Notices by Owen (owen@mastodon.transneptune.net)

Something caused Youtube to lose track of my phone's viewing history recently - probably my point-blank refusal to log in when using the site - and the result has been interesting. Youtube now oscillates between a bare search page, or a page with some of the most feral radicalization content you can imagine, depending on what seems to be pure chance.

It's doing a great job of breaking my watch-a-youtube-video-at-bedtime habit, I tell you what.

If you have any loved ones who use Youtube as a way to follow current affairs, it is your moral prerogative to go through their recommendations periodically and "do not recommend this video" things that are too heavily radicalized.

A JS minifier that, instead of reducing byte count, replaces identifiers with terms like "PipeBomb" and "meth_price" and so on, so that your code is likely to be filtered out from statistical models' outputs.

A lot of particularly capital-brained projects for labour replacement rest implicitly on the assumption that _there will be jobs_ - somewhere else - for everyone displaced by whatever labour-reducing invention they're championing this week.

I really don't think that Khosrowshahi, for example, has any reason to _care_ whether Uber's investments into automating long-haul trucking will displace truck drivers, because surely they can find other work.

This has never been fully true, but it's diminishingly true as more and more business categories come to be dominated by staunch labour elimination.

But it'll take time - and probably violence, unfortunately - before the stakeholders in this labour-elimination project come to understand that they are threatening peoples' lives, and that the people they are threatening are not, in fact, going to take that calmly.

@mcc How would you characterize the two types?

@mcc I disagree only in detail; I agree in the large.

All software is the realization of someone else's mental model. Since it's never your own (even if you wrote it, it was you last week or last month or last year), operating under that model requires learning it. However, software should embrace and facilitate that learning, rather than treating it like a chore to be avoided.

@aphyr I am legitimately not sure where I am more annoyed by "here is our helm chart, good luck" or "here is a single static binary for you to run (assuming your system uses the same libc as ours) (assuming you trust blobs)" (looking at you here hashicorp).

@dalias Given the existence of services like nss and pam, I'm not sure statically linking libc is universally a good idea either. Discovering that one program disagrees with the rest of my system about how user IDs map to user names, or about how hostnames map to addresses, is intensely frustrating.

The classic changelog serves, among other purposes, to persuade users of the importance of installing an update. The vestigial changelog - "Bug fixes and feature improvements" - is a frank admission that we no longer feel like there's any point in doing the suasion when users don't get to say no in the first place.

I dunno, but I have a feeling that the normalization of automatic updates has relieved developers and their clients of having to consider a user's needs to a large degree. Software change is now something you do to your users, not something you persuade your users to accept.

And you may tell yourself, "This is not my rough beast."
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my hour, come at last."

@saddestrobots Speaking as someone who regularly considers black-holing m.social and _doesn't_ see a lot of value in the list in question, hard agree.

@saddestrobots I only just now realized jorts dot horse is on that list, el em aye oh fuckin nerds

@saddestrobots yeah if you're gonna block jorts horsing then have the courage of your bad posts and don't make it about someone else's

You ever think about how Google de-spined - destroyed - literal tonnes of books donated by university libraries, with the intention of scanning them into a digital free library, and how none of that ever materialized?

Those books are just gone now, instead.

The project was buried in litigation because Google and the publishers involved couldn't come to terms on allowing online distribution.

Of library books.

Something to keep in mind when hearing about hydrogen as a renewable or green fuel is that nearly half of hydrogen production, worldwide, comes from natural gas. Another 45% or so come from coal and oil sources. Renewable hydrogen - electrolysis, generally - is basically a blip.

Hydrogen is, in many cases, an attempt _by the fossil fuels industry_ to carry on business as usual in the face of carbon-reduction initiatives by putting the carbonaceous parts out of sight.