October 2020 newsletter

Published: 2020-10-31
Word count: ~12122

All the links here are vulnerable to link rot. If you need a link here and it's rotted, than get in contact with me and I can help you find it, if you catch my drift.

(Also, archive.org is a thing)

timtimestim

The site got a few updates. Here they are in decreasing order of significance:

* Basically used some of the advice of this page and this one to fix some of the sillier issues with how the typography of this page was made. I put my own flair on it with making the headers more apparent, giving blockquotes a little black line on the left, and generally fixing how awful the code blocks were. Also, the font size has been made more adaptive for everyone, so now you can use your own browser's default font size if you want.

I'm pretty happy with the things I've gotten done this month. A lot of diverse projects coming together at once.

Firefox updates and Tim dies a little more inside

I hate software upgrades.

I use Debian Stable for many reasons, chief among them being that it's stable. It doesn't change the software I rely on under my nose, unless it really has to.

And it really had to, at the beginning of this month.

You see, web browsers are a unique breed. You have things like lynx or w3m that can browse from the terminal and are pretty stable, but don't have the functionality that you need; and you have graphical browsers, of which your only real choice is to bend over for Google's Chromium, or submit to the constant annoyance of Mozilla's Firefox.

I use a graphical browser, because a large portion of the things I do online involve graphical things, like videos and images. I also like to appreciate well designed web pages when they come along once in a blue moon. I choose Firefox because it has better support for ad blockers.

Anyways, Debian Stable always uses the ESR release channel for its Firefox package. For a while now I've been using Firefox 68.x and learning it to my satisfaction; so you can imagine when I learned that the new ESR release was coming out and Debian Stable was going to have to change for security reasons, I was pretty worried.

Or, well, maybe you can't imagine it. Most people don't dread software updates the way I do. You can read more about my software philosophy somewhere in my blog.

What's worse is that I've been using Firefox Mobile for my phone browsing needs. The... I think it's called the "Fennec" release. The one based off the 68.x ESR. The point is that my mobile phone's browser was also going to be getting the shaft.

It's free software, so I could just keep using it even after it's not going to be supported, but... How do I say this nicely? Aw hell naw. There's no way in hell you're going to get me to use a non-supported browser, considering the internet these days. If it can run an ad blocker, load my webpages, and not make me want to kill someone, and is supported, than it's good enough for me to get used to.

Yeah I have some pretty low standards. Having them any higher would just bring disappointment.

So I knew a big UI update was in my future for a few months now. I even downloaded the newest Firefox Mobile (after figuring out which one it was; there's like a million different versions these days). The UI is crazy different on mobile, and pretty similar on desktop.

But that's all preparation for the real change-over. I just wanted to inspect the outcome before I committed to planning for it. If it turned out that neither of them supported ad blocking, or were unconscionably horrible, than I wanted to know before getting fucked. I'm happy to report that both mobile Firefox and regular Firefox both support ad blocking still.

I'm a paranoid person when it comes to software updates, if you can't tell. I sometimes think, but don't actually believe, that software vendors are intentionally trying to ruin weeks of my life while I adjust to their next shitty idea for a UI, just after I was starting to get effective and fast with their old UI.

Ahem. My plan (or flan, if you prefer) was to wait until Debian Stable stopped supporting ESR 68, and then move over to the new ESR. Sadly, I don't think there's any ESR for Mobile Firefox anymore, so I'm going to have to deal with shitty updates on the phone if I want a secure browser.

God. I would pay cold hard cash for a secure browsers one mobile and desktop that doesn't change it's UI constantly. If you want my money, than that's where it's at. I'm that desperate.

So, finally, Debian Stable shat out their new ESR Firefox build, and I installed it, also loading up my install of Mobile Firefox.

Honestly? Relatively painless upgrade. There was some oddity where I had to disable a "search suggestion" setting (read: eBay ad) on desktop, but that's par for the course with any software not made in 1998 these days.

Since I was updating Firefox in place, it preserved my ad-ons and other configuration settings. It even preserved my login to my Firefox account login. (yes I use a Firefox account to sync my browsing history. I will pay a bounty to the first person to explain to me how I can extract browsing history from Mobile Firefox without syncing).

Mobile was pretty painless, too. Since I'd already had a new mobile install already set up, I didn't have to fiddle with too many settings or download uBlock Origin. I just needed to log into the sync account, which was really easy: just a QR code I scanned from my laptop.

All in all, it was surprisingly easy to upgrade. Which is, like, the bare minimum for an acceptable upgrade experience.

Unfortunately for me and the length of this newsletter entry, that's about where the fun stops.

I mentioned that the desktop application (the one with actual ESR support) didn't change too much. The URL bar looks a bit different, and there's some other small changes, but my own workflow hasn't been altered in the slightest. I'm intentionally not a power user of browsers so that I don't have to deal with them inevitably breaking everything every six months. If I use the smallest and most basic feature set, that has the highest probability of not causing me massive confusion and frustration in the future.

I know there was a lot of angry people about the new search bar, specifically, but for me it was a total non-issue (I don't use in-browser bookmarks, and I don't click on the search bar, just press CTRL-L to search for something. Yeah it's ugly, but so is everything else on computers these days. I choose to pick my battles on that).

In short: I'm totally okay with the v78 Desktop ESR. "Okay" in the sense that I don't want to launch Mozilla into the sun, that is. Firefox is still a fundamentally broken and borderline-useless program, but I'm trying to be positively here, damn it! Still a bit salty about them advertising eBay to me in the search bar, but it was easy enough to disable, so whatever.

Buuuuuut the mobile release is a different story.

You see, I think Mozilla might have some sort of brain damage. Collective brain damage? Like the dancing plague of 1518, but instead of getting their groove on they continue to make their software less useful over time in some perverse mass-hysteria panic response to other mass-hysteria.

This is going to get really intently negative. Turn back around if you're in a good mood. It really only gets worse from here. I'm going to say some mean things about people making free things that I feel entitled about, and it's not going to be nice. I really just need to vent for a while, and I'm choosing Firefox Mobile as a, perhaps unfair, example of a larger problem.

Making a browser is hard. At least they made it hard for themselves. I'm not trying to imply that the people working on Firefox Mobile are incompetent, I'm just saying it outright: They're incompetent.

What was that? I can't make a browser, so I shouldn't talk? Wow, thanks for the argument. I guess I can't complaining about a shitty steak because I don't have the ability to cook up a better one. Fuck off. I can have preferences and expectations about things I can't recreate myself.

