Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here.

A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.

Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.

Bruce’s business and livelihood survived only because the website was not the whole business.

Others have not been so fortunate. Just last week, ZEGO, a German textile firm that had been in business for 37 years, filed for insolvency after a single cyberattack in March shut down its production for six weeks. Unlike The Numbers, they had no other business to fall back on.

The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.

The Numbers is coming back, better built than before. I would encourage you to keep using it, keep supporting it, and, if you are one of the many people who emailed Bruce in fury about a missing page, perhaps send a kinder one now you know why it was missing.

  • 𝙈𝙞𝙖@quokk.auEnglish
    181·
    5 days ago

    And the new net will be ID-gated for everyone. Everything said and done will be tracked and known to state actors.

        • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
          1·
          1 day ago

          honestly i’ve been slowly working towards that kinda lifestyle for a few years now and i kinda hope the “internet” fucking dies so i’m free to go all the way, it just seems like what things should be like if our recent development wasn’t so directed by corporate interests or just happened more slowly.

          Old-timey life was really quite a lot better in many ways, like we’re just not evolved to constantly read about every single horrible event that happens to any human, and we need to be a little bit bored sometimes.
          But also smartphones are fucking awesome and i like being able to call emergency services if i’ve fallen and i can’t get up, which even the actual amish recognize.

          Also the aesthetics/vibes of judicious mixing of technological eras is fucking impeccable, i want the countryside to look like Hobbiton, small towns like 18th century sweden, cities to look like 1920’s new york with everything VIOLENTLY art deco, and all of it connected with trams and trains that look like metal caterpillars and where 30-minute departure frequency is seen as bordering on not even having service.