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we're providing our mental model of the structural factors underlying that change, so that people who have ideas about what they'd like to see can make informed decisions about how to navigate towards that world

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anyway, the internet is a very mutable thing. it can be whatever we want it to be and work towards. we've seen it change many times in our time here.

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WHERE AND HOW people talk to each other has changed a lot over the years - until pretty recently Reddit was one of the better sources of information, for this same reason

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people talking to each other has always been, and will always be, the most useful source of information on the internet, both to people and to machines

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anyway this is why you see things like the one that's going around today, where Google's ML search tool is allegedly providing helpful urine "facts" sourced from Cohost

(we can't verify it ourselves because the tool is not available in Canada, which we understand to be due to Canadian privacy law)

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Cohost is full of a lot of people who are, with varying degrees of deliberation and intentionality, rejecting that profit motive wholesale

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in a very real sense Google ATE the early internet, it flattened all the social structures that had existed and turned everything into search - search which would not have been possible without those structures

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Google's existence disincentivized that kind of site, though, because suddenly there was a profit incentive in the mix. suddenly people started getting asked to link to other people's sites for pay... some people went along with that and some resisted doing it, but either way, linking to your favorite stuff started to seem not worth it

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when Google was new, that description covered most of the internet. that's why citation analysis was such a highly effective tool for ranking websites

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all y'all know WHY cohost ranks high on Google, right?

it's because it's a site where people write medium-length stuff to other people and the whole thing is highly interconnected in terms of links

it's important to understand that compiler developers are not dog people, but dag people. they love to go “ooh, who's a good puppy! who's so directed and acyclic! you are!!! you're a good little dag!! 🥰”

when I release a zine, I always make a version that looks good when printed at home on a black-and-white printer

so today I'm at a cafe reviewing the black and white version of the git zine

what we thought Linux was: that programmer OS that programmers who program programmedly use

what Linux actually is: an OS you put on your computer so you can go online, chat with friends, write documents, turn those documents into PDFs, and so on

why we thought Linux was that other thing: making things like video card drivers and graphical user interfaces is expensive and Linux is chronically underfunded, so it took them a while to get all most of enough of the things they wanted working so you can just do things on it, and during that time it was hard to use without programming

why we installed Linux even though we thought we would be in for a real rollercoaster ride learning computer toucher secrets: we hate ads so much that we will walk through fire just so we see fewer of them (but fortunately we mostly didn't have to)

wait, what's that "mostly"? look, if you don't want to learn the programming language Nix, you maybe shouldn't install an OS built entirely out of using the programming language Nix, Packbats

(edited to fix markdown)

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Computer Fairies

Computer Fairies is a Mastodon instance that aims to be as queer, friendly and furry as possible. We welcome all kinds of computer fairies!