This post provides no insight to new technology, forces that might “fix” education, nor anything that addresses injustice in the world.
Instead, I celebrate the pure, unanticipated reach of what remains for now an open internet, one that each time you think you’ve seen an edge, infinity yawns open.
It’s about twitter, and those is told in tweets.
It begins with a silly sign I saw on my morning walk, that made for a fine, though 2 day late, contribution to a DS106 Daily Create:
Couldn't resist late take on @ds106dc #tdc1607 I had one #ds106 job and I wrongly got the 105 elf (no magic) pic.twitter.com/b7fiXgVLg3
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) June 5, 2016
Sadly, my use of the word job in a tweet is interpreted by some job related twitter bot account to repeat my tweet, wrapped in the slime of some link I refuse to even click to see. But I can see it’s spam, because when I check the account stream, you can see that this is no human tweeter.
Note how their bot turned my word job into a #job hashtag.
My usual procedure is to tweet them a “thanks for being an opportunist parasite sucking life from the internet I love” message before reporting/blocking.
Check out this twitter spam report @job_lib A bot that retweets craptastic links when I say "job"… pic.twitter.com/tJ7lFVqZ1p
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) June 5, 2016
Now, in my tweet mentioning the word bot yet another bot retweets me. How whacky is @abotthat, with that sad looking hand drawn robot avatar, and a tagline of “a bot that retweets a bot that”
A bot that retweets twitter bots that… Oh, for the love of recursion! pic.twitter.com/kijJn63wS6
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) June 5, 2016
And of course, as I said bot in my tweet mentioning this bot, well, do you see the recursion?
I wonder who would quit first, the bot or me?
For the love of bots…
UPDATE (one hour later): As predicted…
Top / Featured Image: The twitter avatar for @abotthat. It’s a nice bot that probably won’t mind if I re-use it’s photo.
Speaking of bots, the @ds106radio bot has been silent for too long.
Sourcefabrik recently announced a Twitter integration feature. Maybe we could get a tweet when somebody goes LIVE on the radio??
https://www.airtime.pro/twitter-comes-airtime-pro/
Except we have the open source version that now does not have this feature. Plus, no one seems to have the password for the twitter account. Best check with Grant on this.
Oh, gawd, my head is spinning!