Marginalia

> [...] in that empty space, I begin to wonder: Where did all the people go? What are they all doing behind the artifice they’re showing here? Why am I wasting my time and energy wading through these shallow yet unbounded seas of nothing?

Have very much been feeling this bit lately. The social web is an evaporating ocean, leaving only an inhospitable salty death zone full of bots, shills, and influence campaigns, immitating the people that used to be around.

https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/you-dont-have-to/

If programmer speed and efficiency was truly such a significant competitive factor, we wouldn't be packing them like sardines in noisy and stuffy open floor plan offices.

Which one of these would you say is correct?

Argument for "is": In English "data" is treated as an uncountable noun.

Argument for "are": In Latin, "data" is the plural of "datum".

Did some local LLM-based labeling of the HN comment corpus, tasking the model to classify how likely it is that each comment is:

* Using AI-like grammar (e.g. it's not X, it's Y)
* Using AI-like markup (e.g. em-dashes)
* Trying to shill something
* Trying to influence public opinion

Still a bit work in progress, but here are some preview data.

Did some statistics, and it seems posts from newly registered accounts on HN are nearly 10x more likely to use EM-dashes, arrows, and similar typography than established accounts.

https://www.marginalia.nu/weird-ai-crap/hn/

So I had to disable Anubis a while back because it was too much of an accessibility issue for browsers with no JS support.

Now I've deployed a query-rate based mitigation that makes you wait for a few seconds before you can proceed if the query rate is too high.

A bit annoying, but it works with any browser and will disable itself when the bots go away.