Humans are very clever. Sometimes I feel very clever because I have learned so many cool facts and skills with the internet, and then I think about all the knowledge I hold that people of the past managed to figure out from scratch, and it blows my mind

You’re right, it was the .se one I used and I misremembered when writing my comment. Though this mistake highlights why adding sites like this to your bookmarks is important. Opportunistic scams are always common when a big domain goes down, and mistakes are easy to make

They already had a big target on their back. Sure, scraping Spotify made that larger, but given that their aims are explicitly political, I think there’s a lot of value in not being overly cautious and using takedowns as a way to bolster the resiliency of your service.

Domain takedowns are inevitable, even if they’d just continued with their existing archival efforts. That’s why, when I found I wasn’t able to access the .org domain over the weekend, I just went to https://annas-archive.se/ instead.

Edit: wrote one of the old domains (.gs) because I just use what’s bookmarked and got mixed up. It was .se that I used

A writer friend I have says that if she were looking at just her own financial security, she’s super grateful for AI, because she’s pivoted into fixing AI written articles from places that laid off all their human writers. Being a contractor, her hourly rate is way higher than times when she’s been employed full time as a writer, plus it takes way longer to rewrite a broken article than it would’ve done to just write a decent article from scratch (and they insist that they want her to fix the AI articles, not rewrite them from scratch. I assume this is because the higher ups have their heads so far up their arses that they’re not willing to acknowledge that they shouldn’t have laid off the humans).

The work isn’t as fulfilling as proper writing, but she’s getting paid so much compared to before that she’s able to work less than she was before, and still has money to put into savings. She’s still living super frugally, as if she were still a typical, struggling writer, because she was expecting that this wouldn’t last for very long, but she’s been at this for quite a while now (with a surprising amount of repeat business). She thought for sure that work would begin to dry up once the financial year ended and companies went “holy shit, why are we spending so much on contractors?”, but last we spoke, it was still going strong.

I’m glad that at least someone human is making bank off of this. And if it was to be anyone who lucks into this, I’m glad that it’s someone who has the extremely poor fortune to be laid off 4-5 times in one year (and this was pre-AI — she was just super unlucky)

I’m a biochemist who got into programming from the science side of it, and yeah, code written by scientists can be pretty bad. Something that I saw a lot in my field was that people who needed some code to do something as part of a larger project (such as adding back on the hydrogens to a 3d protein structure from the protein database) would write the thing themselves, and not even consider the possibility that someone else has probably written the same thing, but far better than they be can, and made it available open source. This means there’s a lot of reinventing the wheel by people who are not wheel engineers.

I find it so wild how few scientists I’ve spoken to about this stuff understand what open-source code actually means in the wider picture. Although I’ve never spoken to a scientist in my field who doesn’t know what open source means at all, and pretty much all of them understand open source software as being a good thing, this is often a superficial belief based purely on understanding that proprietary software is bad (I know someone who still has a PC running windows 98 in their lab, because of the one piece of essential equipment that runs on very old, proprietary code that isn’t supported anymore).

Nowadays, I’m probably more programmer than biochemist, and what got me started on this route was being aware of how poor the code I wrote was, and wanting to better understand best practices to improve things like reliability and readability. Going down that path is what solidified my appreciation of open source — I found it super useful to try to understand existing codebases, and it was useful practice to attempt to extend or modify some software I was using. The lack of this is what I mean by “superficial belief” above. It always struck me as odd, because surely scientists of all people would be able to appreciate open source code as a form of collaborative, iterative knowledge production

You make a compelling point

Your comment felt like it made my blood pressure spike, because I have heard people saying this 100% without irony

That is a much better name for it, especially because some of the ways in which veteran code gets creaky does feel analogous to age

I wish that the code was open source, because it’d be super interesting to be able to look under the hood of a game like Rollercoaster Tycoon

In the Spring, you can help man the fish doorbell. It’s good fun for the second monitor, if you have one.

Context copied from the linked page:

"Every spring, thousands of fish swim through Utrecht’s canals and waterways, searching for a place to spawn and reproduce.

In the heart of the city lies the beautiful Weerdsluis, a manually operated lock. When the lock gates are closed, fish are forced to wait, wasting valuable time and energy – making them easy prey for birds and predatory fish.

To help the fish, an underwater camera is installed at the lock. If fish appear on screen, you can press the doorbell! This alerts the lock keeper, who will open the lock when many fish are waiting. You can “ring” the Fish Doorbell from early March to late May

People do so enthusiastically every year. In 2024, the Fish Doorbell attracted around 2.7 million viewers, from America to Brazil! The project has gained global recognition, helping people worldwide learn about fish migration and Utrecht’s underwater world."

Do you have advice on how to find this kind of artisan seminar?

Edit: I realised this question might be too broad, so I’ll narrow the scope. How did your friend find out about the blacksmithing workshop?

I really like Citizen Science. Beyond its scientific impact, I’ve seen it have a hugely beneficial impact on people who get involved in this way (I know a lot of people who help with collecting samples of river water and testing its quality). Rather than scientific progress being something that is done to a person, with them having no say in it due to not being a scientist, they get to be a part of the progress, which gives them a sense of personal investment in our scientific knowledge.

