20220104215720-wasm and openSource
Thoughts on what’s wrong with the web
The talk [[]] contains interesting information on what’s going on with wasm and the browser. I think it accidentally also highlights what’s wrong with the web model.
Webs are giant binary blobs that interact in non standards way with the rest of the world (mostly with its own server)
In a unix environment files, pipes and sockets are the main method of communication between programs. Imagine if you had a shell with the program google that takes over the shell, with its own curses interface but that it doesn’t produce any file or socket and that can only open other programs. The program facebook talks to the facebook server to send and retrieve data; nothing can be saved or manipulated.
Even in windows environments the file manager had a big use for dealing with all the outputs of the various programs.
This is a consolidation of the binary distribution via internet at a big scale. The operating system is now the browser, which runs hybrid programs both locally and remotely communicating via all sorts of APIs.
The traditional mode of open source is obsolete because there is no binary for javascript even if obfuscated. When using wasm, the parts of open source can run in the server side while still having non open APIs communicating both.
This is also a regression in the protocol as the main way to ensure that programs talk to each other; Most of the exchange protocols (i.e.: gopher, irc, xmpp, ftp) are dying because http+js/wasm + non open APIs are more efficient from a market perspective. This also has enabled further expansion of surveillance capitalism by enabling data extraction on a regular basis
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