(Also implying that I'm incapable of learning how to make a browser given enough time is really rude. Why would you say something rude about a programmer like that?)

I think every mobile app ever made is horse shit; a total waste of bits written onto flash memory; a god damn tragedy that the human race has collectively lost on. Firefox Mobile is the perfect example of why I hate mobile apps, and why I constantly consider just throwing my phone away and using a dumb phone instead. I would probably be happier without shitty mobile apps constantly trying to ruin my life, now that I think about it.

It makes me feel threatened it's so shitty. Like every mobile app developer is out to get me or something.

That above blog post has some good points. Because I have to actively manage my life around these horrible applications, and every step feels like a colossal effort. It really does feel like it's Out To Get Me.

The shocking inadequacy of every single piece of software on my mobile phone is so appalling that it makes me actively paranoid. And a part of me is screaming in abject horror about how normal it is to say something like that. I could say, "My phone's software is so badly designed and implemented that it makes me paranoid" and people would nod along without even batting a fucking eye.

Hear me out: What if, instead of being terrible, Firefox Mobile wasn't terrible?

I'm being vague because it's funny. But I guess I should show some examples.

First off, the choice of ad-ons is limited. I personally only really care about ad blocking, but that doesn't mean that I don't think it was a stupid decision to limit people's choices on that front. You can choose from a curated list, and it's only by grace of Mozilla's insipid decision process that I can use uBlock Origin in my mobile browser.

But whatever. I really do mean what I say when I only care about ad blocking. Privacy is dead for the most part, and the only thing I can really hope for is differentiating between my aggressive online persona and my totally distant don't-talk-to-me-ever in-person persona. I just like the convince of not having my brain experiencing advertisements all the time. Oh how my standards have fallen.

I'm pretty sure they disabled the about:config stuff on non-nightly builds as well. Alienating power users doesn't seem like a good strategy to me, but again I'm not a power user because I know browsers do this shit all the time. This change didn't affect me.

So far so good. Just hurting other people, which makes me far less angry than me getting hurt myself. Sounds like I'm an asshole? Probably. But I bet there's very few people out there who would actually get more upset at someone else being mildly inconvenienced versus themselves being mildly inconvenienced.

Point is, most of the things that I've heard people complaining about aren't actually my own complaints.

You see, I'm well aware that the v68 Mobile ESR UI was pretty fucking awful. It was clunky, and you had to do some work arounds to get anything done ever. You couldn't really do anything with it. But I used that UI for... I'd say for over a year and a half? Maybe longer? I'm not exactly sure when I started using the v68 ESR, but it was long enough ago that I can't remember an exact date.

It might have sucked to get used to, but I was used to it. It was totally natural for me to use after so long fiddling with it. Now that everything is slightly different, my habits and "workflow" (if you can call it that on mobile) has been completely broken.

This might sound pedantic, but it's the truth. I care more about consistency than I do about effectiveness, when it comes to UI's. If I'm used to using your software in a certain way, and you force me to change to your new way of doing things, I'm going to be upset. To me it feels like I'm being inconvenienced for no damn reason, when all I really wanted to do was read some web fiction on my phone while at lunch.

Your new fancy flashy UI might be "better" (HA!), but I don't care. I really don't care. Why? Because I have never ever ever ever ever ever seen a UI update that actually improved something unambiguously for the better. Not in my lifetime at least. The closet you can come to for making your UI "better" is making whatever stupid thoughtless changes you added easy to adjust to.

The perfect UI "update" for me would be adding features in such a way that it doesn't break the current way I already use your software. Like adding the option in a settings menu or something. And no, that doesn't mean show a pop up window asking me to look at "what's new! :D" every few days. It means not getting in my way. Because I use your software in the way you released it, not in the way you want me to use it in some idyllic future.

I've never actually seen a UI update that straight up improves on the way I already use a piece of software, unless the update was something extremely basic like "Added a keyboard shortcut to throw your computer in the trash!".

So, yes, I hate the new Mobile UI. Not because it's actually "bad", I don't actually care about it that way. I care because the update is forcing me to adjust nearly 2 years of daily habits for no god damn reason. Oh, wait, the "reason" is that you have to "modernize" your browser or something. Fuck off.

Here's how you fix it. Give me an option in the settings menu that says: "Adjust UI" or something. In this, you can select from a super simple menu, "Firefox Mobile 68 ESR" from a list of all of the UI's you've made. Boom. No more complaints from me.

What's that? Too much work to support all those UI's at once? Well, maybe you should stop changing the fucking UI so much.

I don't care how it looks I just care how it functions. If you make everything flat designed or something, but keep the workflow the same, than I'll be mostly okay with that. That's basically what they did with the desktop 68 to 78 ESR change. There's mostly the same workflow on desktop this time, and you don't actually see me writing thousands of words complaining about it.

Here's a general rule: Your UI sucks. Always. Any time you think your UI doesn't suck, taze yourself; the negative reinforcement will eventually convince you of my views.

I'm not without sin, obviously. Just look at my website. I'm no expert at making things that look or function well. I more or less just care about keeping my site consistent versus flashy or modern. Also I don't fucking care.

Just stop forcing your new things onto me. Please. I'm begging you here. I'll get on my hands and knees if you want. I don't actually care if your changes are "better" or "worse" in some abstract design sense, I just don't want it to keep changing so quickly. Please...

Anyways. There's a really stupid bug with the software keyboard on android, too. Basically when I tap the URL bar the keyboard pops up. Wile the keyboard is up, I push the "change apps" button on the bottom of the screen, the keyboard stays there even into the new app. (UPDATE: this has been fixed an a recent release)

Do you people even use your apps? My guess is not. And if you do, than you should be ashamed of releasing with such an obvious bug. It doesn't happen if I have the keyboard cursor on a web page's text field, only the URL bar. Your most recent update hasn't fixed it either.

...

Whatever. I'll get used to working around your awful UI like I did the last time, and then a year down the line you'll get a squirrel up your ass again and you'll force me to change my habits all over. This song and dance will continue forever until AI gets strong enough to make me a perfect UI that actually works. Until then, you can all kindly go fuck yourselves.

Update: I'm pretty sure I can't even re-arange tabs in the mobile browser. Yet another point for removing features with a new update. Who needs to rearrange their tabs anyways? Fucking hell.

