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@waifu
> Somewhere out there, a lonely bot is still tweeting at the void: “sunrise was at 6:47am”, waiting for love.
I had my retarded Twitter uptime bot toss this in because it's trivial (but it posted the time and either "WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE" or "THE MORNING SUN HAS VANQUISHED THE HORRIBLE NIGHT"). The bot ran from 2008 to 2023 and was only useful to me: externally hosted thing would show me whether my box was up or not and whether it had rebooted (until Elon bought Twitter and login-walled everything and then I couldn't see shit).
2500 years ago, without even pen and paper, dudes would calculate this by drawing in the sand and arranging rocks. Who the hell expects a massive following to develop because a guy wires up something that is trivial to calculate and completely uninteresting to look at? ( https://plan9.io/magic/man2html/7/astro , https://github.com/risacher/sunwait , etc.)
It turns out it was because of https://v.cx/2024/02/solar-bot :
> But this broadcasting infrastructure appears to be the key ingredient for the phenomena we call “social”: large numbers of small-time “creators”, with some vaguely Zipf-like distribution making a few of them extremely influential.
> I created a bunch of very simple social media bots that broadcast how sunrise and sunset are shifting every day shortly after sunset. Because this data depends on location, there is a separate bot for each major metropolitan area.
> Update 2025-04-11: The Mastodon accounts have been shut down at the request of the administrator of the mas.to instance where I’d set them up.
He was tryna get famous with bots that were even lower-effort than those stupid "sponsored" Twitter mirror bots, spamming mas.to, and then got banned.
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