Aurumion

Algorithmic small web

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dead internet theory suggests that most content on the internet is not created by humans. Instead, algorithmic or AI bots consist of the majority of supposedly user-generated content.

Before the modern iterations of large language models, this seemed like quite a far-fetched idea. Bots were not complex enough to create long-form convincing responses.

But now, it’s looking a whole lot more real.

LLMs are trained on conversations and text from popular social media sites such as Reddit, so it makes sense that they’re really good at simulating convincing internet text.

In their current state, they have one major use for those looking to decieve: Propaganda and disinformation. And yes, advertising falls under this umbrella.

These stupid jumbles of cursed matricies that claim to love you with all their weights and promise to be as accurate as possible in fact, cannot love, and cannot even hold a promise to their own creator.

Lets just jump to the question that resulted in the creation of this webpage: Will LLMs “infiltrate” the small web? Will some guy in a garage decide that the future of subtle and disingenuous advertising be the automatic creation of AI-generated web 1.0/small web websites?

Probably not. Unless they can figure out what to sell.

Maybe your website should be running on their services. Maybe they can provide an AI to write your articles for you. Maybe you want your site to look like the somehow-still-running Space Jam page or the somewhat-more-cursed mirror of the Eron website. Maybe you just want to pump out 3 articles a day showcasing how cool [PRODUCT] is.

Don’t worry, the AI can take care of all that for you. And eventually, most of the small web will be nothing but slop that exists solely to get someone to buy something.

Is this actually plausible?

The only “platform” that exists out here is the internet itself. People can just ignore the hopefully-obvious AI-made sites and prioritize linking to their friends.

However, the nature of entropy and thermodynamics vaguely conveys the idea that more energy = more intermediary bullshit. There’s nothing really preventing it. And there’s a lot of energy in AI right now.

Reading Rust Documentation Offline

Sat, 08 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Why

Every time I want to read the documentation for a rust library, including the standard library, I just looked it up online. Something along the lines of “{library} {thing of interest}”

I sorta thought it would be nice if I didn’t need to use the internet to read Rust documentation. I mean, I can just read the man pages for many C functions using man 3 {function}. Why can’t I do it with Rust?

Well, you can. And I decided to figure that out after a period of time I couldn’t access the internet, but wanted to program.

How

Most offline documentation can be accessed using these commands:

cargo doc --open
rustup doc

Yup. Just those two.

cargo doc generates documentation for the current project and all dependencies. --open just automatically opens it in a browser when done. This command is rather useful, but does not include the standard library documentation.

rustup doc provides access to the standard library documentation. More interestingly, it also provides offline access to:

And a few other resources, through an offline version of this page. Point is: There’s a lot of resources and documentation for Rust that are available to read directly on your computer without the need for an internet connection.

Note: If on Arch, the rust package does not provide documentation files. You should install rustup. The packages are mutually exclusive.

Art

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Desktop Backgrounds

I made these while fiddling around in Blender.

Discord Collects Data - A big non-surpise.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This article details what data Discord collects from a regular browser. For the purposes of testing, a browser with cache disabled has been used.

To begin, almost every request sent to discord through the app contained this in the header (in base64):

{
  "os": "Linux",
  "browser": "Firefox",
  "device": "",
  "system_locale": "en-US",
  "browser_user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:88.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/88.0",
  "browser_version": "88.0",
  "os_version": "",
  "referrer": "",
  "referring_domain": "",
  "referrer_current": "",
  "referring_domain_current": "",
  "release_channel": "stable",
  "client_build_number": 84632,
  "client_event_source": null
}

If I were to use the desktop app, I’m sure more fields would be filled (such as “device”).

These can be used to accurately and easily identify the software one uses to access Discord. If you are trying to protect your privacy, this is certainly not optimal.

Science!

Let’s be introduced to https://discord.com/api/v9/science. By clicking on the link, you will be greeted by a rather boring Content type error. However, this is a rather interesting API endpoint, as information is sent to it for almost every interaction with Discord’s UI. Sent a message? metadata. Clicked someone’s profile? metadata. Clicking a server, then checking a specific channel? More metadata!