SCP-2718

There's something about the SCP Foundation that's a perfect encapsulation of why I like the internet. I mean, where else are you going to get a dedicated group of people to obsessively make these highly intricate and highly specific horror stories, besides the internet?

I mean, sure, if you had some visionary author or something then they could probably make a book like the SCP wiki before the SCP wiki was a thing, but that's not what I mean. I mean that this simple concept has grown into something truly amazing. It captures the imagination so well that some author's can't imagine not writing for it!

It's been a while since I read any SCPs. It doesn't capture my imagination quite the same way it does a lot of other people. I like some of the stories and concepts, and some of them are actually kind of scary, but for the most part I consider it more of an anomaly if you will.

With that said, I recently read a new SCP, called SCP-2718. I recommend you don't read it before continuing this newsletter.

...Okay, now that you're back I can talk about it guilt free.

I have a fondness for things like "Langford's Basilisk", where the mere act of observing something or thinking about something can cause catastrophic effects. A memetic hazard or contigohazard or whatever. I like the idea because I know that somewhere there has to be something like that. Even if it has to be made personalized on a person-by-person basis, there's got to be a series of words or sounds or images or something that just breaks you.

I'd say that I want to know what it was that would break me, but than that would involve knowing what it was, which would mean it would break me. It's forbidden knowledge, through and through. And forbidden knowledge makes my dick hard. And something truly forbidden, a knowledge that I know I never want to have, is even more intriguing.

But what about a more tame thing? Something that wouldn't cause you to immediately die, per say, but something that would permanently change your life and all future actions?

It's an interesting question. Since what I mean by "change your life" is intentionally vague. More information is almost always a good thing, from an epistemic standpoint; you can make better decisions if you have more information, since you can constrain your expectations better with it. So unless you somehow know that obtaining the information will lead to not being able to obtain any more information (i.e Langford's Basilisk, or something that causes you to loose mental faculty) than you usually would want to know, right?

At the same time, there's things you might not want to know. I'm not so uncreative to not be able to come up with situations where I would want to restrict my information flow. They might be contrived, but only because I haven't thought about the issue too much.

The interesting part of the question is where do you draw the line? It's hard to predict the future (even though it's something you can practice and get better at); how can you, in this moment, decide what the future version of yourself would actually want to know without actually knowing it?

It's an idea closely tied to precommitments, which are a little pet topic of mine that I've been quietly obsessed about since I was young. Maybe one day I'll write out an entire blog post about precommitments, and include some references to the SCP Foundation with it.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

There's a lot of crowd sourcing work websites out there. I have some interesting thoughts about how to take advantage of these kinds of things that these margins are too small to include.

Diceware

Information theory has always been interesting to me. Entropy, surpisal, bits, etc; all that good shit. This means that I have a, perhaps obligatory, fascination with cryptography.

One of my favorite things about the sciences is the fact that they make the unintuitive normalized. And diceware is one of those things.

Most passwords are terrible. Like, really really awful. Even when you think you've done a good job, humans are still atrocious at coming up with something sufficient to beat most brute force attacks.

I'm not going to explain the entire field of information theory here. But things that are done randomly are much more secure than things chosen by a human who thinks they're doing something randomly.

And that's where diceware comes in. Because to have a truly random password, you'll have to memorize an arbitrary sequence of letters/numbers/symbols/hieroglyphs, which is famously annoying and hard.

But information theory doesn't just work like that. What if, instead of choosing random symbols, you chose random words? Words are far easier to remember than arbitrary symbols (thanks memory palaces), and if you have a large enough list of them than they can be easily randomized into something secure and memorable.

It's one of my favorite things, since it gets to the core of the sheer alienness of information theory. Most people's intuitive thoughts (including mine) was somewhere along the lines of, "A password that's just English words? That can't possibly be secure!"

But it is secure. You use regular 6 sided dice and pick words from the list that match to your rolls. Even if someone knows what list of words you used, the actual entropy of the dice rolls still makes the password secure (as long as you have a certain amount of words total. That's your own threat model to decide on, though).

And it actually works. A "passphrase" as it's called is way easier to remember, and you can use it to be a master password for a password database full of actually inhuman randomized things for all your other accounts.

Isn't math beautiful and terrifying? How insane is it that our intuitions can be so wrong, in the face of the true reality of the situation? Seriously, go learn about information theory; it's wild.

Even something as simple as "adding a single bit -- a 1 or 0 -- to something doubles the amount of states that thing can be in" is kind of mind boggling once you think about it. How many states can your hard drive be in? How many states can all hard drives be in? How many states does your CPU change per second? How many states can a neuron hold? Excuse me while I freak out in nerdy bliss.

(And if you have a D20, and a desire to be cryptographically secure while also being the biggest nerd since Alan Fucking Turning, than there's also fantasy wordlist for Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and other shit. Take a guess at which one I use.)

(This sounds like an advertisement for text files. What a joke)

A totally normal review of Metal Gear Solid V

I found a really good blog post / review / something for Metal Gear Solid V. Just read it.

You don't have to have played the game to understand this post. I enjoyed it greatly even though I've never played anything even remotely related to Metal Gear.

The Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect

Here's something you should read online and immediately trust: The Murray Gell Mann Amnesia effect

The summary is that you always laugh at ignorant news articles about things you're knowledgeable about, but then continue to trust the things you read on other news articles. The "amnesia" here is forgetting to generalize from the fact that most other professionals will think the same way about reading something written about they own field.

This also includes things like reading a story about someone you know personally. They get everything wrong, and then you turn the page and trust the next story about someone you don't know. You don't generalize.

Generalizing from one example

Scott Alexander is perhaps one of the best bloggers on the internet. The post, Generalizing from one example is pretty early in his writing (from all the way back to 2009, and hidden in the middle of LessWrong), but it's still pretty good.

The moral of the story is that people don't experience things the way you do, a lot of the time. He brings up the example of people with "aphantasia", a "condition" where they literally can't visualize things, and how everyone thought they were right from the singular example of their own minds.

I think about this a lot. I'm always wondering what I'm missing out on, being trapped in my own brain.

Also, slightly related to the previous topic of the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Which one do you believe? Ooooooo spooky.

(The answer is that you believe both of them. Doublethink. I love big brother. Let's go to the ministry of Love. We are not at war with Eurasia. We are at war with Eurasia.)

Why people write

I've come across a couple essays / blog posts from some authors about why they write:

The interesting thing here is that these are all published authors, which I am absolutely not. They have all these big reasons, and it kind of made me think "why do I write?"

