Notices by brennen (brennen@federation.p1k3.com)

man if i wake up one of these days transformed into a giant insect, i'm just gonna scuttle immediately off into the leaf litter and none of you fuckers will ever see me again

@evan i currently work for WMF, and i concur re: reasons. why i am asking about this anyway is left as an exercise for the reader. :)

that said, the question could probably just as well have been framed to cover code forges, issue trackers, forums, blogs, etc. wikipedia may be a special case in some sense because it's a particularly rich / high profile resource, but anecdotally the effect is widespread.

my mental model of the scraping load on most of the public web is basically:

people want to train models, want them trained on the latest stuff, and there is money for doing this. there is little incentive to be efficient or responsible about it, so we wind up with a bunch of crawlers just absolutely going to town.

do you actually work in this field and know better than me? am i missing something important?

@cwebber "everybody has something to hide, like for example the credentials for taking money out of their bank account" is a weirdly hard thing to put across sometimes

@aparrish i've probably said this before, but i have thought an awful lot about your "programming is forgetting" talk from OHS this last ~decade. feels more, uh, perilously relevant of late than ever.

@cwebber

just gonna leave this here:

https://wikiworkersunited.org/

@skinnylatte holy shit, they have little pins for the trains!

"bitcoin has no real-world purpose" is a thing i've probably said myself, but it's become a harder framing to accept given how just how useful cryptocurrency is proving to a bunch of people who are somewhere between "very interested in doing a bribery" and "hellbent on a full authoritarian collapse".

@glyph @aeva i also found it weird, thought about it for a second, and checked the box

what's a sound that you're so familiar with that if you think about it right you can hear it almost perfectly?

(pleasant version)

i think "a vast array of cicadas" is my most intense and specific version of this.

@cwebber :(

@cwebber that reminds me - did you ever get it to sleep?

it's december the 18th. are you trying to get one last thing in at work, but you just need someone else to give it a little signoff or review?

consider instead: the joys of puttering about in your little corner of things on something no one else thinks about at all. taking a long walk at lunchtime. looking at the fat little winter birds flitting about in the bare branches outside your window and requiring no one else at all to assemble a mental model of anything.

@algernon i think there are few really _good_ options, but i'll at least express a narrow preference for things that make it difficult to create deeply nested hierarchies.

YAML and JSON are both ultimately a scourge not because of their syntax, but because they enable a tendency towards putting stuff inside of other stuff that rapidly escalates towards pathology.

@skinnylatte @ranjit i'm personally innoculated against this (after a week or so i begin to itch for visibile horizons and large expanses of plants), but my partner isn't and i suspect it may eventually happen to me by proxy.

@Andres4NY @ifixcoinops at this point, matrix is indistinguishable from an op designed to ensure that a viable fully-open-and-reasonably-secure-but-more-ergonomic successor to IRC never emerges. i don't really think that was done on purpose, but the effects are pretty much the same. an absolute disaster from end to end.

@RamenCatholic @SRLevine the original question reminded me of some science fiction i read with a city that crawls along a track just ahead of the terminator on... mercury, maybe?

@RamenCatholic @SRLevine ah, this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2312_(novel)

(it was... kind of uneven, but some fun ideas in there.)