Notices by Kat (kat@weatherishappening.network)

i think of this situation frequently when users report bugs that, as a developer, i don't think should be possible. it's truly *amazing* the myriad ways computers find to dismay and disappoint us. every piece of software involves so many moving pieces, so many layers of potential bugginess, so many points of failure that are virtually impossible to predict or plan for.

this tweet wasn't about any of that, though i've since misremembered that it was. i wrote it in a fit of exasperation about something else entirely, and it never really "did numbers", but it's been quoted on a pretty regular basis over the years, to my unending delight.

so here they are, the words of wisdom that i am hereby salvaging from the flaming wreckage of twitter:

maybe teaching sand to do math was a mistake

after a lot of bemusement, frantic debugging, and Automatticians questioning our collective grasp of reality, we discovered that one of the default fonts (Merriweather Sans), which was being loaded from Google Fonts, had published an update with some bad ligatures (special characters in a font that even out the space when common letters are joined together, like f and i).

this font was used in one of the default themes so it affected a LOT of sites. but the post editor used different fonts, which is why it didn't show up while editing, only after publishing a post.

since the font wasn't versioned and we were serving it through Google's CDN, this update had silently propagated to any site that was using this theme, without us needing to deploy anything (meaning not only was this hard to track down since we hadn't made any changes, we also couldn't easily revert the change). voila: Fs were going missing on tens of thousands of blogs (as well as other places around the web)

it's sunday night and twitter is still a dumpster fire so i think it's finally time to re-post my all-time favorite tweet (iykyk)

because the original context for this is lost to antiquity, i want to set the stage by sharing one of my favorite absurd stories about software. (🧵)

back in January of 2016, we started getting reports on WordPress.com that people were publishing blog posts and the letter F was going missing. they initially thought it was a typo, but when they'd edit the post, the words would be spelled right in the post editor. but on the live site? no Fs

sounds like user error, right? but the reports kept coming in. and it wasn't just missing, sometimes it was switched, like the word "first" would become "ifrst". if you know anything about fonts maybe you can guess what was up...

i hope, though, that this exponential flood of inhuman content will finally make it impossible not to see that we all have inherent value regardless of what we produce or consume.

care about the world because caring matters. make art because it matters. *you* matter. each of us contains infinities the machines will never understand. don’t let them try to tell you that you can be replaced; you can’t. none of us can.

always ask yourself who benefits from your apathy, your overwhelm, your exhaustion, your loneliness.

still trying to figure out the right way to say this. in recent decades it has become easier and easier to fall into the trap of "i don't need to make this particular art, someone else has made it better than me". to get demoralized by comparing to the work of others.

art-making AIs extrapolate that feeling to encompass the entire universe of potential art, so you can no longer avoid facing down and overcoming that fear. it's the Library of Babel, no longer the suspicion but the certainty that anything you could say has been said before.

of course it's always been a lie; you have to make the thing anyway. the thing is particular to you. the thing is *specific*, as each of us is specific.

we're all Pierre Menard, rewriting Don Quixote. which was Borges' point even then.

#ChatGPT and its ilk are effectively a large-scale DDoS attack on not only specific tasks (such as teaching, software maintenance and fiction editing) but on human creative inspiration, sense of self and ability to make meaning of the universe.

notice how they are
- creating work for us rather than saving us work
- automating inherently energizing and rewarding tasks such as making art rather than tiring and tedious tasks such as filing taxes
- flooding social networks with generated content that makes it harder to connect with real humans and build community
- distracting us with questions like “what if this machine is sentient?” which keep us from noticing and acting to prevent the suffering of actual humans

that thing where all search engines have become basically unusable because they’re stuffed full of AI garbage? i fear that’s about to happen to everything.

i don’t believe this is necessarily intentional, but no machine that learns under capitalism can imagine another world.