"More people working from home also brings benefits to everyone"

Exactly!

Unfortunately most people suck and would rather make others suffer too just because their own job can't be done remotely. They will take that traffic hit, higher fuel price and exhaust fumes just to make sure no one is enjoying life in a way that they aren't.

Hmm.. well, if I ever get back into working on my web projects I'll have to look that up. I really thought it was ALL cookies. I was considering just blocking all EU countries because I really HATE those popups and don't want to contribute any of them myself.

Nope. That's a lie.

To provide any sort of session based service cookies are the only reasonable technology.

Cookies are not a significant privacy concern.

GDPR rules require obtaining consent before writing cookies thus the popups.

Personally I think every non commercial website ought to be blocking requests from the EU and instead just showing EU visitors a message saying they can have their access back when they get their leaders to stop shoving those god damned popups in our faces!

I own a duplex and rent out the other side.
It pays about 2/3 of my monthly mortgage/tax/insurance escrow on the house.
Whenever it goes vacant it never stays that way for more than a few days past however long I keep it off market for maintenance.

Zillow tells me I could charge a lot more.

But I don't.

Without exposing as many young children to the horrors of public elementary and middle schools a whole lot of therapists are going to be out of work!

Y'all know that one of the next things up on the conservative todo list is going after abortion clinics' records and retroactively punishing those who have used their services right? It's just a matter of waiting for next year's supreme court session.

The only way to stop it is if enough of those bible-belt conservative women who have been preaching against abortion for decades now but secretly had one realize the danger they are in and go cancel out their husbands' votes.

If that doesn't happen then they and anyone else who has had one is screwed!

I worked for 5 years in a call center doing tech support for internet customers.

I'm white, American, always have been and as far as I know I sound it. But my name isn't very common. So, until I started going by my middle name every so often I would get a customer who would go immediately irate because he thought he was talking to someone in another country. Others would ask what country the call center was in and argue with me when I told them. So I can only imagine what it would have been like to have an accent from any other place.

Don't get me wrong. The problem is the bigoted callers, not the people doing their jobs. But a company must cater to it's bill paying customers. At the very least it could help to keep the conversation on business and get done and on to the next customer rather than lose time for the obligatory nationality conversation.

Most of the time I think of anti-nuclear activists as the "useful idiots" of the coal and methane industries. The world would be a lot better off if most parts of it had more nuclear power plants.

But not an island nation that is prone to earthquakes and tsunami!!! Don't build nuclear plants in geologically unstable places. That should have been the lesson of Fukushima, not get rid of nuclear outright until oil gets expensive then build it back up again.

Ahh.. Oh well....

Is Potato!

Do people still use iPods? Why? Doesn't pretty much everyone already carry a cellphone with all of a standalone music player's capabilities plus infinite more? What's the point?

Is the "old internet" really dead?

As you said, "only a few hobbyists wanted it".
Now I'm not sure that's entirely true. I knew some people that in the late 90s/early 0s had their own webpages, and weren't the type one would expect to do that sort of thing. Yet they started learning HTML or at least managed to use one of those chinsey old website builder tools. Their content wasn't that far from the stuff one sees on social media today though and they did stop with the "techie stuff" when social media became available to do it for them.

And it's true that a lot of the "techie stuff" has moved to social media as well, Github and Hackaday.IO come to mind.

But some small percentage of today's internet users do still create their own websites. Much of which is hobbyist content. There are even people still posting stuff on Gopher and Gemini (sort of a modernized Gopher).

It's easy to say this is dead because it's such a small percent of today's internet. But look how many more internet users, traffic and people there are now than then. Is this small percentage really that much less overall than the smaller thing that was the whole internet back in the day?

Or is it that the old internet, or at least something resembling and descended from it is still going but is dwarfed in size and "loudness" by this new thing that isn't really all that related except that it used the same physical network and protocols?

Taiwan, China (capital of)

Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can't say
People just liked it better that way

Harvey OS is where it's at. Or where it will be anyway.

I recently tried Wayland. I didn't chose to but it happened automatically when I switched to Gnome. Everything seemed to work ok. Then I tried to share my screen in a Teams meeting. The option was gone. So I switched back to X. Everything works exactly like it did with Wayland. Except now I can share my screen.

Sure, that was probably only the result of a Teams bug. But what is a user to do? Decompile Teams and fix the bug?

I don't see how Wayland brings anything to the user except a questionable future for remote access.