this entire slate of events (from the fake youtuber scandal, to the trump tweet sources, to the fake scientist) baffles me, because i was around for all of it, yet missed all of it at the time. truly we can live on different corners of the internet.

i am wondering how contextual vs. universal this is -- i feel like i know people who would die a little inside at any purposefully-planned surprise, even one with good intentions. though they might not share this discomfort.

MIDI was used here to talk about abstraction of sound as notes, but i wonder if there could be other non-bitmap formats to represent sound, like notating the shape of the waves via mathematical equations. what would this sound like?

reminds me of how i occasionally see that a file was "edited tomorrow" due to misconfigured time settings (though with interpretation of tine zones, i could imagine how this could be a feature!)

the comparison this serves of spreadsheets to other forms of programming is interesting to me, i hadn't thought of them as significantly different from a list of commands before

it's interesting here that part of the donkey's effectiveness comes not just from lack of awareness of political message, but also from (widely presumed) sentience. people widely see punishing it as unethical, but they also see such an action as possible. it's hard to see the dismemberment, incarceration, or torture of a computer program as cruel to it, so administrators take action against bots without these fears of public perception.