80 users online

HE tracker has been back up for over a week and it shows that we have a steady community that after 18+ years is still online and still chatting in real time.

This has significantly lessened our dependence on E-mail. I probably send out an average of just 1-2 E-mails per day, closer to 1 than to 2.

IRC has always been relevant and it still is.

It hurts it

his year I think it’s my 32^nd year in IRC. I love IRC, but I’m not very “good at it”. I don’t know many of the functionalities (I collaborate with people who do), I make a ton of typos in IRC (it’s very informal anyway; maybe it ought to be that way), and I’ve only dealt with one ircd in my entire lifetime: ergo.

This morning someone told me IRC was dying; I pushed back and showed data that suggested otherwise.

I was told the users are “bots”; but that is hardly new.

IRC will be around for many years to come. Too many people still love it. ‘Too many’ people who use it are my age or younger. They won’t die any time soon.

Breaks and more

oday Durian stayed here until 6:40PM. It was already dark, but Durian is very young so his instincts are different. He eventually left as I had given him everything he wanted. I managed to curate many links today. I also published many articles and I’ll try do do the same tomorrow. Feeding the birds gives me almost 50 breaks per day. That seems like a good form of exercise, with occasional nags to force me to have recess.

I’m quite pleased to see audience size has grown a lot this month. I can see what sort of topics interest more people and research these more.

Tomorrow I shall publish “Production Freeze at the European Patent Office (Opposing Monarchy, Institutional Maladministration and Corruption)”.

It’s an epic scandal it’s a disgrace that media does not cover it.

Back to blogging

he second month of 2022 is – or was – when I finally quit all social control media. I had already stopped engaging or interacting much in it (2 years earlier), but I still posted to it and checked every reply.

No more.

As an associate has put it to me: “There’s probably a public health aspect to social control media when considered at scale. The stress and hate has to be extracting a physical cost on the overall health of the population. There are too many otherwise smart people who participate in it and are thus exploited yet seem to think that they alone in the whole world are immune to it. It’s sad to witness as people succumb to it, even from an online distance.”

Looking back, my time without social control media is the same as the full-scale Ukraine invasion.

I don’t want to have anything to do with weaponised ‘platforms’.

GAFAM news

recently published an article about Red Hat and it was accessed over 75,000 times. I didn’t know at the time the exposure would be that big. Had I known so, I’d make the article longer and more detailed.

Since then traffic in Techrights has been better than before, quite consistently. It’s now about 3 times higher than it was 3 years ago. I don’t think it’s all attributable to LLM bots. There’s definitely a lot of legitimate activity going on.

Astonishingly enough, I chose not to read any comment about that article Because “The Orange Site” is full of toxic “bros” who heckle what they link to, they don’t contribute much to the discussion.

ibera Chat (IRC network) has a CoC, but this CoC seems to not cover really tasteless things or simply does not enforce the rules against truly terrible and potentially dangerous people. In the interests of transparency, I’d like to share information about the sorts of people protected by Libera Chat:

Double standards

oday I read that some channel or channels in IRC got banned based on dubious pretexts. I learned this about an hour after publishing this article about trackers of IRC.

If IRC gets divided along some sort of pseudo- or quasi-political lines, then it’s hard not to be suspicious of a corporate role.

See, corporations that openly and proudly support fascism and war crimes want us to believe that the real issue is some communities that aren’t left-leaning.