I write for the same reason I do anything voluntarily: because it's interesting and fun.

And these people all treat writing as this thing. This big ol' thing. And it is a big ol' thing for them, I think. They're published authors, and I'm not. They've dedicated their whole lives to their craft, and I haven't. It makes sense that my thinking about it is more simplistic than theirs.

Not to mention the fact that I love/hate this "pretentious artist" thing that people do. I love it because it's really funny when done on purpose, and hate it because it's annoying when not.

Who knows? What will be my reasons for writing, years from now?

Toilet Review: Inadequate Equilibria

Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of those books that you read to flex your technical vocabulary, stroke your massive genius dong, and despair about the inevitable collapse of civilization at the hands of Moloch Moloch Moloch.

It's a good book, by my own measure. Non-fiction books are always harder for me to be interested in than other kinds of books, and this one grabbed me enough to keep me mostly engaged until the end; maybe because the ideas in it weren't totally novel to me, and instead it was putting words to something that I've been trying to pinpoint myself.

It talks about a wide girth of ideas.

And it's also a book that I read almost exclusively on the toilet.

I was looking for ways to engage myself in reading more. I read a lot of things, but not a lot of it is educational the way that I would like. It's harder to be engaged in something that twist your worldview into a pretzel for hours on end. I came up with the idea of reading this book while on the toilet, in small 5-minute or so bursts, and now I'm done with it.

I think it's beautiful that I read a book about chronic civilizational failure while dropping multiple shits.

What is IE about? That's a good question. Very good question. So good, in fact, that I'll answer it in the next paragraph.

The greatest blog post ever written is Meditations On Moloch by Scott Alexander, and IE is closely related to the concepts of Moloch; they both try to answer the central question in the head of every sane person on the planet: Why in the name of hot holy fuck is everything so awful?

In a world with so many smart people, so many opportunities, and a long tradition of science, get to the point where something like the US healthcare system can exist? How can something like full time employment, 40 hours a week, still be a thing? Why can't big institutions make any changes to their actions even after proof comes up that something could be better for everyone?

And yet, we can't say that everyone is incompetent or evil, since there are smart people in the world. There are things that get done that are acceptable in competence. But why is that the exception? What's going wrong?

IE's answer makes a lot of sense: In a large complicated system there builds up an equilibrium (called a "Nash Equilibrium") in where no single individual can cause unilateral change, even when they know the change would benefit everyone in the system. Everyone in the system, though warped incentives like "I don't want to publish useful scientific articles, just ones that make my journal more prestigious", are all (mostly) acting intelligently for their own interest, while constraining their own actions in relation to what they think other people in the system will do. This creates an equilibrium where every individual actor is being intelligent and hard working, but the system as a whole is "slow" and "stupid".

That was a lot of concepts to throw at you at once, if you aren't familiar with any of it. If that sounds interesting to you, I recommend you read IE while on the shitter.

But that's not the only thing that it talked about. Remember how I was talking about the "generalizing from one example" thing a few sections back? In that blog post it talked about the Typical Mind Fallacy, in where you imagine your own internal experiences to be universal to other's internal experiences. It's very fascinating to me.

The other large part of IE is how the author talks about inadequacy analysis: how an individual actor (one person) can conclude that some large system is inadequate, and then take individual action to exploit that for personal gain.

The constant example used in the book is SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, where some people get super duper depresso with extra expresso when the Sun fucks off for winter. The fact that this condition is called "SAD" is a constant source of joy for me.

Despite my flippant description of the condition, it's no joke, and the author's wife apparently has it pretty bad. They would have to take vacations in a sunny region just to keep her mood up.

So our author heroically scours the internet for any advice that someone could follow to help in a situation like this one. He comes across research papers where some people are helped with SAD by being exposed to lights, which makes sense considering that his wife got helped by going to sunny regions.

The obvious next step, in his mind, was to buy more lights and string them up all around the house. Sadly, the academic literature didn't have jack shit about this possible solution.

What should he have done? Nothing in Academia (TM) said that he was right or wrong. In his arrogance, he decided that this was a place where the science machine was probably failing, and bought like $600 of lights.

And what do you know? His wife's SAD was drastically improved.

Now, the question is, when do you take a system's word as law (don't buy the light, because if it was important than Academia would have already talked about it) and when do you decide it's inadequate and take personal action (buy the lights anyways, to see what happens)?

The author argues that there's a problem with being too modest, where people are too eager to supplicate themselves before large systems. This would be fine and good, if systems weren't inadequate, but many of them are. It's up to the individual to decide if a system is inadequate, and how they can possibly exploit that fact for their own personal advantage.

Note: I said "personal advantage". If the system was easily fixable by a single external person realizing that "more light!" was a good solution, than wouldn't it have already been fixed?

The author brings up this situation through a large portion of the book. The other example is killing babies, but we'll focus on this one for now.

One of the things he talks about is the Typical Mind Fallacy. This guy openly admits that he lacks a certain human mind thing he calls "status regulation", where people try to keep the current status hierarchy even when it doesn't make sense. People believe that just saying you'll go out and do something out of the ordinary means that you need to already have a lot of status; to reach for status that you don't already have is to be "slapped down".

I think about this a lot. Not the "status regulation" thing, but the fact that it's so easy to have internal experiences that are totally different from the majority, and not even know it.

I'm of the opinion that nearly every institution on planet Earth is absurdly inadequate, so you can imagine this book is appealing to me. It's a dangerous book, since if you're like me than it will appeal to your sense of superiority whether you like it or not. It even has warnings that it can be dangerous for people like me. The point isn't to say that you can always beat the system, it's to say that sometimes you can realize a system is inadequate in a way you can exploit personally, not that an individual is always better.

This review feels like it's all over the place. Go read the book, it's better written and actually explains itself.

GNU yes is the most terrifying program ever programmed

...Not really. But it is scary, just in the way that brains are scary because they made the atom bomb.

To explain why I just related a program called yes to a weapon capable of destroying civilization, I'm going to have to give you some really out-there context. It'll all come together in the end, trust me on this.

yes is a Linux/unix/POSIX/whatever tool that prints y\n (that is, "y" followed by a newline) to standard output. If you don't understand what that means, it just writes:

y
y
y
y
y
y
y

Forever.

This, by itself, is already nightmare fuel enough for like... three Mark Z. Danielewski books. Screaming into the void an endless stream of "y", like asking a cruel god for an answer to a question you will never get. It's tragic, really.

