Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard. Nearly forgot to put this up, whoops)
I read through the white paper and I have further concerns even for any readers who are comfortable fucking over blind people (for the record: fuck you if you're reading this). It looks like this works off of the same kind of technique that allows fonts to render digraphs, positional forms, and emoji, leveraging the font rendering to allow it to jumble up the actual HTML that machines interact with. It's clever, but the fucking with screen readers, form autofill, and basically anything other than direct text rendering is really obvious.
I'm also not sure when it runs to generate the dictionary of mappings. The6biggest harm of the content scrapers isn't that it's ingesting the content it's that the repeated requests spam servers and basically DOS smaller sites out of existence. This is why iocaine is so brilliant and imo remains the gold standard. If the dictionary is generated when the files ar uploaded to the server or set to be displayed then this merely fails to address the real problem, but if the expectation is that this mapping gets created and distributed at request time then that just makes scraping even more expensive for hosts. Given that it works on dynamic text in their example it looks like at least part of the mapping runs on the client, so it's increasing the size of the package if nothing else. Bandwidth may be pretty cheap these days, but that's no reason to be wasteful.