Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

Proved my old-school tech prowess today:

Asked an engineer to scrape a list of company email addresses off of a website we use internally. After 10 minutes, they were still refining an LLM prompt to do it.

I used devtools to grab the JSON data, copied it into Word, edited out the surrounding array structure, then copied that into Excel to sort alphabetically, deleted the numeric keys. Ta da! Took me about 3 minutes.

I really, really worry that basic computer literacy is nearly dead.

Weirdly, as we checked out of the hotel this morning all signs of the riot-adjacent activities last night except the graffiti had been tidied away. And it’s interesting to note the presence of one tonne sacks of short planks had been prepositioned near all the fires during a public transit strike.

Conclusion: the fires were preplanned, the police response was preplanned, and they were planned by the same people (hint: not the demonstrators).

cool we got a reverse url -> torrent index going. now we need a little crawler to extract url lists from wacz archives by just skimming the zip index and grabbing just enough pieces pull them out, then populating the index becomes automatic.

so coming soon to a #sciop near you, a p2p wayback machine, where a URL can get resolved into a bittorrent-backed web archive. then we federate the sciops. and we have the federated/p2p archive dot org we deserve.

If you have a Windows 11 machine, the update they just pushed sneaks Copilot onto your machine and sets it to run at startup. I just had to uninstall it (again) when I found it running in my system tray after the mandatory reboot.

#Windows
#Windows11
#Copilot
#AI
#LLM

@mauve as someone who started online in the early 2000s: we had (semi)centralised spaces and connections born on-platform. But thinking of something like Livejournal, you didn't have a global timeline exposing you to everything anyone was posting.
In other places (thinking of Deviantart) where you had that exposure, the context was still present because the community was small (to today's standards) and very focused. I guess the same would apply to forums of the time.

First social networks I saw (Friendster, Orkut, MySpace) were weird to me because they didn't seem to have a point. No focus like "this is a community about a topic" or "this is place to blog", but just "this is a place to have a profile and friend other profiles".

A nice thing about the Fediverse is that it brings back, in some places, this "topical community" thing with servers, and a nice middle ground between small (server) and wide (fediverse)