badlibrarian

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The problem with “more harm than good” arguments is that the amount of harm relative to the amount of good is rarely specified. Is it 60/40 harm/good? Then shush, it ain't gettin' fixed in your lifetime. Is it 80/20 harm/good, but the harmers have the power and the people being harmed don't? Same. Type all you want on "grapheneos.social" but you're not moving the needle.

Abolishing copyright also means abolishing copyright-based licensing. GPL, Creative Commons, all that loses what makes it work. Want to give corporations a lot more power, really fast? Nuke GPL.

Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense some of the worst people on earth will come up with. Before we abolish copyright, we should wait until Larry Ellison dies just to be safe.

Different site, different backend, different problems. GP was talking about wayback.archive.org, which threw a 429 error just now when I verified the URL.

Which archives? Wayback is different from Archive. Which is different from Archive-It. And the problem with Wayback was power poles being set on fire by homeless people, then SF power in general, then "upgrades," then "bad actors," then hot weather causing the machines to slow down because they don't have air conditioning, evil AI companies, and now seems to be the fact that an organization backed by someone with nearly a billion dollars, founded 30 years ago, cannot source hard drives.

https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c

Fundraising drive coordinated with their loudest employee saying something else, because... of course.

If you use the site, support them. If you are a technical person, offer to help them. But maybe cash, or even the proxy of being able to say they have a large number of cash supporters, isn't really what's needed here?

Set up after the lawsuits that nearly wiped out his personal assets, Brewster Kahle's latest foundation shows $743 million in assets.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/991...

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/the-internet-arc...

"Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental deletion?"

John Gonzalez, Internet Archive infrastructure lead: "We have done experiments to confirm that we can back up large portions of our corpus... but this is not a regular practice for us at this time."

https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-a-m...

Depending on when you click his feed, the ongoing downtime is due to DDoS attacks, bad actors, AI scrapers, power problems, or now an inability to source hard drives.

https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c

He doesn't do much better on the other example. Term-frequency saturation is the important part, and he ignores the 1972 paper by Karen Sparck Jones.

"One of the early victories for me was persuading a young boy of 14 or 15 years of age, named Aaron Swartz, to become the technical architect of the Creative Commons. It took a little persuading, but I told him that this is what he had to do." --Lawrence Lessig

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Cost_of_...

Doctorow, Kottke and others didn't seem to think it was odd that a 14 year old was being flown around the country without his parents present. They pre-gamed at a house instead of a bar because Aaron was too young; the host, then nearly twice his age, later dated him. Didn't end well. And then things really didn't end well.

Epstein made his first contribution to MIT that same year (2002). Lessig arranged for Joi Ito to meet Aaron a year later. According to MIT, Joi Ito met Epstein for the first time one month after Aaron died in 2013.

In the most charitable reading of the situation, Aaron was robbed of his childhood.

His profile says he wrote for Wired, so I'm inclined to cut him some slack. He spent 4,000 words and six Pantone colors talking about SMS for logins, but never found time to write that powerful, 40 year old men were flying a 14 year old around the country without his parents present, so maybe not.

Sickly Jewish kid has his childhood stolen, gets radicalized, hangs himself is a much more painful story to read. More importantly, it demands actual answers. No wonder it never got told. It's not exactly Brighton Beach Memoirs.

I don't like talking about this, but first hand knowledge is rarer by the day, and there are entire organizations profiting off this mythology. It's pissing me off. Aaron is not a data point to build stupid metaphors around. He was a bright and broken child.

Aaron attracted influential and creepy people and was ill-equipped to handle it. He was also working through a period of sexual awakening while being used by older people to advance their agendas. Little of it would meet contemporary standards of appropriate behavior given his physical and psychological state. I spent some time with him before this went down and was horrified by what I saw.

I was not in a position to help him address his mental health, nor in the right physical location to have positive influence, which is what was needed. Then he cracked under the pressure of this and nobody could get through. This was obvious to all involved at the time and that's the part of the prosecution that still makes no sense to me, from all institutions involved. They all have blood on their hands.

It's not hard to find continuing bad behavior by individuals near him at the time. I've given up on them being held accountable. Let the child rest.

It can and does and may choose to do so unprompted. That was one of my "holy shit" moments. Previously I watched it spit out nonsense to get around edge cases and avoid tests and uttered many of the things I read in this thread. Then the new models hit.

Find some code you're proud of. Find someone else's code you admire. Find something that's been stable for 20 years with no bugs reported. Feed it in, ask it to look it over, and prepare to be humbled.

I can specifically and directly state that is false.

Ah, the classic HN "I keep Wikipedia's list of logical fallacies on my bookmark bar" retort.

“No true Scotsman” would require me to redefine “senior developer” to exclude people who disagree with me. I didn’t.

And “you’re holding it wrong” is a strange objection to a tool that, like Git, rewards learning how to use it. The question is whether that learning pays off.

