I got to thinking about IRC some time ago, and how much creative time we spent solving the fundamental problem of how, exactly, to use the internet without needing some sort of middleman, like a crazy person hosting a server for no clear reason, so that we could all communicate together.

That and designing the thing so that even if the hardware in your closet got hammered with a bajillion visits it wouldn’t stutter because it was all too light weight for that. But also, fuck no I would rather throw myself down the stairs than arrange it so that I have to maintain it a lot. That type of thinking defined an era, and that’s why zombo.com still works.

I have to put more maintenance into my Gmail account than the zombo guy does into the entire website, is what I’m saying. Return to monke, is what I’m saying.

God I love shitty cosplay that still works.

Somebody shakes their head and says something about milk and pizza

He’s a survivor. He had a hunch and started walking casually toward the mountains, never to be seen again.

Please note that the prompt says “queens of England” very clearly, which turns it into a glorified Google image search, so the results are unacceptable trash, and vaguely leftist language about people being angry for the lack of racism are your problem, only. Fuck off, troll.

The real issue is that even with a handholding, direct and easy prompt, the tech cannot simply hand over pictures, even generated ones to avoid copyright issues, that come from easily discovered answers on Wikipedia and who knows how many other credible sources. The lineage of the British Royal Family is all but open-source data - probably is, literally - and your mom can probably name three Queens offhand though she’s Canadian. This thing completely ate shit on an easy, easy prompt.

I don’t know how many times now I’ve seen some YouTuber use “evil Jerome Powell” as a prompt for a thumbnail, and get a clear picture of him complete with devil horns, copyright be damned, so what the f? The AI isn’t this stupid, that means they’re nerfing it and screwing it up. You best believe they’re still selling it, though.

What other results will it comically fuck up, but you don’t have the knowledge to critique? You won’t see the results, either, somebody else will use them to judge your resume; IS using them, now. Fucking lazy hiring managers are going to just plug your name into this thing and ask for a synopsis of your life so they don’t have to work. It will just fill in missing information with lies, and they’ll eat it up. I guess you shot two people a couple of years ago and didn’t know about it. I wonder why you didn’t get the job?

People have been crazy dumb with this AI, meaning young, smart, tech-savvy people with heavy internet backgrounds who should know better than to trust keep treating it like an oracle, because they have some weird blind spot about this technology. Ignorant executives who think math is for slurs are going to make it do everything.

They’re going to use this technology to decide who gets an apartment, who gets arrested, and a bunch of other shit, save your leftism for that.

The stinky back of that poor tiger

The only time I get 10 hours and wake up tired is after a lot of drinking, so maybe you have other issues.

Try out Shreddit, it’s a web app for exactly this. It even lets you filter by post karma so you can keep your hits. I’ve never used it but that’s the name that came up over on Reddit from everyone talking about the announcement.

This announcement is just “oh by the way, the horse is now out of the barn. He left like 10 years ago but this is the announcement.”

Shout out to whoever dismissed the first AI writings with “It’s like a perfect Redditor. Totally confident and completely full of shit, doesn’t even know that it’s lying.”

That doesn’t happen by accident. That happens when everyone was already scraping the shit out of the site, at the very least.

This show is going to be a huge hit with line cook babydaddies.

This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

This type of relationship is pretty common in war. You and the squad end up “in the shit” and now you have all crossed the boundaries of what civilians call “manliness”. You are free, unimpeachable, the manliest thing, a real warrior, a soldier in battle. The things you do now define manliness, you are writing the rules. They can call you whatever, you will reply with the sort of laughter that silences fools.

People die around you. The sound of another man’s voice becomes poetry to you. How much longer will you hear his voice? Who knows, tell him a shitty joke. Sit on his lap for a gag, do whatever. Drink in his presence, press his flesh against yours, be alive together, try to keep him in your memory, tomorrow we all may die. Has anybody seen those pictures of soldiers from the American Civil War all hanging out and mugging for the camera? Acting all “gay” with each other? That’s what war does to men, sometimes, probably not that often, I fear.

