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Never Ending September Date
- bighoki2885000 3y ago[dead]
- fouc 3y agothe 1993 date seems like a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- willcipriano 3y agoIt links to: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-...
- adw 3y agoAnother entry for "things which make one feel old" (it definitely is a reference to that, and it absolutely needs explaining, but...), especially because: a) I can't imagine more than a single-digit percentage of people on here were on Usenet, and b) this is _exactly_ the sort of place which will have a wildly disproportionate number of old Usenet denizens; most places that single-digit percentage would be more like 0.0x% at most. (Other candidates; Dreamwidth, I reckon, probably Tumblr, and anyone who still unironically uses mailing lists). In the earlyish 2000s, I gave a talk once to a bunch of more senior academics at the institution I was working at, the central thesis of which was "in about five years, you're gonna start getting undergraduates who have never known of a world where they couldn't cheat on their homework by cribbing Wikipedia". This was a true – arguably, even insightful – observation at the time, but in retrospect, it's a charmingly quaint view of the future compared to where we are with ChatGPT. Eternal September is the same kind of deal; it contemplated the future through the lens of the present and, well, it _sort_ of got there, but it kind of missed the full existential horror of "your grandmother on Facebook".
- throwaway22032 3y agoThe hilarious thing is that even the hugely expanded post-Eternal September Usenet lot (hi!) are a vanishingly small percentage now :)
- adw 3y agoOh, yeah, absolutely; I’m post-Eternal September too!
- thriftwy 3y agoI wonder how much work it would be to change it to September[1] of 2007[1] I hope 1993 is not hardcoded. It would also be great to have a calendar where every year past 1993 contains just one day that is conveniently September 3rd[3]. 1993 should start normally but September 3rd should be the last day. 1. https://dzen.ru/a/YyMkZQzd1Ec2e4XC https://dzen.ru/a/YyMkZQzd1Ec2e4XC 2. https://memepedia.ru/vernite-moj-2007/ https://memepedia.ru/vernite-moj-2007/ 3. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Третье_сентября_(песня) https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Третье_сентября_(песня)
- jwilk 3y agoThe epoch is configurable: $ sdate -e 2007-09 Thu Sep 5844 10:25:05 UTC 2007
- smitty1e 3y agoThere was a Duty Officer rotation for the O-5 (Commander) officers on the USS Blue Ridge in the late 1990's. The 0-6 promotion list was out one September, and they had fun with a certain Captain-to-be with a monstrous ego, who was quite excited to be off the rotation. They put his name down for 31-September. As expected, he achieved low Earth orbit in his rage over the affront. MORAL: date math is hard.
- emmelaich 3y agoI had the privilege of visiting the Blue Ridge inner sanctum when she visited Sydney. Really cool :-)
- mjb 3y ago"Eternal September" has big "I can't believe they let those people into the country club" energy. Gatekeeping is bad. It might feel good when you're on the right side of the gate. It might even feel righteous. After all, you deserved it, by being in the in group. But gatekeeping on arbitrary criteria is always bad, and we diminish ourselves when we encourage it. For me, the gatekeepers are worse for the Internet and it's communities than all the new people. It's great that the internet's gate is open. Let's celebrate that.
- chrisco255 3y agoWelp, the gatekeepers lost / won depending on how you look at it. There was no stopping the internet of course, but Usenet fell into irrelevance somewhere along the line. Which is I guess, getting their wish?
- cosmojg 3y agoI hate gatekeepers as much as the next guy, but I'll take Usenet over TikTok any day of the week. I suppose a better world requires sacrifice.
- TechBro8615 3y agoMy childhood was superior to your childhood. Nostalgia is a tale as old as time.
- type0 3y agoChoosing usenet over tiktok has nothing to do with nostalgia, it has everything to do with online freedom
- TechBro8615 3y agoIt has everything to do with nostalgia. Nostalgia is the only reason you can even express a concept as nebulous as "online freedom," when hardly anyone in the current generation can even conceptualize what that means, nevermind how it's lacking in TikTok, or why they would desire it in the first place. Waxing nostalgic for the "online freedom" of usenet is no different than extolling the virtues of "hard work" that are lost on those damn kids nowadays who don't even need to hike up a snowy hill to get to school.
- nyanpasu64 3y agoNow create a calendar for never ending 2020.
- JonathonW 3y agoAlready does that-- `sdate --covid 19` will keep it perpetually March 2020. It also accepts arbitrary starting points with `--epoch`. Not sure how you'd do a perpetual 2020 while allowing the month to advance-- pretty simple if you keep the month as a number, I suppose, but problematic for the named months used in the examples (what should the 44th month of a year be named?).
