Hm.

Is anyone doing "Index of folk motifs but for stories people tell on the internet"?

Things like:

- recalled childhood media has no records or memories by wider culture (Horse Autopsy, Candle Cove, possible some pieces of The Mandela Effect in general, ...)
- consequent affirmation by assembled crowd ("everybody clapped", <I'm kinda assuming this definitely IS a trope rather than the end-note of a single famous story but like it's TALKED about aa a trope so famously>, ...)
- spontaneous violence by unanticipated passerby (the Down With Cis bus, maybe Richard Spencer Getting Punched is this? (and if so, Carlson too), ...)
- idea is infectuous (multiple copypastas, but also the "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" narrative, ...)
- ...

Like maybe there's not that much and/or every one of them are already in the existing ATU Index for classical folktales but I don't think I'd expect them to be..?

Okay I'm randomly watching a three-part series on the Cold Fusion 1989 Fleischmann–Pons experiment and fallout/drama questioning it,

(part 2/3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbfJFPVApu8 )

and I think one notable thing we are missing in the arguments over Anthropic/OpenAI/etc.'s claims about We Solved [Collatz/Navier-Stokes/...] is academics quoting bits of song lyrics or ad-hoc rhyming couplets to snipe at each other in press conferences.

I think we should have more of that.

(Also becuse I mentioned hackers as a possible community, I should say explicitly -- do not write these connections down. do not make a tool to make playing this easier. do not serialize this into parseable or queryable forms. a personal ad-hoc roladex or def-facto email address book as downstream artefacts, maybe, but do not do not let your connections be extractable from your physical-self or immediate-local-data-self.)

(I cannot emphasize enough how much this is practical advice I actively want people to pick up for their own community-navigation, for the social and political ends I expect to come out of it.)

(If you're Jewish this is called "Jewish Geography". I didn't make up the name. If you're queer I've never heard anyone name it (just do it sometimes -- usually incidentally, not systematically), but if you wanna make the name actually make sense you can try calling it "Queer Network Topology" maybe.)

(... if you're doing it as part of trying to build diasporic politics in the global Hacker community, you HAVE to call it "Hacker Network Topology", I think. Or possibly "Wait do we know anyone in common? Can we play Social-BGP for a bit?")

PRACTICAL ADVICE FOR DIASPORIC POLITICS #4318642:

If someone feels familiar to you in the way you are trying to build/live a diaspora around, assume you know-someone-who-knows-someone-who-knows them. If you're having an extended conversation with them, try to figure out what that chain is -- share what places you've known fellow-people in, learn and be interested in what places they've known fellow-people in.

(If you find a chain -- success! you won the game and you have a deeper and more meaningful connection with not just that person but with everyone in the chain.
If you don't find an existing connection -- also success! you didn't win, but now you know someone in a network-location of the diaspora you didn't before, and so will have more directions to play the game in with the next fellow-person you meet.)

Also the "Post-Modem Neo-Luddism" joke that I keep trying to make happen and is clearly just not anyone else's sense of humor is objectively funny, darnit. You all just don't appreciate Art. It's the children who are wrong.

*listening to the recent Spritely Institute talk*
"Wow, nice 'The Thing You Are Supposed To Be Decentralizing Is Power' reference !"

Individual downstream projects don't matter less because upstream has already been compromised. (This isn't a security-guarantees fight.)
Rather, reverse-that, it is partially BECAUSE individual (or community) downstream projects like this DO inherently matter, that gives any extra meaning to the upstream losses at all.

LLM-GenAI-slop isn't an attack on coherent software as a meaningful artifact of a community-of-knowledge because it's some sort of contact- or dependency- corrupting force. Violating one brick in the stack doesn't violate everything above it.
It's an attack on that because it is, on a repo-by-repo basis, an attack on that community, and on the meaningful knowledge that community can be said to have, and on the intentional and recoverable and communicable meaning that is embedded in the codebase. It's an overwhelming wave of incoherence.

Lifting this AI-Slop take out of my replies here -- I feel like I've seen this sentiment said or implied a few times, and a friend talked about how they were losing confidence how much it even mattered that their personal project was sticking to not being vibecoded at all, when the dependencies and tools -- wgpu, iced, the rust compiler, llvm, blender, zed, linux and countless others -- are all falling into that pit, so like if the entire stack below is corrupted What Even Is The Point Fighting This Even.
(.. sorry if I'm mis-summarizing it, hopefully not.)

And like I have a post that I've been rolling the threads of around in my head for the past month or two at least, but I DISAGREE with this, like, /pretty strongly/.

(I'm not actually sorry.)

"Gadit isn't that the same book that you're always loudly quoting for that one definition of Cyberspa--" yeah. sorry,

http://www.albion.com/netiquette/corerules.html

The Core Rules of Netiquette are excerpted from the book Netiquette by Virginia Shea. Click on each rule for elaboration.

Introduction
Rule 1: Remember the Human
Rule 2: Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life
Rule 3: Know where you are in cyberspace
Rule 4: Respect other people's time and bandwidth
Rule 5: Make yourself look good online
Rule 6: Share expert knowledge
Rule 7: Help keep flame wars under control
Rule 8: Respect other people's privacy
Rule 9: Don't abuse your power
Rule 10: Be forgiving of other people's mistakes

REMINDER: You can CW posts as "lewd" even if they don't have any actual lewd in them. Keep people on their toes. Give 'em something to think about.

The most simultaneously extremely frustrating and politically invigorating thing in computing over the past decade is how we've so thoroughly fallen back to a 1970s mainframe-terminal architecture except our thin-clients need to be supercomputers now.

Worldanvil this, Twine that...

I simply think someone should tell a multi-segmented hypertext narrative/world by forking getting-running and replacing the data in Sefaria.

Hypertext Fiction implies the existence of Metatext Fiction, Supertext Fiction, Controltext Fiction, Shifttext Fiction, Toptext Fiction, and Greektext Fiction.

The attack on A/I raises a very important question:

Is there any way we can get the IETF or any W3C WG cool enough to likewise be declared a terrorist organization?

Hm.

What if a social media space where all comments-sections were, structurally, follower-only,
and in particular boosting carried neither permission to comment nor a list of known responses, that list only lived in a canonical location of the OP, and GET/POST the comments required view-permissions (I think there's a cryptographic way of encoding this, I'll defer to Willow Protocol for all that work this is just a thoughts) on the account?

sledgehammering is an accessibility tactic leaked source code is an accessibility tactic ASL is an accessibility tactic reverse-engineering APIs is an accessibility tactic occupying buildings is an accessibility tactic phreaking is an accessibility tactic electoralism is an accessibility tactic f**k-you reimplementation is an accessibility tactic