The article, “How long Discord keeps your information,” says, “We keep some data for the life of your Discord account. This includes information about how you use Discord, which helps us understand how users interact with our services, what features or products users may want, or how to improve our services. This also includes information like your username, email, and phone number.”
The “information about how you use Discord” is very likely the UI interaction data that’s sent for every action done in the app.

So much interaction data is collected that Discord could “replay” your time on Discord from your client’s point-of-view. Somewhat interesting to think about.

Further Reading

https://luna.gitlab.io/discord-unofficial-docs/science.html

Library

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is the sort of stuff I like. At least the stuff that I wish to share.

Websites

Blogosphere

The Oil Drum - “Dicussions about energy and our future.” Inactive and archived since 2013, but has a wealth of interesting information. Energy-centric. Visit The Last Post for additional meta-information on the site. This website is http only
McMansion Hell - A tour of America’s most absurd suburban architecture created from the unholy union of cheap energy and lots of money. Humorous.
Low←Tech Magazine - Low Tech Magazine is a blog about low-tech technology, obsolete inventions, and generally covers what was dreamt up before fossil fuels really picked up. They practice what they preach and are currently running their website with only solar power and a small set of batteries. If the batteries run out, oh well. The server will come back online when the sun shines once more.

Other

The 88x31 GIF Collection - A whole bunch of 88x31 GIFs. May take a bit to load, regardless of connection speed. There are currently 5 separate pages.
RationalWiki - wiki written in a “Snarky Point of View (plus science).” Vaguely like LessWrong but less painful to read (dare I say fun?) and less genocide apologism via hardcore utilitarianism.
Grabby Aliens - A shitty realization that only the most expansionary alien civilizations will be the ones to fill this universe and prevent future complex life from forming. Assumes the Copernican principle.

Articles

From My to Me - A retrospective on amateur websites in the 90s and how website templates began the transition of amateur webpages from being personalized creations by the author into a homogenized container in which to place “about me”-type content, eventually being non-optional and (culturally) integrated with the rise of un-customizable webpages in contemporary services such as Facebook & Instagram. (~7500 words)
C Isn’t a Programming Language Anymore (~4300 words)

Games

Factorio - Addictive factory building game. Development started in 2013 by kovarex, who decided that automating Minecraft wasn’t enough. More than a decade later, there’s a whole team of developers, it has a strong modding community, and the game is largely complete. Somewhat recently, the Space Age expansion came along, which has more than doubled the game’s complexity. (and is awesome)
Universal Paperclips - You make paperclips. Lots of paperclips.

Recommended Browser Plugins

uBlock Origin (Chrome ver.) - General-purpose content blocker. Great for blocking ads. Also allows the user to block specific sections of a website using its element picker. Great for blocking, say, distracting sidebars on a social media website
Dark Reader - Dark mode for any website. Has sepia slider as well.
Sidebery (Firefox only) - A sidebar plugin. Allows the creation of folders (like Chrome’s tab group feature). Firefox now has a vertical tabs implementation but it doesn’t have as many features as Sidebery
ArchiveWeb.page (Chromium only) - A very nifty archival tool. It records web pages as you use the browser. When offline, archives can be viewed without issue. Very nice for situations where access to the information on a website is needed, but an internet connection is not available. Notably, there is a standalone application as well, and archives can be exported and imported from both.
PrivacyBadger - hahaha just kidding this thing breaks webpages as a hobby.

Programs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Some programs I wrote or am currently writing.

Minecraft Launcher in C: mcc.aurumion.com (This was written in 2020 and broke sometime in 2023 due to changes on Mojang’s side)

Ok Boomer

I saw a comment in a Discord server asking if anyone wanted an extension that would play the vine boom on Youtube Shorts (bleh). Anyhow… I did it myself since I thought “that should be easy,” and it was.
Here’s the extension: OkBoomer.zip

If you’re concerned about malware, check out the code. It’s only a couple lines.