Seemingly due to overwhelming backlash, the survey was taken down a mere several hours after it initially launched. In the free form section at the end, I wrote a couple paragraphs airing my concerns. While I've entirely moved to Matrix now, I still felt it worthwhile to respond, and also to mirror this text elsewhere.

As a large, centralized corporation housing an enormous amount of personal data of users—including that of minors—I am incredibly concerned with any AI integration into Discord whatsoever. The thought of any person having the ability to offload data, particularly from private servers or private messages, into some other company's data centers for processing, is a privacy nightmare. With some of the features considered within this very survey, it sounds like even voice and video chats may become rife with direct processing to such companies. I cannot imagine whoever you partnered with would sit idly by while such massive natural human data streams come in, without harvesting them for who knows what.

Even if you hypothetically added an opt-out, and I were to trust that this genuinely prevented the transfer of data, the vast majority of people will leave settings as default—having the effects of this without necessarily even realizing the ramifications. It may also violate the consent of others, dependent on if someone who chooses to have AI highlights or summaries, have information included from participants who have chosen to opt-out. This would defeat the entire purpose of turning it off, beyond a veneer of a few hidden buttons; this would obviously be very problematic.

Additionally, I fundamentally am tied to Discord for communication between people, and only people. AI generated stickers, emoji, messages, or any other sort of non-human output, are directly at odds with the only thing I care about doing on the platform: talking to actual people. Groups of friends or communities create their own in-jokes and memes, and it is this human interaction which spurs the creation of things which we collectively enjoy. When I use a custom emoji or sticker, there is a story as to why it's there, and who created it. If there are people who wish to use generative models in spite of that, I would encourage them to use a local only, open weight, generative model they have full control over on their own computer.

I certainly don't want to further platform and normalize the generative models of the multi-trillion dollar AI market bubble, which is almost certainly what would be the case for any AI integration that is done by Discord. This bubble is causing lots of problems currently, and I expect those problems to get worse before they get better. Look no further than the gaming demographic Discord used to be aimed at; SSD and RAM prices are at astronomical levels right now, purely because of backroom AI data center deals. I am appalled by the prospect of further rewarding this behavior as it continues to put strain on the general populace, with deep pocket investors begging us to take part in their self-serving, prospective profiteering.

All writing is licensed under CC-BY-ND with attribution to Foxfire. The FSF recommends this license for opinion pieces.

I found a small piece of wood, and placed it just above you. As if you understood the instruction, you quickly moved your legs upward, and stuck to it. I took you outside to some flowers; you seemed curious, but didn't wish to leave the wood after a few minutes of facing them. Perhaps you just needed more time to rest, more time away from the sun-baked windows which were cooking you alive. I gave you shade nearby, and found some small rain puddles to coat my hands with, hopefully to give you some hydration. Just some small droplets and flicks of the fingers, hoping you might ingest some beads of water, as you gained more strength.

I wasn't sure if you'd make it, but I saw you breathing—I saw you holding on. Earnestly, I just hoped that whatever happened was better than the uncaring hand you were dealt until this point. When I checked on you after my lunch, you were nowhere to be seen. I'm holding on to hope that you regained your strength, and eventually flew away. We all live and die, but the pointless cruelty of dehydrating on a window sill is too much. You just wanted to live and forage, and instead we trapped you in a labyrinth of suffering. Who would've even cared if your corpse were there instead, had I missed you today? Why do we often feel so little for the countless other inhabitants of our world?

I hope you got your second chance.

All writing is licensed under CC-BY-ND with attribution to Foxfire. The FSF recommends this license for opinion pieces.

My absurd requests:

• A simple dark mode layout.
• Justified post body text.

I imagined that doing something like justifying text would be simpler than an entire theme, so I set off looking for answers. Digging through the writer guide brought up nothing, so I fervently clacked away, until I came across a several year old forum post on the matter. Not knowing what I was doing, I was happy to copy what seemed like a complete answer from Matt, the founder of Write.as. There was a warning about single spaces not functioning, but I figured “I separate paragraphs with multiple line breaks anyway, it'll be fine!” It was not fine; my entire blog post turned into a single rectangular mass. Additional line breaks did not help stave the amalgam, and I was left a bit conflicted. On the one hand, it's very evident I can justify text, but on the other, I can't really justify keeping it in this state.

