Links, March 21, 2025
§Flip a real coin dot com
What it says on the tin. The internet needs more weird silly things like this, in the vein of the Trojan Room coffee pot.
§Gut - Git Made Easy
A very user-friendly command-line interface for git.
§Don’t fork the ecosystem
Software can be rebuilt, because software is a machine. But a software ecosystem is not a machine. It is a living system. When we attempt to rebuild the ecosystem, we’re making a category error. We’re confusing the software for the ecological process unfolding around it.
This piece very much reminds me of Seeing Like a State (which I need to write a recommendation for), and indeed the author wrote about the parallels in software.
§Privacy is Also Protecting the Data of Others
If you care about privacy rights, you must also care for the data of the people around you. To make privacy work, we need to develop a culture that normalizes caring for everyone’s data, not just our own. Privacy cannot solely be a personal responsibility, data privacy is team work.
Say it again for the people in the back.
§My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
I am a proponent of learning how to defend oneself against scams & cons, cult indoctrination techniques, and abusive behavior patterns for a variety of reasons, and as such find stories of standing up to or countering such behavior both intriguing and often educational. This piece is both.
When stories of romance fraud hit the news, we often hear that the victim had become extremely attached to the scammer, but very little on how they got engineered into that position.
§Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face
These bots crawl everything they can find, robots.txt be damned, including expensive endpoints like git blame, every page of every git log, and every commit in every repo, and they do so using random User-Agents that overlap with end-users and come from tens of thousands of IP addresses
In my original draft of Prove Your Humanity, I had linked to robots.txt is a suicide note by Jason Scott of the Internet Archive, the thesis of which is that asking nicely for the bots to leave you alone is not a good defensive strategy. I removed it because its line of though was ultimately a tenuous tangent.
§Foss infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
It’s pretty crazy to have to go through your own code because a bug report confidently tells you there’s some critical security issue to fix, and … not finding it, because the whole issue is just AI hallucination.
Quoth the raven, furthermore.
§Why Tech Bros Overestimate AI’s Creative Abilities
What this means for AI is that, even if the tech bros recognized how far their models are from writing great fiction or solving the trolley problem, they couldn’t admit as much, because it would deflate the narrative they need to sell.
In addition to the classic Upton Sinclair quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”, there is the further problem of people not actually understanding the things they’re purporting to disrupt. Meanwhile, they’re trying to make it legal for LLMs to prescribe medication.