Somebody online with a military background once remarked about the safest he’s ever felt, including in civilian life, was when he was in some tent in a war zone with the rest of the platoon, everyone in their sleeping bags, crammed in the tent together like a litter of kittens in a box. Sure, they were in the death zone, for real, but he was warm and snug, surrounded by armed badasses who would come to his aid at once if anything nasty went down. He said he slept like a baby, that he’s never felt that sense of security since, not even safe in bed as a civilian, later.

It means a lot to me that this book, TLOR, was pretty much written by the Great War. Tolkien went to that war, against his own will, compelled by shame campaigns, not even the law, in spite of his own convictions, and he did not have some safe posting at the base, no, he was at the Somme. He saw the worst of it, probably missed death by inches several times, saw mud and blood, was deafened and battered, only to survive at last, coming home as changed as Frodo.

He watched men charge into machine guns like mice into a blender, watched them die of trench foot and the stupid ways war kills you without even glory or honor to show for it, saw that sometimes courage is just hiding in your little hole and not screaming when the tanks roll over. He saw Mordor in person. No man’s land.

Then he came home, and did he write some edgy darkness? No. He wrote this thing, this fantasy, with its message of hope that evil can be vanquished, and that men can be good, yes, even when they seem utterly lost to goodness. This is somehow the lesson that the War to End All Wars had taught him. He had nothing left to prove, so he made a pretty, frivolous thing, for children, but couldn’t help it, he couldn’t help making something bigger than that. He knew how intimate men become with each other under fire, and it ended up in the book.

That is the only thing he wanted to remember, that unexpected love when suffering and death are right on top of you. I wonder who Legolas was to him? Somebody young and beautiful, who deserved to live a thousand years, but didn’t, probably. They shall not grow old.

We shouldn’t need the machine guns coming at us to hug our friends, that’s probably what he wanted the world to know.

So are they aware that they’re trying to shame a joke account that’s already doing a bit?

Do they think they’re winning? Are they in on the bit? What sort of cataclysm has to happen for Twitter people to wake up and go “oh my god, I WAS THE ASSHOLE THIS ENTIRE TIME, WHAT AM I DOING HERE”?

I’m glad I get to wipe my ass with what’s left of them without having to touch their vile community, I’ll call that a win.

So what’s the verdict, are the electric unicycles cool? Have they broken the curse? They do look cool, and you better be wearing the full motorcycle getup if you know what’s good for you, because they’re fast as f too.

That’s my favorite Pixies album

I wonder if it works like IRC. The “plague” this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you’re kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.

Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there’s never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.

Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there’s always going to be a server, even if it’s not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it’s “free” but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There’s always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn’t really need it.

The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user’s machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven’t used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn’t changed, then it also doesn’t support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.

Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they’re pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn’t viable. I don’t know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.

But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It’s not a web app, it doesn’t live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there’s no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.

Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there’s that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else’s unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.

We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that’s what Matrix is.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it’s normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the “business casual” version of Discord. This doesn’t seem to be true, but that’s how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.

I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack’s name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you’re fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.

It’s been very strange. When I was a child in school I was not well liked, I was fat neckbeard with no internet because late 80s. Truly I was a sad pile. They called me all manner of hateful things, but it never even occurred to them to call me short, at 5’7".

I rarely feel “short”, only average. Most men seem to be around my height. Some minority of men are taller. I still manage to tower over many women, because women be small, yo. A “tall” girl is roughly my height, so they’re either at eye level or shorter, with the occasional very tall woman in the mix.

I’m tall enough that other people ask for assistance with things on high shelves on a regular enough basis, mostly women.

There is a DRASTIC difference between how the world treats my height versus how the internet shitbag community does. Go figure, abusive people are abusive.

I can only pinpoint the 2000s, and online dating profiles where you can sort by height, plus many women having a height fetish in the exact same way that men will ask people their bra size, and the continuing popularity of the NBA, plus women wanting to have sex with the players, plus their truly freakish heights throwing off the populist curve so that anybody under 6’0 is teeny tiny. Somebody is gonna start squeaking about “6 foot is average” so sure, chief, you win. But there was a time when I just wasn’t particularly tall. Suddenly I am perceived as an actual midget.