Long bet: the NTSB will require all transportation software to be submitted for independent review, and that review process will be heavily automated by AI, within 5 years. Take it?

I've tried. It's like trying to teach squirrels how to Google. Really, you just have to figure out what works for you. You will be rewarded.

Very, very senior dev here who has never taken a shortcut in his life. Don't mean to sound like a prick but you're doing it wrong. You have to find your own path through this stuff. It works, promise. I was in your shoes six weeks ago.

I'll worry when that stops happening. Probably means I'm getting in my own way or not thinking big enough.

Might I recommend HVAC or plumbing, it's honorable work and pays well. Trim trees if you've got the body for it.

I don't recommend web work, the last ten years or the next ten. Wouldn't touch the stuff. I skipped the phone app era, too.

It's August 9, 2026 and if you're a software engineer who hasn't had multiple "holy shit, I can't believe it just did that" moments, it's time to consider a new trade.

If you repaired televisions in the 70s, most of the IBM 604 trigger circuit looks completely ordinary: a couple of triodes, plate resistors, grid bias, coupling capacitors, and voltages high enough that you kept one hand in your pocket. Shirriff's observation that the trigger can oscillate, latch wrong, or refuse to switch unless the voltages are just right is especially familiar. We used to call that "the set’s acting up"; computer people called it logic margins. The later diode-controlled version is revealing too. Engineers weren’t escaping analog electronics so much as steadily boxing it in until the analog behavior became somebody else's problem.

Early digital hardware makes a lot more sense if you approach it with a voltmeter instead of a truth table.

This represents a small part of what IT is worried about. Offer a beer and say the word "SharePoint" if you want the long version of where this could wind up.

The issue isn't letting end-users add features. The issue is twelve end-users customizing something that produces output, saving it, and now nobody can read it.

This can get solved. If it even gets a chance to gain traction (it should, though IT will of course push back). But let's not pretend we're there yet.

Evoking Gödel via GPT, with the requisite em-dash: "No sufficiently expressive formal governor can be simultaneously consistent, complete, and able to prove every relevant proposition—including all propositions about itself."

But "Read AGENTS.md, including the middle" sure helps.

I just had GPT reverse engineer, from scratch, some ancient Corel Draw documents and turn them into perfect PDFs. None of the open source libraries helped. In fact, GPT didn't make any progress until I told it to ignore them.

LibreOffice was a big part of the problem. Their import code was half-baked, and silently changing Arial to Liberation Sans wasn't particularly liberating, either.

"The optic cortex is the biggest area of the brain by far. When everything is saturated in fluorescent light, as it is in small studios many times, the fluorescent light is going on and off at 60 times a second, or ideally at 120, but more roughly 60 and it’s shutting off your brain 60 times a second. The brain is kind of a fluid thing and everything is coupled with everything else, and when this happens – no matter where you take the EEG – if the subject is looking at fluorescent light, you see 60 cycles from the fluorescent light."

https://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/don-buchla-pass...

I suppose it's worth double checking if the 60 Hz was just leaking into the measurement rig. Or autism, for that matter. But Don was great and I've always loved this interview, so I'm sharing.

Archives have not taken a consistent stance on this. Preservation, removal, restricted access, de-indexing, and “right to be forgotten” sit on a spectrum.

Good archival practice has to include judgment, context, and humility.

Sometimes that means preserving. Sometimes it means limiting access. And sometimes it may mean "honoring" a removal request or court order, even if you're just setting a flag.

From http://bbslist.textfiles.com/

Perhaps Dude is among us.

  206-246-6647
  White Center, VA RaT City BBS
  (1993-1997) Dude Renegade
  "Primarily a demoscene board with a vast collection of Impulse Tracker music and ANSI art. 
  Used to meet IRL at Seattle Center to take field recordings for use as samples. 
  Members included Dude, Catspaw, Geo, and Infamouse." - Dude

"Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental deletion?"

John Gonzalez, Internet Archive infrastructure lead, replied:

"We have done experiments to confirm that we can back up large portions of our corpus... but this is not a regular practice for us at this time."

https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-a-m...

It started failing two days ago, when it suddenly couldn't access gmail threads reliably. Then it started popping up warnings that I was over quota when I wasn't. It even let me use Fable briefly, or pretended to. Meanwhile search finally started working, so there's that.

This video, wow: https://www.threads.com/@founder__growth/post/DZz_9Ikj3Wx

Out of desperation, I moved to ChatGPT and it's working better than I remember. All these companies are playing games under load, under failure. No wonder we can't agree on what's good for what.

Exactly. They're both very expensive and prone to surprising you. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. I'd rate them 85%, but you have to run a test because they both fail in different ways on the 15%.

The physical version of that magic wormhole is called a slide rule.

The first section is the good part.

The later reuse of “log” across valuations, dimension, vector fields, orders of vanishing is not so good. Those may be related ideas, but each needs a type signature: from what, to what, and preserving which operation?