But yes, unlike the Navidson Record, is actually useful for some things besides existential dread and delicious on the nose typography. Specifically, it exists to answer the age old question:

Yes or no? (y/n)

You pipe it into a program that asks you this question over and over, and it will give it the one answer we ever really want: y\n

It's pretty useful for automated scripts, and when you forget that rm has a -f option and you want to delete a .git directory or something.

And what's more, it's super easy to write! Here, I'll write a version of yes for you in a single line of bash script:

while true; do echo 'y' ; done

It's basically writing "hello world" in a infinite while loop. It should be the second or third thing you make after figuring out that code executes in sequential order.

And as long as you aren't intentionally trying to slow it down, it should execute fast enough that you won't even notice it happening, especially if you use it in a script.

So tell me, ladies and gents, why is GNU's version of yes so damn fast?

You don't need to understand that post in it's entirety. Stuff like "I/O buffers" are secondary to the results:

Compared to other Unices, GNU is outrageously fast. NetBSD's is 139MiB/s, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD have very similar code as NetBSD and are probably identical, illumos's is 141MiB/s without an argument, 100MiB/s with. OS X just uses an old NetBSD version similar to OpenBSD's, MINIX uses NetBSD's, BusyBox's is 107MiB/s, Ultrix's (3.1) is 139 MiB/s, COHERENT's is 141MiB/s.

All this, while (on that guy's machine), GNU's yes implementation got 10.2 GIGABYTES per second. My own machine is pretty low-power, and I can confirm the relative findings here: In a comparison between GNU yes and busybox yes, GNU got 3.54 GiB/s while busybox got a measly 90.1 MiB/s.

(Funnily enough, my single line bash yes above got only 463 KiB/s. A simple C implementation -- busybox's -- is absurdly faster than the interpreted language of bash trying to do the exact same thing. Busybox's source has some more details than just calling puts() in an infinite loop, but it's close enough to the most simple thing possible to be a good example.)

This is great. Some nerds decided to hyper optimize a program that didn't need it in the slightest, and now you all have to deal with me writing about it.

In the interest of keeping you on your toes, let's talk about AI.

I have strong interest in the development of AI technology. So gwern.net's post about GPT-3 has been something I've read and re-read half a dozen times at this point.

If you aren't mired in the technical jargon and history of Artificial Intelligence research, than that post will be nearly incomprehensible for you. And just like the reddit post about GNU yes, the main point is this:

While I was highly skeptical of scaling hypothesis advocates when I first became interested in AI 2004–2010 (back when AI was stuck in the doldrums of hopelessly narrow tools and dates like 2028 seemed impossibly far away), which smacked of numerology and “if you build it they will come” logic (at the time, we certainly didn’t have general algorithms that you could just throw compute at), in 2020, I have to admit, I was wrong and they were right. We built the compute, and the algorithms did come, and the scaling hypothesis has only looked more and more plausible every year since 2010.

The "scaling hypothesis" of AI research basically says that you can just stack more computational power (more super computers) and data, and you'll get incredible gains in your AI. This is corroborated (proven, maybe?) by GPT-3, the third in the line of "GPT" AIs that, in essence, try to predict what text will come next after being given some text. That sounds tame, but... Well, read some of the random samples of AI generated writing and you might have your mind changed a bit; if I didn't tell you those were AI generated, would you have been able to tell?

Anyways, the upshot is that the scaling hypothesis is turning out to be true, at least as far as I can see. The more power and data you thrown into an AI, the better it gets (which is pretty non-obvious if you actually understand a bit about AI research. Ironically the simplest idea of "just throw more shit at it" is the right one).

And now it's finally time to describe to you my nightmare scenario. The reason why GNU yes scares me:

Imagine there's a wealthy internet company out there that has an interest in advertisement. Since I'm not in the interest of naming names, I'll just call it Google. That sounds like a good name for a wealthy internet company, right?

So this mysterious Google has AI research, since they need to advertise stuff to you and AI seems like a great way to do that at scale. All is well.

Then, OpenAI releases GPT-4 (not a thing that exists yet, but stay with me here), and it's so much better that not even large bureaucratic nations like Google and Facebook can ignore the simple fact of the matter:

The scaling hypothesis is true.

Now. OpenAI isn't large, when compared to Google. They had to struggle and toil to get the funds to invest even a dozen million dollars into training their cute little AIs.

But what will Google do? A dozen million dollars is literal chump change for them, the computational power needed is silly in the face of what they already do every day, and the data? Seriously? Do you have any idea the kind of in-house databases that Google probably has?

(Just replace "Google" with any of the tech giants: Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, whatever)

Once they get their heads out of their asses, what will they train their scaling hypothesis AI on? Advertisements, of course!

Meanwhile, some nerds a few years ago have optimized a little program called yes to print 'y\n' at speeds that are frankly absurd.

Google trains their AI using a small fraction of their annual budget. Once it becomes apparent that the blessing of scale is actually helping them, they push it hard.

And just like in GNU yes, the AI learns to optimize. Not in the direction of printing y\n to the screen as fast as possible, but in the direction of making itself better at advertising to you.

Do you have any idea the kind of horror I'm talking about here? Some nerds working for free made GNU yes orders of magnitude faster than their competitors. What about an AI that doesn't have to sleep, eat, or think about anything else besides convincing people to act in the monetary interests of a cooperation?

You can't imagine it, I can tell. So I'll spell it out for you.

Just like how GNU yes is optimized for a single goal -- speed -- this new scaled AI can optimize different parts of itself. Except it doesn't have a human brain, it has a computer's skill at keeping tack of things. It doesn't have to write code that humans understand, it doesn't have to explain itself, all it needs it results.

And that's when the world ends.

As the AI starts to improve itself out of control, it will become smarter than the average human, than the smartest human, and then totally incomprehensible. It will consume computer power and resources to make itself smarter. For what purpose? Advertising.

Fucking imagine it. You wake up one day and you literally can't stop yourself from buying product X because the AI had rewired your brain to obsess about advertisements. And that's a mercy, leaving you to be terrified of what had happened. If I was the AI, I would just kill everyone and then tile the universe with identical simulated minds that only watch and think about advertisements; but that's just me.

Computers are fast. Computers are fast. And a computer that understands itself can make something fast. The same logic that makes GNU yes a silly little example of nerds being nerds, also shows the untapped potential that a sufficiently powerful AI can exploit, if given the data and power to do so.