Plus it helps them to trust science more, because they get to see it as it really is: deeply messy and human. Us scientists are not nearly as objective as we may like to believe, but that’s sort of the whole point of the scientific method — that’s how we try to acknowledge and set aside our subjective messiness, and get closer to objectivity, even if we can never truly reach it. Getting to understand how science functions within society gives people a deeper sense of trust because it’s more authentic.

And on top of that, citizen science is useful for challenging the arrogance of scientists who believe that their field of study makes them superior to people who studied the humanities (or people who didn’t do higher education). I know, because deep in the back of my brain, I was one of those asshole scientists. Getting involved in citizen science project helped me to recognise how valuable it can be to get different perspectives and systems of knowledge production. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on beyond the ivory tower, and I’m glad to have been thoroughly humbled by the experience.

It’s also so cool as well to get to share stuff that I love with people I didn’t think I had much in common with. Turns out we have a big thing in common: we don’t want shit in our rivers, we know the water companies are fucking us over with their bullshit excuses, and we want to be able to take our vague mistrust and anxiety, and turn it into something concrete we can use. And so we find ourselves united in our quest to quantify the ways in which the water companies are failing in their duty.

It’s very cool, and it makes me a bit more hopeful for the role of science in society

That’s been my experience too. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to game on Linux. There have been some games where I had some issues, but the same could be said for Windows too. I think the gaming specific aspect is roughly equal between the two operating systems.

The nice thing about Linux though is that when it does go wrong, I am better equipped with the information and tools to be able to effectively troubleshoot and fix the problem. At least, in theory — I am still learning, so I often find myself wading through logs that I don’t understand, with little progress. It does at least feel more empowering though, to have the abstract option of being able to fix my problem, even if I am not able to grasp that opportunity in practice.

A lot of these annoyances can be disabled somewhere in the Settings, but the problem is that there are so many of them tucked away all over the place. Windows 10 (I haven’t used 11) was better than Windows 8 in terms of how unified the settings were, but I remember a few instances where I had to go rummaging through the skeletons in Windows’ closet in order to change some stuff (e.g. having to go through the old-style control panel rather than the Settings).

Furthermore, Windows has the annoying habit of changing settings after updates, and it’s an unnecessary inconvenience to have to go traipsing through the settings again and again to revert unwelcome changes. Even if it’s only the minority of settings that get changed, and if those changes aren’t too frequent, it’s still draining on one’s executive function to make your PC actually behave how you want it to. People get burnt out, and then this contributes to them struggling to find the time and brain to go through changing things.

Mostly though, I am just irked that it’s necessary to go into the settings to turn this stuff off. I am a very techy person, and thus I enjoy tinkering (or perhaps "I enjoy tinkering, and thus I am a very techy person), and stuff like this annoys me so much because I know that I’m in the minority when it comes to willingness to wrestle my tech into the shape I want it. Most people won’t go to that effort, even if it’ll only take 2 minutes — the key thing here is that many of them don’t know it’ll only take a couple of minutes, and I don’t blame them for that.

Good software needs to have sensible default settings. If that were the case, then I think we’d see more non-techy people figuring out what particular settings align with their preferences. As it stands though, configuring Windows to work in a sensible manner is a Task, and the activation energy required for that means that many won’t do it.

I’d rather hone my skills at writing better, more intelligible code than spend that same time learning how to make LLMs output slightly less shit code.

Whenever we don’t actively use and train our skills, they will inevitably atrophy. Something I think about quite often on this topic is Plato’s argument against writing. His view is that writing things down is “a recipe not for memory, but for reminder”, leading to a reduction in one’s capacity for recall and thinking. I don’t disagree with this, but where I differ is that I find it a worthwhile tradeoff when accounting for all the ways that writing increases my mental capacities.

For me, weighing the tradeoff is the most important gauge of whether a given tool is worthwhile or not. And personally, using an LLM for coding is not worth it when considering what I gain Vs lose from prioritising that over growing my existing skills and knowledge

I want this on a t-shirt

Please express this as my tentative expression of interest (tentative because I’m travelling for Christmas and don’t have brain to think about this properly right now, but I’d certainly like to bookmark this for if this ends up happening)

That’s super interesting, because with mine, it definitely made a huge difference. It honestly tasted pretty bad before it had aged at all, and it didn’t taste much better after 3 months. It was drinkable after a year, but still not great. After 2 years though, it was one of the nicest alcoholic beverages I’ve ever tasted.

I wonder what caused such significant differences between our experiences. Do you have a particular recipe you use? Not because I want to compare methods — I wouldn’t be able to find whatever guide I followed. Rather, it sounds like whatever strategy you used gets drinkable mead far quicker than whatever I did

You’re right — I think it’s more the frequent moving home that’s holding me back. I just want stability

I agree with the ethical standpoint of banning Generative AI on the grounds that it’s trained on stolen artist data, but I’m not sure how tenable “trained on stolen artist data” is as a technical definition of what is not acceptable.

For example, if a model were trained exclusively on licensed works and data, would this be permissible? Intuitively, I’d still consider that to be Generative AI (though this might be a moot point, because the one thing I agree with the tech giants on is that it’s impractical to train Generative AI systems on licensed data because of the gargantuan amounts of training data required)

Perhaps it’s foolish of me to even attempt to pin down definitions in this way, but given how tech oligarchs often use terms in slippery and misleading ways, I’ve found it useful to try pin terms down where possible