Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

Today I found out that google docs infects html exports with spyware, no scripts, but links in your document are replaced with invisible google tracking redirects. I was using their software because a friend wanted me to work with him on a google doc, he is a pretty big fan of their software, but we were both somehow absolutely shocked that they would go that far.

One thing Anna doesn't lack is ambition:

"A year ago, we set out to answer this question: What percentage of books have been permanently preserved by shadow libraries?

[...]

"And ideally we don’t just have a number, but actual metadata. Then we can not only match them against shadow libraries, but also create a TODO list of remaining books to preserve! We could even start dreaming of a crowdsourced effort to go down this TODO list.

https://annas-blog.org/worldcat-scrape.html

Total student loan debt that would have been erased for millions of Americans: $400 billion

Total cost of the Trump tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy and corporations: $1.9 trillion

This is what I mean when I say the system is rigged.

The year is 2029. I have lost my job because programmers have been replaced by LLMs and badly paid "fine tuners." So, now I'm selling CDs out of my trenchcoat. On these CDs is a text-only archive of Wikipedia which I downloaded in 2017, burned on an old laptop that has been airgapped ever since. (All other repositories of knowledge have since been irrecoverably corrupted by LLMs.)

Every single person should be able to receive basic food and housing from a gigantic, mountain-sized omelette at a fixed position on the map; labor should only be required to obtain luxuries beyond what is naturally provided by the giant omelette. This is just so intuitively obvious, to someone born between 1983 and 1990

Expand your Latin

The owners of Neopets were trying to indoctrinate us in Scientology and NFTs but it backfired and instead what it taught us was "everyone is entitled to one free omelette per day" and that's why now all millennials are socialists

One of the most remarkable things to me about all these studies that turn out to have misused data, etc., is that most researchers apparently keep incredibly poor records; there's no audit history for changes; Excel is somehow the gold standard. I guess that's true in business, but I somehow thought there would be university, journal, and professional standards that required very specific one-way archiving of data, etc.

@wolf480pl CloudFlare isn't a profitable company. Their bandwidth is paid for by investor money and has been for ages.

Eventually investors will stop (most likely now when the economy is going to hell) and they have to make money, and turn corrupt. which is why you should keep as far away from it as possible before it happens.

This is the same chain of events that recently happened to sites like Reddit

On Thursday 5, we'll have a new #AMA session with
@mauve about agregore browser #P2P

Come join us and learn more about the distributed web!

https://discord.gg/bMZPGHmb?event=1158108698896510997

I think in the future if I am ever writing a code paper I am just going to take the list of contributors and copy paste that into the authors list with links to a git blame (with consent). If we're going to have a credit assignment system as broken as authorship, we can at least err on the "include everyone" side of the brokenness - I want the person who submits a PR to fix a typo in the docs to get credit for helping. People being incentivized to make lots of little contributions is good, actually.

It should be the same way with regular papers too - put your lab techs and undergrads on the paper! Put on the grad student/postdoc who isnt explicitly assigned to this project but ends up helping out anyway. Its literally free! Authorship inflation is a made up problem thats not even a problem!