Brings back memories of tcl/tk eggdrop bots, buying shell accounts to keep your nick held while you were offline, and automating server jumping so you wouldn’t be banned for idling
Good times! I wonder how many people were launched into infosec careers or learned coding or had some other positive result in their lives because of petty fights on IRC.
I learned a lot from that era, not only about social skills, but also asynchronous programming from watching msa make the irc server code much more scalable.
> Today, I'm strong. Today, I'm confident. Today, I am social.
Today, I am patient. Today, I am accepting. Today, I have a cause.
This would not be the case, if yesterday, for me, was not IRC.
Do you also agree that "IRC, is a transcended level of humanity, that values you for all the other genes and experiences that make you, you - unlike the "real" world which is utterly focused on nothing"?
> Good times! I wonder how many people were launched into infosec careers or learned coding or had some other positive result in their lives because of petty fights on IRC.
I certainly did! After spending a couple of years (at 16-17) idling on IRC and picking stupid teenage fights, out of boredom I learned to code... in the mircScript language, to write silly bots and stuff. This is what motivated me to learn programming seriously.
IRC bots are really a fascinating category of software, because you can inject them into situations where people didn't necessarily agree to use them :-D much easier to attract users of your code if it's not totally... voluntary.
Have you ever seen a child using a telephone or a tablet? Its the same thing, but a thousand times over! They have software injected into them and they unwillingly suffer the effects of said software.
Or any adult browsing a website with uncalled-for javascript for that matter.
That wasn't what I was getting at, sorry to have been unclear. What I was saying is that you can write an IRC bot and then show it to your friends (on IRC) without your friends having to do anything in advance (like downloading an app.)
Brings back memories of tcl/tk eggdrop bots, buying shell accounts to keep your nick held while you were offline, and automating server jumping so you wouldn’t be banned for idling