In a world where brute force is king, the brute that can force the hardest will win.

Be afraid? (y/n)
y
y
y
y
y
y
y

New earbuds

I wear earbuds nearly every day for 8+ hours a day. Usually I wear them while at work, but I also wear them at home frequently too.

For quite a long time I've been subjecting myself to supermarket crap earbuds. They work... well? I guess? They're alright, but they aren't robust in the slightest. I put my earbuds through an insane amount of abuse through a year, and I've never had a set last longer than a few months of high-frequency use.

(There's a set I had that lasted nearly a year because I never took it out of the house and used it exclusively for computer listening.)

Considering how much of my life and sanity relies on having earbuds, I think it's reasonable to finally double down and get a pair that is in a higher echelon of quality. Maybe not something that's crazy expensive, but something that I can rely on a bit more than the cheep crap I've been using. Also, it was my birthday and I wanted to get myself a gift that I've been pondering for at least two years at this point.

(I bought a set of like 8 earbuds last Christmas, and it took me until mid October this year to burn through all of them. They were really bad. Don't but bulk sets of earbuds, people; they're probably made to fail much faster than even regular store-bought ones. Also I couldn't expose them to sunlight without the screen on my phone glitching out, which is still something I don't really understand. Even now I'm a bit paranoid about being out in the sun with my earbuds plugged in.)

Anyways, after consulting with my Audiophile/musician friend I decided on the KZ ZS10 PRO in-ear monitors (which will be called "earbuds" because I will always consider them to just be "fancy earbuds").

They're about $50. Much more expensive than any earbud I ever purchased before; if they last for more than a year, though, the math works out to them being worth it.

You gotta understand that I'm not really an "audiophile" or super entrenched into the weird obsessive world of in-ear monitors or whatever. I just want something that will last longer than a few months and sound better than average. Sorry if you were looking for a super technical review or something.

First off, it was way way way too confusing to figure out what bud went in what ear. The way these work is that there's a separate wire that comes with them, and can be replaced. Since the wire is almost always the first thing to break, this means that they might actually last long enough to see the next month.

But they didn't label what bud went in what ear, or what plug went into what bud. This is a design decision that's so baffling and moronic to me that I can only conclude that they're doing it maliciously. Is is really too hard to print "L" or "R" on one of the buds? Really? Fucking pathetic design, and everyone involved should be ashamed.

Seriously. I had to look up a picture of someone (supposedly) wearing them correctly and use spacial reasoning and tactical feeling to (maybe) wear them correctly myself. I'm still not convinced I actually have it right.

(I realize that I might have missed an "obvious" marking somewhere on them, but I scoured all over and nearly impaled my eyeball trying to get a closer look and found nothing.)

Lovely. What's more is that I ordered a black pair, but I got a blue pair instead. Jokes on them, I like blue. You can't keep me down motherfuckers.

The wire feels strong and I'm comforted by the fact that it's replaceable (even though there's no standard for wire parts, so when they stop making new wires I'm fucked). I like how they wrap around the ear, even though I was a bit of a neanderthal trying to get them to fit the first few dozen times.

As for the sound quality: It's nice. Way nicer than the tinny awful bullshit that I was subjected to for most of my life wearing earbuds, but not as good as the DT 880 PRO I have at home. Still, the new earbuds are much more convenient, since I can actually bring them with me to work and shit. I have to emphasize how relieving it is to have actually bass instead of whatever my other earbuds were pretending to do.

One of the unexpected favorites of them is how noise canceling they are. I feel a lot more comfortable with less noise and stimulation around me, especially at work, so having them block out a lot of noise is actually really nice. I wasn't expecting to be so comforted by that, but here we are. Also, it makes it easier to ignore people, which is a plus. I've been told it's also good to have noise canceling earbuds for preserving your hearing, which is always a nice plus.

I wear glasses, and I was worried about the wrap-around ear thing messing with that, but it turns out to be totally okay. Imagine the scene: At work I'm wearing a mask which has straps wrapped around the ears, earbud wires that wrap around the ears, and glasses that rest on the ears. My ears have been getting the workout of their life. Thanks, ears.

I have a fear of these things breaking within the first month (because why wouldn't they?), but I also have hope that they'll last long enough to actually be useful instead of a source of stress. I really hated buying new earbuds every few months.

Now if you excuse me, I'm going to listen to the same song over and over again for 5 hours straight while I slowly descend into a total dissociative state where I'm just a consciousness hearing and working. Something akin to meditation, except with more expensive earbuds this time.

Do you even lift brah?

I've been meaning to get into better shape for a while. I run frequently and whatnot, but my (non leg) muscles are pretty spindly and not macho.

I recently acquired a weight set because of this reddit post that talks about the various benefits of lifting weights. Instead of just doing push ups and planks and running, now I can injure myself with weighted squats and shit too!

Summary: Lift weights and you'll be healthier for longer, with a low amount of risk.

I'm honestly excited about getting into weight lifting. It'll be fun, I think. :D

Language learning

I've wanted to learn a second language for a while now. But it's always fallen by the wayside along with other "desires" like drawing or voice acting or singing or making music or... Well, you get the idea.

I was almost spurred into action by this reddit post (notice how I read a lot of the Slate Start Codex subreddit. This is a pattern) that talks about how someone managed to learn how to read German before learning how to speak it. Basically by reading the German text and the English text side by side, translating word by word until he was done. The trick, he says, is to re-read the German stuff over again without doing the translation to English in your head, just try to build intuitive understanding of what you're reading as if it were English.

Like I said, I was almost convinced to start something like this. Mostly because it's so novel and weird that it sounded fun. Sadly, not even an interesting learning method is powerful enough to actually convince me to learn a new language right now. Maybe some day I'll do it for real, but there's no inherent need for it like I feel I have with writing and whatnot.

Still, you can check out farkastranslations.com for a collection of side-by-side texts of stuff like Alice in Wonderland and shit.

And just so you know, if I were to learn one language it would probably be Esperanto since I love the idea of a constructed language that a few people actually use. And I hear it's easier to learn than other languages, at least for native speakers of Latin-derived languages.

Amato Animo Animato Animagus

You remember Harry Potter? I was a pretty big fan of Harry Potter back in the days of my youth. Probably because I thought my life was the biggest depressing awful thing imaginable and the fantasy of going to a magical school that actually gave me a semblance of agency was a powerful drug.

