This is basically what the "early Internet" looked like that people often write paeans to. Lots of pages written by people very dedicated to a weirdly specific thing while also peppering it with nonsequiturs and their crazy theory about who runs the "real" government. It was fine, but hardly the glorious wonderland often portrayed. (Not that the current Internet is without its flaws, but if I want to learn something from someone it is a million times easier today than it was in the late-90's and early-00's.
> It was fine, but hardly the glorious wonderland often portrayed.
Probably down to personal taste, but I would happily take a thousand of these websites with strange, esoteric folk sharing knowledge in unconventional ways than another subreddit that's 70% non-sequiturs by volume, or a Stack Exchange thread that's just the same quesiton asked 400 times in broken english.
The difference is that the extraneous junk is in one long block on modern websites, whereas it previously would've been freely mixed throughout the actual content in the old web.
Yeah, that's a good point and it makes me wonder if the modern web has shrunk my attention span.
I used to often meet this exact type of engineer early in my career as an enterprise data storage consultant in the 90s and early 2000s. I would say the most common "character" I would run into at a customer site was "UNIX libertarian hippie guy" who would love to weave politics, especially about privacy, freedom of speech, government overreach, new world order, esoteric obsessive hobbies, etc into technical discussions.
I feel like the typical tech worker today either has very different socio-political views, or keeps their politics out of our workplace interactions.
