Slashdot's Top Stories of 2023

January 3, 2024 3:18 PM

"Slashdot's 10 most-visited stories of 2023 seemed to touch on all the themes of the year..." After 27 years, the still-publishing "news for nerds" site ended 2023 with its special year-end list showing what attracted the most eyeballs. The top story drew over 100,000 views, but the whole list succinctly summarizes the last 12 months in its handful of headlines - AI, electric cars, misinformation online, and two stories about Linux. +1 Insightful
posted by destinyland (36 comments total)

First post.
posted by Quonab at 3:49 PM on January 3 [35 favorites]

Remember when being slashdotted could bring down servers?
posted by srboisvert at 3:51 PM on January 3 [31 favorites]

Junis nods approvingly from his Linux-powered Amiga from the foothills of Afghanistan.
posted by dr_dank at 3:53 PM on January 3 [3 favorites]

First post.

You mispelled frosty piss.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:59 PM on January 3 [5 favorites]

Just checked. They still have the same numerical UIDs as 25 years ago. 4 digit slashdot ID here.
posted by ocschwar at 4:11 PM on January 3 [9 favorites]

That's impressive, ocschwar. I managed to dig up my User Name and reset my password and it appears my first comment there was November 15, 1999, but my UID is still six digits.
posted by The Bellman at 4:52 PM on January 3 [4 favorites]

I've got that beat by a significant digit.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 5:14 PM on January 3 [2 favorites]

Wait, the low-UID siren even works when you're not on Slashdot?
posted by clawsoon at 5:16 PM on January 3 [6 favorites]

Just today I was talking to the soon-to-be-retiring instructor I took classes from 25 years ago. We were going over the class I'm going to teach this spring, and he noted that I had a 4-digit legacy student ID and that today they're all six digits.

I thought of Slashdot for the first time in a while and told him about UID bragging rights over there.

Now of course, that just makes me feel old, rather than cool.
posted by Ickster at 5:16 PM on January 3 [10 favorites]

I'm totally putting my /. UID as a novelty license plate on my mobility scooter when I move to the retirement home.
posted by ocschwar at 5:19 PM on January 3 [10 favorites]

Five digits, "Excellent" karma, and it's been over a decade since I last logged in.
posted by Slothrup at 5:33 PM on January 3 [9 favorites]

It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: in Soviet Russia, server slashdots YOU!
posted by chillmost at 5:38 PM on January 3 [4 favorites]

Kind of sad that the most viewed post only got 428 comments but at the same time I'm a bit surprised that Slashdot is around at all.

I just logged into my account after a loooong time and my user page shows my comments back to 2005 but I can't get past the first page to see anything older than that.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:47 PM on January 3 [3 favorites]

+1 Interesting
posted by rosary at 5:57 PM on January 3 [4 favorites]

Echoing Slothrup, same boat, same 5-digit ID range, "excellent" [!!!] karma. Nostalgia!
posted by northtwilight at 6:33 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]

Three digit ID, people. Three. I am very old.
posted by phooky at 8:59 PM on January 3 [13 favorites]

I'm amused that only 2 of the top 10 stories were about Rust.
posted by ocschwar at 9:24 PM on January 3 [2 favorites]

Kind of sad that the most viewed post only got 428 comments but at the same time I'm a bit surprised that Slashdot is around at all.

It’s around, but it’s a mere shell of its old self. All the changes in corporate ownership over the years really sapped the life out of that site.
posted by jmauro at 11:10 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]

It’s around, but it’s a mere shell of its old self. All the changes in corporate ownership over the years really sapped the life out of that site.

The enforced 'beta' of 2014 was what got me to finally go away, and I wasn't alone.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 11:40 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]

to what does slashdot refer? I always assumed it was a misunderstanding of the POSIXish shell expansion of . but idk, should probably have asked there but after reading the site for a minute I decided never ever to post anything there.

ls /. just lists the root dir contents, same as ls / does. The dot does not appear to mean anything in that connection. ls ./ lists current working directory, same(ish) as ls . would do.

Some UNIX utilities have different behavior for foo/ than for foo where foo is a dirname. rsync has bitten me a few times this way.

