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

@aparrish @aeva "AI" and "the social contract" are vader and lando in that _empire strikes back_ scene where vader's like "pray i don't alter it any further"

@clarity i'm leaning towards we should probably do it a lot less

bleeding from each knuckle in a way that's probably familiar to anyone else who has ever made the mistake of using a chunk of hardware cloth for anything at all garden related

@baldur thinking about asbestos, lead, arsenic, PFAS, ...

it's hard not to conclude that a lot of the most harmful things are exactly those with a lot of apparent applicability / utility in a bunch of domains while the harms are hidden, deferred, papered over, obscured by industry collusion, etc.

generative AI feels like it fits this profile one way or another. its outputs *may* not be good, but either way the relevant people are convinced of the utility and hellbent on obscuring the harms.

@baldur and like... asbestos is an amazing insulator & fire proofer. lead is straightforwardly useful for countless things. all that stuff that 3M et al. have churned out that now shows up in every water supply and bloodstream is *super* useful. too bad about, you know, all the poisoning.

i wish we could talk about computational phenomena more like we talk about lead: yep, sure is useful if you don't give a shit about the nervous systems of your children.

we should have paid more attention to the cats who, for decades, put their bodies on the line to walk on keyboards and sit on laptops and prevent us from programming

@cy yeah, i mean, you're not wrong, but i think the exists-is-the-enemy-of-good thing - while often _triggered_ by corporate interference - is a dynamic that's kind of orthogonal to the specific source of the existing thing. sometimes the reason you don't have a better thing is that a longstanding community project or standard fills the niche for the people who'd otherwise create something better.

@pho4cexa a recurring rant of mine is that we don't have a good desktop mail client because everyone who would have written one is just using gmail, we don't have a good irc successor because everyone who would have written one either stayed on irc or fell for a con like matrix, we don't have good encryption tools because pgp, etc., etc. there's some general principle at work here.

@skinnylatte on multiple occasions, i have been yelled at by an entire social group for not bringing enough bags of salt & vinegar chips to a party or campout also heavily featuring dill pickles and pepperoncini. exactly one guess as to what nationality the majority of us are.

it's been 0 (zero) minutes since i last saw a set of overworked coworkers courting burnout as a result of AI bot scrapers abusing the ever living shit out of infrastructure we run as a service to the public

@theresnotime my first distros came on a couple of CDs i ordered for USD 2.00 apiece from... actually i don't remember. maybe walnut creek or something was involved? someone who specialized in selling cheap install media. i think i had to make a boot floppy to do the install.

nobody is going to out old-timer @liw on this one - who as i recall got his first linux because linus wanted somebody else to try it out...

@skinnylatte @brooke if they worked as well as these off-brand transitions lenses i have, they'd never shade genders except when staring directly into the gender sun

@Aleums ok, but to fully calibrate this take, can you tell us how you feel about peter frampton?

@alex there've been bot-related costs and malicious traffic for as long as i can remember, but this feels like it's intensified massively everywhere. it gets harder and harder to imagine a network where public-by-default keeps being a viable approach.

software as a disservice

"goin' where the weather suits my clothes" but really it's just waiting for the brief windows of time where it's actually wintery where i live so i can wear 3/4 of the things i own

ok so i currently follow people who are extremely into: birds, bugs, fountain pens, old computers, weird computers, weird computer languages, sailboats, poems, trains, bicycles, gender fuckery, cartoon animals, weather, radio, disaster response and analysis, fiber arts, rpgs, drugs, movies. you know, the usual stuff.

so what else you got, fediverse? i'm looking for some special interests i don't currently see anybody going way over the top on.

@cks "Quick guide to EBNF" is my go-to example of a phrase encountered in documentation that lets you know instantly you're fucked.

the man page equivalent of http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/nosql/

@m455 @technomancy @aw rST _seems_ like a nice design, but in practice i had to placate sphinx for a while and i'm never going to touch it again if i can help it.

@technomancy @huertanix "ignoring this bullshit until it's supplanted by some other bullshit" has its limitations, but it's clearly one of the most durable strategies in technology if you can afford the timeframe.