Sarah Jamie Lewis

When it became obvious that the primary consumer of bandwidth was corporate web scrapers powering generative models, I started being more selective about what personal projects (/+updates) I made public. Ultimately I have no interest in doing subsidized work in the service of for-profit enterprises; and while there was always an undercurrent, lately the dynamics of the foss ecosystem have radically shifted towards that end. Thinking back to the days when IRC was the main way I shared code.

We are 6 days into the year, and already my fresh list of "new project ideas I want to do but do not have the time to do" is already in the double digits.

Encrypted content / headers / transport / etc. are great harm reduction, but by no means is it metadata avoidance (in the strict academic sense of what those words mean when applied to communications systems). Third party actors (e.g. relay servers / network actors) can build correlative models using the *metadata* inherent in the communication protocol (source, destination, timing, frequency). We have decades of research demonstrating the power of such models - let's not minimize them. View quoted note →

Practically every tangentially related to work external meeting I have had with other Canadians in the last year has included a segue where all parties discussed taking steps to diversify away from US infra/software/orgs. It's the kind of activity where nothing seems to be happening, until it happens all at once. e.g. We began researching, negotiations, and planning early in 2025 and only actually started migrating systems in December. We will begin cancelling contracts later this month.

Memories and Ink fades, links rot, collections cycle, and censors edit and rewrite. Building archives, even if only in private, is both a defensive and optimistic act. Make copies of artifacts and please write about them excruciating detail, document from weird angles, note the obvious, and the absurd. Presuppose a future where someone else wants to know that artifact as you know it. No one person, or org, can hold back the fog of time forever, but consider giving history a helping hand.

Today, the universe wanted to reaffirm my belief that more people should ensure they have local copies of anything they think they might ever need. - picked up a project I hadn't touched in a few months to find some of the build scripts failing - because the decades old mirror they were attempting to pull packages from has apparently been offline for months. - then I went to check a popular git repo and got hit with: "site administrator has misconfigured anubis" (worked around it...but still)