- thrtythreeforty 3y agoIs it `--covid19` or `--covid 19`? The fact that the year of COVID is parametrized in the second makes me nervous.
- proto_lambda 3y agoIt is indeed the latter, but it only knows about 19 so far: https://github.com/df7cb/sdate/blob/ace93c8d301c333a96ff354e8b25559d1089a0e0/scripts/sdate.in#L49-L61 https://github.com/df7cb/sdate/blob/ace93c8d301c333a96ff354e...
- NikkiA 3y agoI mean, you could argue that --covid 02 would represent SARS1 if we accept covid19 as SARS2
- ben_w 3y ago> what should the 44th month of a year be named? Second half of the year's months are Latin and off-by-two, so… Quadragintaduober?
- breckenedge 3y agoYou mean like this XKCD? https://xkcd.com/2459/ https://xkcd.com/2459/
- johnsanders 3y agoDoes this mean I can stop worrying about remembering to wake up Green Day?
- v3ss0n 3y agoThat's the first thing comes to my mind too
- sys_64738 3y agoAOL was the death knell for USENET when they joined up. At that point there was a high barrier to entry for USENET but the bar got removed completely. A sad day.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoI must confess that I directly participated, aided and abetted Eternal September. By summer 1992, I had landed my first-ever job with InterNIC Information Services. They were part of a trio (with the obscure Database Services and the notorious Registration Services by Network Solutions). IS's mission was to serve as a clearinghouse for information to the Research and Education communities who comprised the Internet in the early 90s. My crumudgeonly supervisor had an MLS degree. Of course, due to our (800) toll-free number being published by a few very annoying national media outlets, our scope crept into the consumer dialup market. Thereafter, my job duties consisted chiefly of pulling every voicemail message as quickly as humanly possible, then photocopying or printing via SPARCprinter a document known as PDIAL, and then quickly cramming it into an envelope or FAX machine, then probably either rebooting the SPARC machine to unjam the printer, or going to listen to more voicemails. PDIAL was a compendium of all known methods for getting onto the Information Superhighway at up to 14.4Kbit/s. Of course it included AOL and all the other walled garden, pseudo-ISPs. So if you ever meet someone who pioneered the commercialized, privatized Internet in 1992-93, I may have been the dude who gave them directions.
- euroderf 3y agoSomewhat related: when did the host rs.internic.net stop resolving ? I've checked it every few years, and nowadays it has (finally?) given up the ghost.
- amadeuspagel 3y agoIt strikes me that "Eternal September" is an older generations version of "Enshittification" — an expression of the same anxiety about change, the same entitlement to have everything stay the same.
- oblio 3y agohttps://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ How is enshittification not objectively bad? It's the logical progression of platforms, where they start abusing users openly.
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoIf a restaurant raises it's prices in an inflationary environment, is it enshittification? You know, the restaurant you've been able to buy a $6.50 burger and fries with for the last 10 years now costs $8. Am I, the customer, being abused? "Abusing users" in eshittification is fundamentally about violating expectations/norms, which is what Eternal September was about. Before "Eternal September", Usenet users came aboard in small waves and acclimatized to the local culture. This was the norm on Usenet. Once Usenet opened up, users joined so quickly that they could participate in the network with no shame without acclimatizing to the local culture. Likewise, when more ads appear or previously-free API surfaces begin costing users, older norms/expectations have been violated.
- uoaei 3y agoYou're getting downvoted because it's clear you simply don't comprehend the arguments you're allegedly responding to and are projecting your own straw men to make your (non-)points.
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoI'm curious what the purpose of your comment is, to further sneer at me out of disagreement? HN's culture has been steadily changing from one of operators to one of users for a long time now. I knew this would be an unpopular sentiment. Though my comment did go up and then down, so it's obviously a controversial one. It's also not wrong to feel angry when expectations change. If a Dollar General in your area raises prices, it puts pressure on local residents who may have just barely been staying solvent. Through no fault of their own, those residents now have even more financial stress on them. This is why economics is a complicated field; things like interest rate regimes have broad knock-on effects on the economy and create winners and losers that under different regimes may have never emerged.
- rasz 3y agoI know of another Never Ending Eternal September 1993. All Sierra games Mac ports stopped working precisely on September 18 1993! move.l Time, d0 ; seconds since January 1 1904 divu.w #$a8c0, d0 ; divide by 12 hours https://www.benshoof.org/blog/sierras-macintosh-timebomb https://www.benshoof.org/blog/sierras-macintosh-timebomb
- bighoki2885000 3y ago[dead]