Lady, EVOLVED @Lady@cat.family

@gaditb i think there is a categorical difference between a set of instructions on a page and the actual enactment of those instructions. i view “infrastructure” as perhaps everything EXCEPT the instructions themselves which allows the execution to take place; i think lumping the instructions (an abstract product of human knowledge) in with all the things which actually are processing and doing and performing the execution is a mistake. but to be clear, this is referring to computer code as intellectual product, not computer code as bits on a disk. likewise, the information in a database is not infrastructure; the actual physical database that you can query and perform tasks on is

this distinction is necessary because the intellectual property of computer code (or database information) is not the only requirement to having an actual usable infrastructural piece. for databases, you need to have a computer which can store database entries, for one. then you need to actually load the database entries into the database. you need to connect it in such a way that it can be queried. only after you have done these tangible steps do you have a database-as-infrastructure. just the information, without performing those steps, is no more infrastructure than a cookbook is grocery

or, you might need recipes to make good food, but you also need ingredients. you need code to execute tasks on a computer, but you also need something to load the code onto and something to execute it. when i say “infrastructure”, i mean the latter items, because code which is not loaded onto anything or executable by anything is not actually a usable computer program. or, for that matter, meaningfully distinguishable from any other output of human intellectual pursuit, e.g. books

(if your argument is that all human knowledge is infrastructure i feel like you are severely weakening the utility of thw term)

@aschmitz i wish all the pretty okay people who used rails would get together and fork rails

i know this won't happen but i wish it

but i still would not contribute to rails

there’s plenty of tech thinkpiecing right now which is like “if a web scraper uses libxml2 to process web pages does that mean that contributing to libxml2 is being complicit in web scraping” and i don’t buy that, i think (1) the people who are complicit in the web scraping are the people providing the physical infrastructure (machines, wires, electricity) required to carry it out, and (2) libxml2 isn’t even that good, and the fact that the web scrapers can Just Use It instead of writing their own XML parser might save them a little bit of time and intellectual work in the short term, but in the long term they would just write their own XML parser, it’s not like nobody knows how to do that, secrecy regarding the methods and computer code is not a meaningful impediment

programmers seem very committed in the present moment to thinking of code as concrete and material but infrastructure as abstract and ephemeral and i would like to suggest that maybe that is exactly backwards

this isn’t like, a particularly principled stance, because ultimately i think that the bulk of the ethical responsibility for computers lies at the feet of the people providing the computers, and not at the feet of some randos who wrote a software library that someone else decided to run on the computers, but also, no i do not want to make those software platforms i disagree with strongly on a philosophical level Better

honestly i’ve found bugs or at least Problems in ruby or rails or whatever before and come up with workarounds but i will never submit a patch upstream because do you realize what people use rails to Do

@packetcat “eggs”

X·M·L was right to mandate that lesthan be written < everywhere

parsing is just so much more complicated when you can't tell immediately if a curly brace is opening an object or just a literal curly brace in a string

i want a data interchange format like Json but which doesn't allow meaningful markup characters inside quoted strings. does this exist. i mean aside from X·M·L

buddy you don’t even own the thing you wrote; you let everyone make their own copy for free

programmers will literally think that just because they wrote the operating manual that they own the machine

i wonder if there is anything which can be learned from all this

similarly, the part where tolkien was bad was the part where he was an englishman riffing on other cultures he had no personal stake in

the part where tolkien was good was the part where he was an englishman riffing on english culture and its antecedents

i’m invisible today (took a vacation day from work)