Notices by Nate Cull (natecull)

In my headcanon, the Moonbase from UFO (built 1970 to 1980) is the direct precursor to Clavius Base in 2001.

The International Astronautical Society does not talk about the awkward situation in 1999 when the entire Moon appeared to leave orbit briefly.

It certainly wasn't 'an explosion in a radioactive waste dump', though that was a pretty good cover story.

They kept the Monolith (that all those UFOs were searching for) under wraps too.

But the giant orbiting space baby? Harder to explain.

@kaniini I doubt it has the ability to exerpt content from *a source which isn't Pleroma*, which is kinda the whole problem.

On Mastondon, I could easily link to a Mastodon toot! That's not my problem. The information I'm referencing isn't in bite-sized form.

@kaniini and even then, anything URL based is likely to vanish or change randomly.

so it's the problem of "how do I point to a piece of content X on another website, or inside a file like a PDF, not the whole document, prove attribution that it's real, and also preserve it for future reference"

And so far the only answers have been "use Internet Startup Y" and Internet Startup Y generally goes out of business within five years.

@kaniini If we had something like, eg, 'URL, but, just the text at some sub-location', that might help.

HTML 'anchors' are almost entirely useless for this purpose, even though it was sorta what they were invented for.

@kaniini It's not *threading* but *excerpting* that's the empty hole at the moment.

Eg, we have well-understood semantics for basically three types of Internet / social media content right now:

* text (mostly raw text; Markdown if you're very, very lucky)

* URLs

* images (for some reason; they just sorta got grandfathered in because sharing photos is what a lot of people do on mobile)

And the problem is that everyone abuses 'images' for all data that doesn't fit in those three types.

@temporal YAY! Thanks for locating that!

@clarjon1 Yep! It is so utterly trivial to F12-edit and fake now that posting screenshots is just... (headdesk) And to see a Google Cloud engineer doing it !!!

And yet, I'm still guilty of doing it on Mastodon all the time, because a) reading PDFs or ebooks orJPGs that don't allow text copy, b) more text than will fit into a toot...

at least I try to always provide a link to the source though. But I wish we had a real excerpting/quoting protocol.

@clarjon1 Yep! It is so utterly trivial now that posting screenshots is just...

And yet, I'm still guilty of doing it on Mastodon all the time, because a) reading PDFs or ebooks orJPGs that don't allow text copy, b) more text than will fit into a toot...

at least I try to always provide a link to the source though. But I wish we had a real excerpting/quoting protocol.

@luka It made sense back when Twitter was just 'mailing lists for SMS', so, 2006

@clarjon1 It did strike me to wonder whether he posted it as an image to deliberately obscure the attribution, since if you post true and correct links and metadata to a conversation on the Internet in 2019, you often cause a swarm of angry hornets to alight on the nose of the person you're referencing.

Which is another way that social media has broken down, but I guess not really one that's the fault of programmers

The Illuminati Internet works so well because it has only one server and one user ('Guest') and nobody ever, EVER switches it off, because they lost the source code during that whole unpleasantness with the Newton-Liebniz calculus priority war and the alchemy bomb that SOME JERK WITH A BIG GRAVITY FIXATION in the Cambridge mathematics department uploaded to the kernel. (Security was a lot more lax back then).

and this is how the Web of 2019 is being built, apparently

on useless messaging tools

why

Somewhere there's actually the Illuminati Internet, right? the real one? the one that works?

one server sitting in a cave somewhere in Bavaria, running the Platonic ideal of the perfect operating system, with a tiny cluster of hooded ex-Google acolytes who are, once in their life, given a glimpse of the Great Mystery and then must swear never to implement it until society is ready for the wonder?

This derailment of thought brought to you by my Twitter feed tonight:

https://twitter.com/crcsmnky/status/1120189000474681347

in which a Google Cloud software engineer responds to a quotation from some unknown source, posted as an image.

yay metadata

yay discourse

I mean I know this is all we got, right now, but,

we used to have better messaging tools than the entire 2019 Social Media Ecosystem on Usenet

in the 1980s

heck we had better message-responding tools than this on FIDONET in the 1980s

This derailment of thought brought to you by my Twitter feed tonight:

https://twitter.com/crcsmnky/status/1120189000474681347

in which a Google Cloud software engineer responds to a quotation from some unknown source, posted as an image.

yay metadata

yay discourse

I mean I know this is all we got, right now, but,

we used to have better tools than this on Usenet

@KitRedgrave Twitter - and the whole pattern of social interactions around it - made sense as a platform for exactly as long as it was an interface to SMS, yes.

@KitRedgrave but still:

Programmer:

ok , let's see. Big decision time. Should I let an end-user upload a 4 kilobyte text file OR a 4 megabyte image file.

well obviously the 4 megabyte image file! if we let users just post arbitrary text files on our text chat system, it could be too big.

@KitRedgrave but still:

Programmer:

ok , let's see. Big decision time. Should I let an end-user upload a 4 kilobyte text file OR a 4 megabyte image file.

well obviously the4 megabyte image file! if we let users just post arbitrary text files on our text chat system, it could be too big.

@KitRedgrave okay yes, novelists and journalists, two classes of people who of anyone on the planet SHOULD know better, cheered that.

I have no idea why some novelists and journalists actually have jobs to be honest.

@KitRedgrave and yes, novelists and journalists, two classes of people who of anyone the planet SHOULD know better, cheered that.

I have no idea why some novelists and journalists actually have jobs to be honest.

@KitRedgrave but those 'other people' are programmers right

I mean it's not 'end users' who built text chat systems with a maximum of 280 characters.

Programmers did that.