have ready access to the email address used on a lot of them. The others have an email address on a domain I own, but I can't change the nameservers because I can't get into the account, but my friend paid the domain fees while I was locked up, so I still "own" the domain. I can't get anything back as the court owns all the identity documents that I have and won't let me have them. In fact, when I asked a couple of weeks ago they said they have no idea where they put them all.
Oh, and everything is SSL now. That wasn't a thing in 2013.
Any other questions, fire away. It's a fascinating topic. I do feel like I teleported 8 years into the future.
> I can't get anything back as the court owns all the identity documents that I have and won't let me have them. In fact, when I asked a couple of weeks ago they said they have no idea where they put them all.
This is perhaps not what you were expecting to be asked about, but I’m curious nonetheless. So when you reported to prison you had to hand in your passport, driver’s license etc? And now when you were released they claimed that they have misplaced them? How do you get new documents, family members vouching for you or something like that?
Everything except my passport was taken either from my person or from my house. My passport had to be handed over in order to get out of jail. Actually my passport was handed over to the prosecutor years before I was released. The judge wanted the prosecutor to have it because it normally is held by the court, but they had sold R. Kelly's passport when they had it. I ended up spending three extra weeks in custody because the passport needed to go to the jail and the prosecutor's office refused to walk it the 100ft from their office to the jail and made my family come and get it and walk it over themselves.
Surely the prosecutor's laziness keeping you in jail for an extra three weeks is something you can sue somebody about? That seems like a huge violation of your rights.
Yeah, I thought this over and over. It's actually hard to figure out exactly who to sue and for what. I've done a ton of litigation and at the end of the day this case just seemed too difficult to pursue, even though I had mountains of documentation and even the British embassy got involved at one point. I just have to suck it up like a bitch and accept I lost another three weeks of my life.
Did you notice the reduction of information density on web pages? I think that would be the biggest immediate difference. Old Reddit vs. new Reddit as one prominent example. The dominance of responsive designs now, as compared to the old separation between main site and mobile site, as another example. I guess hamburger menus weren't a big thing in 2013? I honestly can't remember. Maybe time to hit the Internet Archive and look at pages from 2013.
It's interesting thinking of the changes. I guess many of the current trends were well underway by 2013 so the current state would be different but not too different to you. At any rate, I'm glad you're out and hope you can sort the ID mess.
I actually like New Reddit, except for the advertising.
Design is much more responsive now, I'll give it that. Lots and lots of huge photographic headers. Hamburger menus? I'm guessing that is the name for the 3-line icon? They were pretty new in 2013 on mobile sites on my iPhone 5. And the 3-dot thing for "extra" options ... I don't remember that existing back then.
There is a reduction in information density.. some of it is warranted by an increase in white space which is good. A lot of sites now have super-intrusive advertising posted all the way through the copy, which wasn't common in 2013.
The sheer amount of data I burn through just browsing the Web.. that's a huge change. Even my mobile plan with 100GB of data gets burned in no time just browsing around. Sites are so, so heavy now. I saw that post yesterday about Discord having an enormous favicon file and so I can see that people just gave up trying to trim their code. I look at some HTML source now and I lose my shit because it is literally megabytes of bullshit. People were more careful with their code in my time.
One weird thing is that my brain doesn't know it is 2021 yet. I saw a show the other day where a woman said her son was born in 2011 and I did the maths and my brain said her son was two years old. This happens to me constantly. It's like my brain stopped counting time as soon as I entered the jail.
Thanks. I have ethical issues with ad blockers. As someone who has built businesses based on ads it pains me to hurt these sites, even though the ad situation is really fucked up in 2021.
I just found out about Brave this week. It looks promising. I didn't know DuckDuckGo had a browser. I've been using the search occasionally. People say they can't switch from Google, but honestly their search quality is over-rated. They are really sanitizing their results more than the others recently. Even Bing is bringing back more results from really useful obscure sites than Google is.
Adblock Plus might be an acceptable solution for you, IIRC it has an "acceptable ads" program designed to only filter out the heavier or more intrusive ads.
I was really suprised about TikTok. I did a lot of social media marketing for nonprofits before I was locked up, so I was very into social media.
The thing with TikTok is that there are tons of videos helping, supporting and bringing awareness to issues such as ADHD, OCD, Tourettes, differing sexualities, gender identity etc, that are really refreshing and have really helped me to understand myself and my neuro-problems that caused me to get locked up. No other social network has that type of content.
Facebook was huge in 2013 and still relevant. Now I barely use it at all. I think Facebook has some big problems. I don't want to say it will go the way of MySpace as Facebook has been much better at adapting than MySpace was, and Facebook has some way smarter people and more money. It might even come back into trend again in the future if their "Meta" projects take flight.
The media only really shows the goofiest or cutest videos from social media. Nothing of any real worth. So my view of TikTok was very fucked up. TikTok is different for every person that uses it since your For You page is based around how you interact with the videos it gives you. I get zero people dancing on my page, and a lot of really smart content.
Also, for the first five years I didn't have any access to the news, for security reasons, so I was very cut off.
It's a label I use to group together the ways that society continuously ruins a transgressor's life, long after they've paid their penalty.
By moving the goalposts further and further away, we've made redemption effectively impossible & wiped out the strongest motivations for people to learn and improve from mistakes (penalized by justice systems).
Amen, brother. 90% of the people I saw in jail were there because of this. Once they had a black mark against them society would not let them reenter and they were forced onto the margins where inevitably something would happen that would cause them to reenter the justice system. Sometimes something as small as not being able to get to an AA meeting because they had no transport. Maybe 25% of the jail population were those who had made a minor transgression while on an ankle monitor awaiting trial and were rearrested for it. The lawmakers in Illinois recently passed a law allowing you to be able to buy groceries while on an ankle monitor, but just before the law became effective it was rescinded.
Oh, nothing warrants it at all. The jails just like to control everything, even if there is no reason for it. Their policy is basically restrict everything and then dial back once sued.