It’s just another example of the way people constantly try to find excuses to treat you like shit over just about anything they can think of, it shows how they’re constantly inventing that. It’s one of God’s little reminders to not worry what happens to them.

Yeah, she’s spiritual. Good thing none of that is up to you.

Half the Boomers didn’t, either. It was they who got everyone started talking about the environment. They also built this fucking thing we’re typing on. Shit, the ability to divorce people if you need to was one of their biggest breakthroughs. I have no business kissing their butts, but you millennials? are fascist about this stuff and it has to end, now. Nobody has the luxury of your bullshit.

Millennials are what, 40 now? Some freelancers writing sniveling articles about avocado toast 20 years ago does not allow you to desperately look for scapegoats to blame for everything that happens to you. Nobody cares if your parents are bad people, everyone else alive does not pay for that.

Don’t fucking talk about voting until every last one of you is doing it. Fuck you for refusing to show for Clinton, THAT is on your head, so worry about your own crimes, you killed a lot of people by letting Trump through at the worst possible time, plus slacking off on all the other elections you didn’t even know existed, and if you don’t like that framing of responsibility, then fuck OFF about the baby boomers.

How many times now have I seen you little bitches no-show? How many chuds have you made wealthy? Rogan and a bunch of these other right-wing fucks becoming wealthy for stupid podcasts is on your generation for listening to them. How many times have you stepped up for anything but self-pity? How many more excuses? I don’t care if you never get to buy a house, shut the FUCK up about it. Welcome to reality for, like, 99% of the global population.

It ends. The next time I catch one of you talking about your “struggle” making 140k a year in stupid fucking Frisco, I swear to fuckin god. Everyone understands your living expenses just fine, you NEVER shut up about it, across what? 7 platforms? Somebody is making 25k in the same fuckin town, in a restaurant you’re too special to eat at, fuck your whining.

Scapegoating is a bad, bad, bad habit that your entire generation seems to share, I think it’s a trauma thing. Don’t care. I just got done hoping that COVID didn’t kill me and my whole family over some trash job that exists so you and your family can bang the order button from safety. Fuuuuck you and your victimhood, you expected us to be all cool about that while you decided to have yourself a worker’s rights movement that we weren’t invited to unless we stayed obedient to your ideas for FUCK sake. It’s your responsibility to process your trauma, it’s nobody else’s responsibility to put up with your failure to do so.

If you expect the millions of people who went under the bus for your convenience to just “get over it” and be all cool, then you will get the fuck over whatever is your problem and STOP trying to build solidarity with each other through scapegoating one group after the other. Who’s next after enough Boomers are dead? We know you won’t just drop that shit, it’s how you are, so who has to be your scapegoat next?

None of us, globally, are ever going to be free of the conservatism that seems to be baked into roughly half of humanity, that causes all this grief.

You think Boomers are bad? Some of the people on this Earth, we can’t discuss their evil without getting called xenophobic, good thing they’re all moving to live closer to you, so rise the fuck above, get over yourselves, and prepare your souls for that situation.

Maybe, with some sort of coherent political will, we might be able to get a fucking leash on the wealthy, who are always at the root of our suffering, but not so long as you and your kind get played like a fucking harp, constantly spewing casual hatred on a generation of people who ultimately had no more control than yours does, and who aren’t anymore or less fashy than you fucks clearly are. THEY show up to vote, YOU bitch and do nothing.

You’re 40! Fuck sake! This is teenage bullshit. You should have figured this out on your own by now. Enough.

Get the fuck over it, now. Tell your fucking friends. People are holding YOU personally responsible for the Palestinian genocide because you aren’t doing enough about it, so see how you feel about being in the hot seat over shit you can’t control. Motherfuckers, goddamn.

I just want to say that I appreciate the truly fractal nature of these memes