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

@cwebber i'm sure the paychecks will keep cashing while we white-knuckle the infrastructure of civilization around this infinite series of switchbacks nobody look over that edge turn up the music let's fucking go

you know that feeling when you're driving or biking in heavy rain, or in icy conditions, or in strong wind, and you can tell the wheels are no longer in contact with the ground in a way that completes the usual tight feedback loop between how you operate the controls and how the motion of the vehicle responds? that sense you have of floating or drifting, and your model of the system you were controlling your place in until a moment ago is at least temporarily void?

anyway i think i crossed the "the majority of code i review will be slop from here on out" threshold today.

i work with conscientious people, so "slop" is an imprecise description. a good portion of this stuff will have been evaluated by people equipped to understand it. but there's no longer any real way to know what's been written directly by a human, and it's clearly less and less as time passes.

it's windy. the wheels are floating on black ice.

it sounds like if you don't want the sync feature anyway, you can go to about:config, and toggle:

identity.fxaccounts.enabled

to false. then restart.

i'm about to restart and see if it works...

me in 1995: hackers is an unrealistic film because computers don't work like that and thus it is stupid

me now: hackers is an unrealistic film because it believes that good things are possible and hacker culture is on the side of downtrodden and the earth and it's great

look, we've been finding out for quite a while now, can we please just get back to fucking around

noticing my little personal code forge is down for some reason, shrugging and turning off the server forever instead of figuring out why

i think the next thing to do is replace all of the blog URLs with a little notice that says "if you're human and there was something here you wanted to read, e-mail me and maybe i can get you a copy"

no one will ever do this.

i think reading @simple_sabotage over and over again in these little bite-sized chunks has done something to my understanding of the world.

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?