World’s Best CSS Developer

anyone want to help me rob some graves? it'll be the heist of the cemetary

I really oughtta finish Disco Elysium. The problem is I'll play about an hour of it before I have to sit down and digest it for a while because for all the silly nonsense and funny jokes, it really does have some of the most evocative and profound prose I've ever seen, and I need time to process the philosophical dialogue about the heat death of the universe that I just had with a character who calls themself "the Noid" but by the time I remember to turn the game back on it's 3 months later and I have no memory of what I last did in the game and the only clue I have to go off of is the next available dialogue choice which is something like

Speaking as someone who has written web crawlers for non-evil reasons...

I like how all the platforms (twitter, reddit) are destroying their APIs to kill "bots" but the fun thing about APIs is that only the good guys use them. They're like door locks: they only keep out honest people. Someone wanting to steal your TV will just put a brick through your window.

Similarly, people wanting to flood a platform with spam and pornbots will often just not use the API, because it makes it too easy to track them down. They'll instead write a program that pretends to be a browser, and clicks on links just like a human does.

Fun fact: that's an "API" that exists for every website, and for a long while it was the only API that any sites ever had. So when you're trying to automate using a site (for good or evil), the "api-zero" of just doing web scraping and user-agent-impersonation is always there. That's what the bad guys will use, and that's what the good guys are sometimes forced to use.

Anyway the end result of this sort of API monetization/destruction nonsense is that you're only killing the bots that were written with good intentions. You're killing the haikubots and that "THERE ARE FIVE LIGHTS" twitter bot. you're killing the reddit bots that help moderate submissions by automatically applying flair or timing out replies after too long has passed.

But the bots that are just there to send you crytypocurrentsea scams and entice you in with stolen porn? They don't use the APIs. They won't be affected. They'll keep on working. The people scraping your site for AI research? they won't even register an account, they'll just request the plain HTML contents of your pages.

So once you know that, locking out users from your APIs seems like a real bad idea, doesn't it?

who wants a list of some of my best videos about video game economic crisis events theyre kind of my favorite subject of all time

habbo hotel is an anarcho-capitalist gambling and a scam-based economy run by children part 1

part 2 of the habbo hotel analysis centering on types of common financial crime orchestrated on habbo

gaia online’s gold-generating hyperinflation crisis

ffxiv’s housing crisis

the hypixel skyblock exotics 1 trillion coin bubble pop

the ‘cash-based’ mmo where the f2p players literally sell sweat harvested off monsters for pennies

a history of neopets controversies centering largely on the “unconverted” neopet bubble market

“the falador massacre”, an infamous runescape event in which a player was able to pvp kill in non-pvp areas, resulting in thousands of player items and gold being looted from corpses with no possibility of rollback

oh hell yes

Well played, Beverly.

POV you're Miles

Like, I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but it's kind of bleakly entertaining how over the course of my life my skill set as an online researcher has gone from being:

It's always interesting when my posts about technical writing end up doing numbers on librarian Tumblr. I guess we have something in common!

#cries softly#yes most of the younger students I work with really struggle with basic computer skills#and their 'searching' is the first 3 results in google#but what's really infuriating is MY ability to squeeze good info out of google is declining#bc the search engine is getting so much worse#so now my chief skill is less forcing Google to spit out good results#and more knowing where I can go specifically where those results are likely to be

why did he start climbing the stairs???

The instinctive urge to run up stairs on all fours

Sometimes you just get the feral urge to climb everything.

“The average US president has been charged with 1.54 felonies” factoid isn’t true. The average US President has been charged with 0 felonies. Donald trump, who has been charged with 71, is a statistical outlier and should not have been counted

the fact that they wrote “yugioh” in the magic the gathering font

pointing out the issue with the font is the first test

ppl who celebrate fictional character birthdays are annoying pass it on

FUCK this post and happy birthday sonic

going from the reddit star wars fandom to the tumblr star wars fandom is giving me insane whiplash. the upside is that people aren’t bitching about every single imperfect detail in the entire franchise, but the downside is that i’ve seen more fanart of obi wan and commander cody tenderly knowing each other than i have ever wanted to in my life in the last three hours and it has probably fundamentally altered the way i interact with the entire franchise

WELCOME.

red hot silly peppers :)

been stuck with a terrible feeling that one of the episodes in the new black mirror season is gonna end with a title card like "the program you just watched was written by artificial intelligence" and they're going to be so smug about it and we'll all have to talk about it for weeks

oh hey apollo

lol

the r/curatedtumblr -> tumblr migration is so funny to me. it's like going to the zoo and enjoying it so much you climb into the enclosure to live with the monkeys