Mr. Hands

god grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

• Cohost is not a giant corporation with giant funding, and both the financial updates and the way the site is run will reflect this
• there will always be people who react to every staff update by demanding to speak to the manager about PROFESSHIONALISMMMM
• and people who react with "well, now that Cohost is definitely shutting down tomorrow, here's my take on the news..."
• while there is no reason to believe it is imminently shutting down, Cohost probably will not last forever and should be enjoyed in the moment, not used as the only basket for your digital eggs

the courage to change the things I can

• back up your posts using the high-tech bespoke backup tool known as "copy paste to text file"
• use a consistent username on different sites and set up a carrd or something so people can find you
• keep a local file of your friends' carrds or other off-site contact info
• contribute financially to Cohost if you can. like fair enough if you can't because of your personal financial situation, but it's kind of unsporting to say "I'm canceling my Plus in protest at the terrible management here, but of course I will continue to stay in their house and eat their food"
• try not to make posts like the one I'm currently making more than once every few months, as it is also adding to the hubbub by mentioning it, even if it's taking the pro-co-ho(st) side
• get some damn perspective that this is not in fact the only place on the whole entire internet where you can be a gay furry with your dick out

and the wisdom to know the difference

• pending

I have a complaint about Cohost. I understand my complaint is not trivial to address, and I don't expect change to happen quickly, but I want to see it addressed at some point. It's section 6 of the TOS. I've been complaining about this for two years and I am planning to keep bringing this up gently about once a year.

TOS provision 6 grants Cohost the company an unlimited and effectively unbounded right to do anything, including potentially commercial exploitation without compensation, with the content you post to this site. This is extremely normal for a social media site, and because websites like Cohost are technically complex it is widely considered impossible to run a site like this without a broad clause like this. The clause by itself is standard and unsurprising. What is not usual, and is the source of my worry, is that Cohost's IP grant does not have a termination clause of any kind. The last time I posted about this I wrote a long-ass philosophical post comparing every social site I could think of. This time I'm just gonna be blunt¹. I want to call attention to three things that happened since the last time I posted about this:

1. It has begun to be standard for a declining social site to sell their post histories to "AI" companies as training data. Tumblr², Twitter³ and Reddit have all three done this— and all three did it notably after mass exoduses from their respective sites⁴.

2. Stack Overflow, shockingly, after their own deal to sell post content for "AI", took the totally unprecedented step of not only disallowing people from removing their own content, but banning people from the site for attempting to use the existing delete/edit features to remove content⁵.

3. The Cohost team this March posted a financial update stating that, at the time they posted it, they would be running out of funds completely in April, and detailing⁶ what exactly their plans would be if the site shut down. It appears that some combination of efforts has moved the danger out of visible range⁷. However, the fact remains the Cohost team has now acknowledged that the future shutting down of the site for financial reasons is a possibility.

The first two of these items matter because they show there is now an existing market, for a site which no longer sees their route to success being to gain new customers, to rugpull by selling all their users' content for mass commercial exploitation. Before when I posted about this I was imagining frankly mildly implausible scenarios like "Cohost or someone who got hold of their IP puts your posts and art in a book and sells it". There's not really a market for that. But there is now a market for buying posts for "training". The worst-case scenario is no longer hypothetical. It's a multibillion-dollar business.

The third item matters because (speaking for myself here) the reason I trust the Cohost team would not sell my shit to OpenAI (or whatever other worst-case scenario bizarro IP abuse) is because I know some of them personally and I trust them. If you read the March update above, you'll see the team repeatedly stressing how committed they are to ensuring user data and IP are protected in a shutdown scenario. However, if there actually is a real possibility of Anti-Software Software Club going out of business, this opens up possible futures where it goes out of business in a fashion where those people I trust at ASSCLUB, and who made the promises in the March update, are not in full control of what happens to assets like user IP.

The solution to this, I believe, is for Cohost to join sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter and add a termination clause for the IP clause, probably activating on some natural boundary like a post being deleted or an account being deleted. The TOSes of those other sites show this can be done in a commercially non-disruptive way. If site architecture means that deletion takes time, you can mimic text like YouTube has⁸ that the content is removed in a "commercially reasonable" timeframe. If your backup process means you've got site backups with old user IP interleaved, you can mimic— again— YouTube, and have the IP grant acknowledge there may be content which is retained for technical reasons but no longer commercially utilized. It should be possible to fit the termination clause to whatever Cohost's actual site practices already are, and so I expect (with the admission I have not myself attempted to run a site like this one) that the only expense involved in fixing this problem would be the lawyer time required to write the clause itself. That is not nothing! But it is still doable.

The circular saw holder was one step up in difficulty from the holder for my jigsaw, which is great because being slightly uncomfortable is the best way to grow your skills. Although this holder is another box-like construction, some tricky business was afoot.

there is no excuse for this shit. there just isn't. i do not care what bug up your ass you got about minimalist design or what moron's design guide you shoved up your nose: do not do this

there are one thousand nine hundred and eighty of god's own pixels spanning the width of the window. you can afford to spend more than five of them on the fucking scroll bar.

in general i'm sick of people thinking scroll bars are some optional part of interface design instead of a critically-useful tool for positioning and navigating documents, and if you think the scroll bar is just an annoying little gray thing that should be shoved out of the way and hidden, this is a very personal "fuck you".

Scrollbars are so important for navigation that I use an extension called RockMargin in Visual Studio to make it much easier to understand my code. It gives a bird's eye view of the document so that I can easily jump to "the big green section" (a big blob of "TODO FIXME" comments) and "the jagged mountains" (a switch...case event handler). Basically, I made my scrollbar 120 px wide, and I love it