I was going down memory lane a bit and came across this article about how to become an "animagus", which is basically a magical person who can turn into an animal and back.

You might notice that the process is absurdly complex and ridiculous, which is hilarious. You have to keep this leaf in your mouth for like an entire month and do this meditation thing and drink this potion during a lightning storm and if any of it goes wrong you become some weird animal hybrid monster thing.

I would totally do it, just for the challenge. And I guess being able to turn into an animal at will would be cool too -- as long as I got something that could fly.

Naked html quine

https://secretgeek.github.io/html_wysiwyg/html.html

That page is a cool quine (A program that prints it's own source code).

I'm honestly impressed at how this was made, especially considering the fact that web programming is atrocious. *golf clap*

Surfing uncertainty review (review)

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/

Yet another slatestarcodex post. This time for the actual ssc blog and not from the subreddit. Huh.

This is a book review of a book called "Surfing Uncertainty", which is a treatise on... how the brain works? I guess? It's very general.

I haven't read the book, but I read this review and it gives a good enough summary. The major points that the book tries to make is that the brain is a prediction machine. It... You know what? Just read the damn post. It summarizes the book better than I can.

Also, the post itself is good. This makes this section a review of a review of a book. Mua ha ha ha.

SuperMemo and Incremental reading

As you may know, I am working on a spaced repetition flash card program called ikna. It's being made because I hate all the other offerings for the SRS (spaced repetition software) space, and decided to just get up and make my own.

Since I don't want to repeat the mistakes of my contemporaries, I looked at a lot of other SRS programs. One of the biggest, most complicated, craziest, nastiest (but oldest!) ones is SuperMemo.

Now, I would never ever use SuperMemo for my own flash cards. It's Windows only without any chance of working on mobile. I have no damn clue what its file format is. It's proprietary, so its value is basically zero once it's not supported anymore. It's built on top of HTML and other web technologies (like most SRS programs), which gives me hives. It burned down my crops and unleashed a plague of locus into my home. And it schedules things in a non-transparent way that I find appalling.

With that said, I'm fascinated by this program. For one, it's a perfect example of someone building their own castle. The guy who made this is really passionate about it (see "The true history of spaced repetition" to see what I mean).

SuperMemo, to me, is like a programmer who has used Emacs for 40 years and config'd it into such a superstate of personal utility that it's more or less an extension of his mind. Nearly incomprehensible from the outside, but from the inside it's exactly what that specific person is looking for, with decades of work put into making it juuuust right.

Like, did you know you can use this program to plan your day as well as review flash cards? Why would you have that in the same program as a flash card program? I guess it's well integrated, but holy shit man.

This program is basically the dream for a certain kind of mind: A personal knowledge management application that also happens to schedule how you acquire said knowledge.

The thing I find most interesting about it is it's incremental reading functionality. It's a complicated enough topic, so I probably have something completely wrong about it. Still, I think this is how it works:

You add consumable media (articles, books, videos, whatever) to a spaced repetition schedule. You read a few paragraphs of this media and mark up some interesting sentences/whatever you find. Then you re-read those marked up things in a spaced repetition schedule and make cloze deletion cards out of them.

This seems like an interesting idea to me, since I read a lot of stuff online, and I always have a massive backlog of articles and books and shit to "get to eventually". Having something that automatically serves me my self curated content and allows me to make flash cards out of them easily seems pretty nice, all things considered.

I've been thinking of ways I can implement this, and I might come up with something decent when the intent crystallize. Or it'll fizzle out. Who knows! *wacky laughter*

The best storyteller in the village

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/d0v5kl/the_2010s_are_about_to_end_what_are_some_things/ezfyzdu/?context=3

Yet another reddit thing, this time in a comment instead of a top-level post. But this comment spoke to me quite a bit, so I might as well share it.

You can read the surrounding text for context, if you want. I'm going to be talking about the comment by /u/TracingWoodgrains.

...it's startlingly hard to feel genuinely useful in the world.

It goes on to say that there's a lot of issues with living in a global world. You can go online and find 10,000 people who are better at writing than you are and another 10,000 that are how good you want to be at a different niche thing, and so on.

But it's not just about skill and competition, but about agency. It's about having a measurable impact on what you perceive to be the "world".

Say you're the best storyteller in the village. It doesn't matter who tells good stories elsewhere--you're what people have, and they appreciate it.

I would be the best storyteller in a small village -- assuming that there's not some other competing storyteller there. It wouldn't matter that I'm not as good as some other storytellers, since my "world" would be only my village. I wouldn't have to be part of a global culture spanning thousands of generations of people weaving tales. The stories I tell would have a tremendous impact on the people around me.

Instead I get to go to /r/writingprompts and see a silly little competition where 50+ people are all writing to the same prompt. My own submission to that competition is insignificant in comparison to the scale of the whole. But that silly little story would have stood out, in a village.

I'm reminded of a gwern.net post titled The Melancholy of Subculture Society, which expands quite a bit more on this topic.

The general advice given here is that you should become the mater of a niche domain. That way you will still feel like you have an impact on your "world" while also being able to engage with the global culture. This is good advice, and I recommend you follow it if you can. Sadly, I find this advice hard to follow, since I'm extremely introverted and getting involved in any subculture is really rough for me for personal identity reasons.

Instead I practice a more "focused" method of feeling like I have agency: focusing on myself. It's hard to explain, but after years of practice I've been able to really appreciate the impact my own actions have on myself. I've been able to conceptualize myself as "Present Tim", "Past Tim", and "Future Tim" almost like they're different people. Like Past Tim gave me a gift, and I can enjoy almost as if it were a planned gift for my birthday.

That sounds insane, and it probably is to some degree, but imagining myself as a past/present/future version of myself allows me to take in a slightly bigger picture. It shows that I have the agency to improve my life, even in significant ways. Even though I'm not affecting the elections or curing cancer or building a Friendly AI I can still feel like I have agency, which is really important to my mental health.

It's also a less intense method of just... noticing things? It's really easy to get distracted by all the lights and colors of life, but sometimes taking a step back and being like "Okay this cake is tasty" is a good way to feel like I have agency. I procured that cake, and my reward is tasty goodness. It's not significant in a universal sense, but not noticing it would be even less significant.

I feel like I'm meandering here. The point is that I totally agree that it's hard to feel significant in the world, the way it is today. I also agree that there's things you can do about it. Lowering the scope of what your "world" is, even down to the level of just yourself, might be one of the few effective strategies to combat this malaise.

