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.gs/ instead.

I’m glad to hear that things are going better for you now. I’m on the recovery from burnout path myself, so I know how hard it is.

I’d be interested to hear it you would share something specific that has given you peace or joy recently. I always find that hearing about little nice things bolsters my resolve.

Something that recently gave me joy was when I was spending Christmas with my found family, and we were having in-depth discussions about things we have read that had most shaped our political thought. I liked it because it was intense and tiring in a good way; I’ve come to realise that what is restful for me would probably look like work to most other people. That’s one of the things that made recovering from burnout so hard — at first, I tried to rest in a more conventional manner, and it took me a while to realise that what I needed was to carve out some time and energy where I can work at fulfilling things.

I am not well versed in history. The last time I studied it was in highschool, when I was 16, so the kind of analysis we were doing was quite broad and not very nuanced — most of our time was spent studying the run up to both world wars.

However, the simplicity of the topics means I remember it quite well. In particular, the numerous failures of the League of Nations, before WW2. They had three powers: 1.) They could denounce a country and try to encourage peaceful resolutions; 2.) they could apply economic sanctions; 3.) military action.

Military action never happened because the League of Nations didn’t have its own dedicated military force, and none of the countries who had the manpower necessary to take action wanted to commit troops so soon after WW1. Economic sanctions were useless, because none of the countries were willing to take the economic hit from apply sanctions to key things like steel and iron, and the US wasn’t even in the League, so any sanctioned country could just trade with the US. And moral condemnation didn’t work because obviously wagging your finger at an imperialist regime isn’t going to bother them when they know there will be no further actions.

We are now not even at level 1. International law looks very different today than it did 100 years ago, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. Spineless world leaders are going to drag us all into another world war. Do they honestly think that it will work to placate Trump? What fucking idiots. I hope history remembers them with disdain.

Apologetics for past US imperialism does not seem a productive strategy for criticizing present imperialist actions, nor preventing future imperialism.

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

Makes such a useful piece of software, and is also wise enough to set boundaries to protect himself from the toxic pressure of open source development.

What a G.

Yeah, I share your view. I wish that the youth of today could have grown up in a better world than I did, but unfortunately for most, that’s not the case. Sure, there are some things that are better, but by and large, young people are facing so much hard stuff. In spite of that (and perhaps even because of that), I have seen so many of them who are deeply caring and engaged in politics.

I met someone the other year who didn’t know the difference between cut and paste, and copy and paste

Edit: I agree with the last part of your comment especially. So often, I see people blaming GenZ for their lack of knowledge, but that feels unfair to me. From my perspective as a younger Millennial, it looked like society seemed to assume “oh, GenZ are digital natives, so they’re naturally a whizz at all this computer stuff” and often assumed that it wasn’t necessary to do much work to teach them how to use computers. Now that I’ve had more chance to meet GenZ folk in the workplace, I’ve heard this complaint from them a lot.

It’s made me grateful for growing up as a Millennial. I was too young to experience the early days of computing, but at least I got to experience computers and the internet before they became the closed, walled-off gardens that GenZ grew up with

I used to live in a city with many striking clocks, which meant that no matter where you were in the city, you could probably hear a bell ring out on the hour.

I’m realising now how much I miss it. I remember times like drinking with friends into the wee hours of the morning, when we would hear a bell and then all fall silent as we counted how many chimes there were. If it was only 2, we would laugh and continue, but for four or more, we would wince and contemplate the future consequences of our choices.

Or while doing an all-nighter to get an assignment in before a morning deadline, how my handwriting speed would become a touch more frantic with each passing chime

Yeah, it reminds me of languages. I learned French to a pretty high level in high school (I was a try hard whose brain clicked well with languages), but over the last decade, I have rarely used those skills and I was recently shocked to realise how much my knowledge had atrophied. It’s easy to become complacent once you feel you have learned something, but you use it or you lose it.

To give another data point for comparison, I am about as young a Millennials as one can be (I’m 29), and I don’t recall there being any issues in reading analog clocks in my cohort.

This is weirdly both surprising and not surprising to me. Not surprising because like I say, I am one of the last of the Millennials, and it does seem intuitive that this would be an issue that started with Gen Z. It’s surprising though, because 9 years seems like quite a small time window for such a change to have happened

I get what point you’re making in distinguishing between pedophile and ephebophile, but personally I don’t find the distinction particularly relevant. As an adult, the level of grossed out I feel at the prospect of sexual interactions with a young teenager Vs a literal child is approximately equal, because it’s not their physical attributes that cause ick, but rather the exploitation and power dynamics involved.

Edit: I guess what I’m arguing is that in practice, we see the term “pedophilia” used as an umbrella term that encompasses pedophilia, hebephilia and ephebophilia, and I think that is a reasonable use of the term. It does muddy the waters a tad, given that pedophilia does still have its more specific use of referring to sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children, but I don’t think that an issue in the majority of contexts. When it comes to the law, an adult having sex with a child is equally illegal as an adult having sex with a 15 year old. Sure, we can split this hair and distinguish between the terms, but we don’t need to

I use Fedora, but I frequent the Arch wiki often enough that I feel like an honorary Arch user.

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.