ciderkin

Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down. 

Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls. 

I've been attending the meetings out of curiosity; I hear the restaurant's music sometimes, but I'm far enough away that it doesn't actually bother me. I rarely go out at night, so I hadn't encountered the "nuisance" aspects of it, which include lots of loitering drunk people, mysterious box trucks with no license plates blocking bike lanes while unloading, and bouncers swearing and trying to stop and frisk people walking past the restaurant.

("Why does a restaurant have bouncers?" you ask. Well, one of the complaints was "He's operating a nightclub but just using a restaurant license to do it.")

Anyway, I was intrigued to attend the latest video call because last time ONE DERANGED PERSON got on the line and spent ten minutes telling everyone else that the place is fine and if it isn't nobody cares and if you do you're a narc. I wanted to see if they were gonna come back to rant again and they did, but they got stymied by the moderator, who insisted that if you wanted to talk you had to "raise your hand" in the video call and they clearly couldn't figure out how to do that.

But then. After the airing of grievances and the owner's lawyer apologizing for no-showing at the last meeting, the alderman's spokesperson got on the line. FIFTY MINUTES into a one hour meeting, she said, "Before you inform the owner about the steps he needs to take to prevent this from becoming a legal issue, the Alderman has a question. He understands that the building landlord has served the owner with an eviction notice for the business, and we'd like to know if you and your client are aware of this?"

Every visible face on the video call did a jaw drop. It was awesome. I was muted and I still went "OooooohOOOOOOHHHHH!"

So yeah turns out the owner is "a little behind on the rent" but is confident he can bounce back, and then the moderator gave him a list of twenty things he needed to do (or not do) to fix the non-rent-related problems, two of which were "Stop doing unlicensed bottle service" and "No sparklers indoors".

I knew the one deranged person defending the restaurant's activities had to be known to the owner and they are.

At the start of the call I was disconcerted to find that while I tried to go to the CAPS meeting yesterday and nobody showed, it's clear from the call today that it did happen and the situation did get discussed. Presumably they just changed location, but I can't find a time or location for that specific beat meeting on any of the municipal calendars, including the Ward calendar, the CPD calendar, or the City calendar, so I'm still very confused.

A lot of the problem in the call today is that the owner kept asserting certain rights per his permits and plan -- what the tabletop RPG community would call Rules Lawyering. He's been asked to close at 10pm (so that the loud music will stop), but he's licensed to be open until 2am, so why can't he host private events from 10 to 2, that sort of thing. Which...I mean he's not wrong. It is unfair to make him close if he has the legal right to be open and the BACP could request that he just keep the music down. But he's going to get his permits yanked and lose those rights if he keeps pissing off the community. (OR SO I THOUGHT before I found out who Caller 17 was. Now I have no idea.) And a new problem is that people are parking in a privately-owned lot nearby and then afterpartying there past 2am. The police can't do a ton because it's not "drinking on the public way", they're on private property, and the BACP hasn't been able to make the lot's owner do anything about it. It sounds like they haven't been able to reach the lot's owner, to be honest.

One of the major complaints the community has had is that it's technically a restaurant but it's realistically operating as a nightclub; Caller 17 actually called it a club during this meeting, and some of the angrier community members jumped on that during the Airing of Grievances, saying "Look, even this person involved with the restaurant is calling it a club, and it's not licensed to be a club and we also don't want a nightclub in the middle of our neighborhood." There was much frustrated amusement when Caller 17 eventually responded that they don't go to nightclubs and they were referring to it as a club because they consider it a supper club.

I feel for the people who are genuinely suffering from this misbehavior, like there are people who just leave their homes on the weekends because the music at night is so loud it shakes their building. This process is likely going to drag on for a while and that's really rough for them. But at the same time, it's such a fascinating spectacle.

I may miss the next meeting -- while Hodag has also been attending the meetings, we'll be together and on the road at that point, and neither of us like distractions while we're driving. But I've looped Friend A into the madness now so possibly she can take notes.

a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.

i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.

the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)

and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.

an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:

https://www.re3data.org

There are over 3500 respectable data repositories on one respectable global registry; to a researcher there’s no point in data existing if not findable; if you’re trying to find a new home for your dataset, start there

Here are some of the scripts I’m using to email University Research Librarians and department chairs/assistant and associate deans who I know oversee faculty who use resources from data.world for their lessons:

The ORC BOYAR seeks entertainment; perhaps this will be your chance to impress the ORC BOYAR?

Perform a dance for the ORC BOYAR by selecting two DESCRIPTORS of the ORC BOYAR’s liking.

You perform a BONE MUSHROOM dance.

The ORC BOYAR was not impressed.

You perform a CHEESE SPIKE dance.

The ORC BOYAR was not impressed.

You perform a FAST BROTH dance.

The ORC BOYAR was not impressed.

You perform a HOT CRUMB dance.

The ORC BOYAR was not impressed.

You perform a DESSERT STONE dance,

The ORC BOYAR was not impressed.

You perform a LAKE MUD dance.

You feel TIRED.

The ORC BOYAR was not impressed.

You perform a ROYAL PIG dance.

The ORC BOYAR was not impressed.

You perform a CAVE TROUT dance.

The ORC BOYAR was not impressed.

You perform a ANVIL BREAD dance.

Your POINTED JINGLE SHOES begins to show wear from use! Bring the item the TOWN SMITH to repair it.

The ORC BOYAR was not impressed.

You perform a DOG MOSS dance.

The ORC BOYAR seemed slightly interested.

You perform a DOG DOG dance.

The ORC BOYAR was not impressed.

You perform a MOSS MOSS dance.

The ORC BOYAR was not impressed.

You perform a MOSS DOG dance.

The ORC BOYAR was not impressed.

You perform a DOG MOSS dance.

The ORC BOYAR was sent into a rage.

ORC BOYAR: I have already seen DOG MOSS dance. Away with you!

A FERAL HOG appears to your LEFT.

A FERAL HOG appears to your RIGHT.

A FERAL HOG appears to your FRONT.

The FERAL HOG attacks you!

The FERAL HOG attacks you!

The FERAL HOG attacks you!

You have DIED. The world has been thrown into chaos.

there’s sixteen Colorado counties that their most searched was “wolf furry”, plus thirty-odd counties (not counting either Arapahoe or any of the ones marked here as “Insufficient Data”) which may well have had plenty of searches for “wolf furry”, just fewer than for whatever they’re labeled here

and “skunk furry” searches in Arapahoe County outnumbered “wolf furry” searches in the entire state of Colorado