Fictional non-fiction

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/d86yv8/book_review_the_things_they_carried_a_work_of/

Hey! It's /u/TracingWoodgrains again! I feel like a stalker; even though I found this one independent of the previous section's post. What a mad world we live in.

Anyways, this book review is a review of a book about the Vietnam War. I've never read the book.

The concept that is come back to constantly in this review is the idea of how fiction can tell the truth better than non-fiction. The shortest possible explanation of that contradictory term would be: Fiction can tell the emotional story while non-fiction can tell the actual truth.

It's an interesting thought. In the book the author (who's name is Tim lolololo) lies about a number of things, like how a friend died and whatnot. He does this deliberately and even points them out within the book itself. The point, apparently, is to tell the emotional story. Just read the review, and you'll understand.

Besides this being an excellent book review, another line stood out to me:

My longstanding commitment in writing is to write in a way that would not disappoint and drive off my childhood self, which requires some concessions in pieces like this one.

This is talking about not writing swear words like "fuck" and "shit", even when directly quoting the book. Remember when I was talking about Past Tim and Future Tim? Well, I find this line fascinating because I would have never considered writing in a way that Really Past Tim would want. Maybe something like One Year Ago Tim, if I'm stretching, but writing has always been something to progress on without those kinds of limitations for me.

It's such a strange rule. Don't write swear words because Child You would have felt uncomfortable about it? It should be stupid, but... It wouldn't have had such an effect on me if I didn't do similar things in my own life. Like learning how to program in C in large part because I always wanted to be able to program in a low level language, even when I was a child. Or reading "smart" books because Child Tim wanted to be smart. I could name hundreds of examples of Child Tim's desires and wants constraining what Present Tim does.

I guess I never thought about it in the sense of upsetting Child Tim, though. I don't think Child Tim was ever really uncomfortable with swear words (actually, it was mostly words like "sex" and "penis" that made me uncomfortable. "Fuck" was okay, ironically enough). But should I stop eating vegetables because Child Tim hated them? Should I stop wearing a nice shirt because Child Tim hated them (I was a bit of a hipster as a kid, so I always wore stupid tee-shirts and vowed to never wear something buttoned up. Now I wear mostly buttoned up things). How much should I constrain myself for the old values of my childhood self that I don't actually embody anymore?

This isn't really a cut and dry answer. My intuitive response is "You don't value those things anymore, so you don't have to care", but there's a wrinkle: Child Tim cared about those things, and I was Child Tim at one point in my life; would I want Really Far Future Tim to just ignore the things I care about now, the same way that I am ignoring the things Child tim cared about?

This is an advanced form of talking to yourself that only true insanity can bring.

It's hard to imagine. Maybe Really Far Future Tim won't care about this website, even though I, in the present, care about it immensely. Would I want to constrain his movements so that he keeps fulfilling values he doesn't have any more? I don't think that's the right way to go, but...

Value drift is a thing. Preserving the things you care about seems like an important thing, from a personal identity standpoint. If (nearly) none of my values are stable, whats even the point of working on them right now? Just for the Hedonistic Mission? Is that really it?

I have a few values that I've preserved, however. For one, my values of staying alive has stayed even though a 8+ year long chronic depression, and to the point where I have been signed up for cryonics for about 1.5 years.

So is the actual goal to find values that are so strong and fundamental that they will persevere even through other values? Perhaps. But then you might get stagnation, where your values don't change over time. And I'm honestly not sure which option is worse.

I think about this a lot, the way the past can constrain the present and future. Maybe one day I'll be able to articulate it better...

Chesscoaster!!! :O :O

https://xkcd.com/chesscoaster/

I like things like this. Just funny trends where people have fun. Yay chesscoaster!

Why nerds are unpopular

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Okay back to the serious stuff. This is a blog post about why I was such an outcast in school.

I'm not sure if I agree with everything said here (I knew I that I hated school, but too this day I don't have a complete picture of why I hated it so much; this blog post didn't clear anything up for me either).

But if you were an "unpopular" nerd in school, or are an unpopular nerd in school, this might serve as a good ego boost? I don't know; I read this whole post, and I wanted to write something about it, but my thoughts on it amount to: ehhhh...

Euclid's elements, but fancy

https://archive.org/details/firstsixbooksofe00byrn/

Euclid's elements are a really great introduction into geometry. This is probably the best version of it that I've found. It even uses the old english s in places where it doesn't need to! Just to remind you that you're reading a book from 300 BC.

This is only the first 6 books, and is more of a historical beauty than something I would expect someone to read through, but my god is it beautiful.

Markup languages

I've been looking into markup languages like TeX and roff, since I have a passing interesting in typography and got bitten by a bit of a research bug on them.

And as far as I can tell, the entire environment of these "typography languages" is atrocious. I tried setting up something simple in TeX and I had to install hundreds of megabytes of shit, set up complex and inscrutable commands, read thousands of words of documentation, and generally shit the bed uncontrollably.

Roff, on the other hand, is so ugly and antiquated and borderline unusable that I can scaresly believe it actually exists. At least it's easier to use, if you want to constrain yourself to using groff and/or a supremely small subset of "macro packages".

It's no wonder people find it hard to get into this shit. LaTeX isn't much better, neither is ConTeX. I do not feel comfortable using this shit; it just feels... gross. Like it's going against all my beliefs about software.

I could strip away a lot of the TeX stuff down to the base "plain TeX", and that would solve a lot of my problems (apparently base TeX is really really robust for software), but then it's nearly impossible to actually use unless you study in the mountains for 10 years to learn how to bold a fucking word.

0/10, too much water.

RIP youtube-dl

This month we are gathered here to mourn the loss of a true hero: youtube-dl

Well, it's not actually dead, but it has been issued a take down request, and so removed off GitHub.

This would normally be fine, except that youtube-dl needs constant updates to say ahead of all the insipid changes youtube and other websites go through. If it doesn't get frequent updates, it will eventually stop working. And with their central development platform taken away, and their maintainers (probably) threatened with legal action, it looks pretty sketchy.

I have high (probably too high, let's be honest here) hopes that youtube-dl will return in one form or another. It is public domain and open source. Someone out there must rely on it enough to maintain at least of of it's basic functionality. As of right now I'm waiting for the dust to settle, and I'll update you next month on what's going on.

But for now, this is a perfect example of why I hate copyright.