Being dumb sucks sometimes.
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 3:01 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]

It was meant to be confusing when you said the URL out loud.

“ech tee tee pee colon slash slash double-you double-you double-you dot slash dot dot org”
posted by dr_dank at 4:01 AM on January 4 [12 favorites]

It's not Halloween yet, but I'm going to take this opportunity to link to -- what I believe to be -- the best story ever told on Slashdot. Big Block Mopar's response in "Fun with Fog Generators" from Saturday October 19, 2002 .

"Chainsaws, Fog Machines and Stage Lighting (Score:5, Funny)".

You're welcome.

5 digit UID + Excellent Karma
posted by mikelieman at 4:50 AM on January 4 [4 favorites]

Don't remember what my ID is, let alone how many digits it's got. It was modestly fun for a while, and probably the first place that I realized that Wil Wheaton had a public life beyond having played the least-liked character on TNG, but this post was probably the beginning of the end in terms of it having any real relevance. (You might notice that a lot of the commenters are pushing back at CmdrTaco's peremptory dismissal.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:37 AM on January 4

I had multiple accounts on Slashdot that sadly ended up being throwaways because at the time I was a teenager using whatever sketchy free POP3 and IMAP email addresses I could find and those usually had a limited life. Hotmail and Rocketmail (?) existed back then, but I was too cool those web-based services. Anything short of using fetchmail and pine was for AOL-lusers.

I'm so glad that I eventually lost interest in Slashdot and grew up a bit.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:05 AM on January 4 [2 favorites]

This makes me feel naked, petrified, and covered in hot grits.
posted by Carcosa at 6:25 AM on January 4 [2 favorites]

#315 and also slashdot forgot the new password I entered in 2017 and is using my vintage password from 1999. Um.
posted by joeyh at 7:49 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]

I found Metafilter via a slashdot post, though somewhat indirectly. The discussion was about how to find content on the web, and somebody linked to a piece on Kuro5hin (!) about link aggregators. Metafilter was listed on that piece as "links with discussion" or some such...
posted by Surely This at 12:20 PM on January 4 [8 favorites]

Well sheeeet... I got +5 Insightful for a comment I made just yesterday. High six-digit UID, though. I was reading at least as early as "Voices from the Hellmouth" - remember Jon Katz and Columbine? - but I didn't sign up until years later. Probably heard about it from the old INTP mailing list. Not sure where I heard about Metafilter.
posted by clawsoon at 1:10 PM on January 4

Five-digit user ID. I hadn't logged in for eleven years, and my karma is still excellent somehow.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 2:03 PM on January 4 [1 favorite]

6-digit UID, Good karma. I think, at some point, that I bounced from /. to kuro5hin to Metafilter, but that was so long ago...
posted by wintermind at 5:30 PM on January 4

yep, irrelevant now after 20 years or so. I have a sorta low UID, but they got bought out years ago.
posted by baegucb at 7:25 PM on January 4

I admin tools for like 10,000 developers and I’ve still never seen any Rust code in the wild …maybe 2024 is the year of Rust !
posted by caviar2d2 at 5:40 AM on January 5 [3 favorites]

I admin tools for like 10,000 developers and I’ve still never seen any Rust code in the wild …maybe 2024 is the year of Rust !

The Polars Dataframe library for python is internally implemented in Rust. It is ridiculously fast, natively multithreads your code across all available cores and its API is orders of magnitude simpler than python pandas.
posted by mmascolino at 6:39 AM on January 5 [3 favorites]

A lot of the core Unix utilities are being rewritten in Rust, and some will make their way into standard distributions.

And if you're writing any sort of CRUD product, the Rust library stack is so nice. (Rocket/Diesel/etc).
posted by ocschwar at 11:42 AM on January 5

I only have 'positive' karma :(

last comment was in 2010.

wow. their user profile still has slots to put in your AIM, ICQ and Jabber id's!
posted by ArgentCorvid at 2:06 PM on January 5

four digits and my real name, last comment was 0x10 years ago.
I think /. is how I found mefi, maybe via k5,
20th century internet man!
posted by inpHilltr8r at 9:04 PM on January 7