CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@b0rk I think that the way we perceive the Internet is still in a state of flux and 20 years from now we'll look at now the way we look at the early 2000s web2.0 the way at the time we looked at the early '90s geocities era when we looked weird at the earlier Usenet era and so on: a rather quaint but ultimately doomed to be obsoleted way to use this technology. In any case, there's a strong generational component, see the origins of the "Eternal September" meme.

At this point I feel it's all unescapably converging towards the amorphous yet omnipresent hose of semi-worthless data that's the backdrop of most cyberpunk media. But who knows?

@b0rk I personally found that doing a complete read of the manpage of a new tool gives me a fairly good idea of what sort of problem the authors wanted to solve, even if I don't recall specific parameters later. Also whenever i run into a weird command somewhere, I look up what all the flags do, both to understand the subtleties and to "prime the cache", so to speak.

Also-also, at least on Debian, a _lot_ of things have manpages, like file formats or some helper scripts. And they have neat references to one another at the end. It's basically a proto-web.