If that was going to give me trouble, perhaps I can spend more time looking into dark themes. The first place I go to check is the Write.as themes page, to where I am greeted with a surprisingly limited selection. Out of everything, only one theme even seemed to resemble a dark palette at all: Painkiller Bullet. It's in the ballpark, so I do try it out, but gives off a bit of hacker type vibes, which isn't really the style I want personally. I did try changing some colors, but it feels like there's a number of things here I don't understand. Perhaps I could've sat with it longer, but I figured that if I was going to understand anything, I'm going to have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and make changes—one at a time.

Enter: Duct Tape

Carl Sagan once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” If you want to do that with a dark theme for someone else's website, I guess you have to stare at inspect element until you can't keep your eyes open. Between the very basic style info in the writers guide, pulling variables in inspect element, and consulting with W3Schools, I slowly managed to cobble together my custom theme. My vision was heavily inspired by one of the templates from System76's COSMIC dark mode, which has an umber background, along with yellow links, and an off-white base text. Surprisingly, I was able to get pretty far along, and I feel like I've (mostly) gotten to the point where basic stuff is presentable now. I even added some additional rules to match some personal tastes, like having titles be sans-serif, with the body being serif type. Also yes, I've fixed my justify problem, and can finally sleep at night knowing my margins are nice and orderly.

That being said, not only have I run into some limitations, but I also have already managed to create quite the mess of code. Things are not ordered in a sensible way, my comments are outdated, and I'm sure I'll need to add even more rules before I actually begin to clean it up. I intend to use this blog entry to help with figuring that out, since I won't know something is broken, until I try to actually use it. Once I do manage to clean up everything I feasibly can, my intent is to make variants of this theme for other blogs. Perhaps one inspired by KDE Plasma's dark breeze theme, or maybe one of the Dracula style dark themes I've seen in programs such as Voyager would be a good second version. As for the limitations, there seems to be some oddly hard-coded problems I can't work around with my custom style sheet. For example, this little bugger is jammed right into the webpage directly, so no matter what I do, it overwrites all style rules:

.post-byline .byline-author {
display:inline-flex;
align-items:center;
gap:0.5rem;
text-decoration:none;
color:#666;
font-size:0.9rem;
}

Most of this stuff isn't too big of a deal, but seriously, I'm forced to have a specific color of gray text for my author name‽ In order to make this not an absolute contrast nightmare, I had to turn my name into a faux button; a button far darker than anything else in the theme too. It doesn't look awful, but it does absolutely stick out in a way I'm not particularly keen on. I also can't for the life of me find a way to change my context menu icons from dark to light. Thankfully that's something only I can see, though I did manage to give them a background, and reduce their opacity to blend it better. Also, I ran into a roadblock you didn't even notice, despite it still impacting me as of this writing: blog avatars are broken. You might be saying to yourself “but I saw your avatar at the top of this article,” and you'd be fair to say that—but you're wrong.

Hacking In An Avatar

Assuming it's still broken when you read this, try right clicking and opening my avatar in a new tab. You probably noticed it threw a lovely 404 not found error, and tries to find an image called default.png. This is because I am totally unable to upload an avatar, but more than that, the default fallback avatars are broken too. Now, of course I brought this to the attention of the kind hosts of this instance, but in the interim, I was determined to prod at this until I made something happen. I have a feeling that I can hypothetically pull this off, because I can see that images can load through CSS, and there are a few tutorials on it through W3Schools too. Also, I'll need a reasonably reliable host to service the image as well. I figure since it's an avatar anyway, that I could just source it from one of several sites I use this exact image for the same purpose. Let's get a better look at our objective, shall we?

“The mission is simple: get me in there.”

I ended up choosing my profile from Etterna Online, a website for a FOSS rhythm game. I went with it because I know the owner, and I know full well this is exactly the place which won't care whatsoever, that I'm hot-linking a small image to an even smaller blog. When I added it as the background for the the property which controls the avatar, I suddenly see nothing but blue—fantastic! That means it's loaded the image at full size inside the circle, and now I simply need to reduce it to the correct value. This turned out to be 28px by 28px, and was very simple to append to the image properties. So with that, I managed to hack my way to a faux profile picture, effectively indistinguishable from a normal one. On top of that, I can do this for any blog independently, meaning they can all have different faux avatars for as long as necessary. Realistically, even if it were never resolved, I still won; I feel really good about that.

I suppose I need to test tables too:

All writing is licensed under CC-BY-ND with attribution to Foxfire. The FSF recommends this license for opinion pieces.

Beyond that, I intend to purpose this blog (not the GNU/Linux one), with various writings; old, and likely new too. There have been many times where I feel like writing something, but end up succumbing to the combined weight of my unending tiredness, and feeling that the write-up has no place to go anyway. I think what I realistically want is a personal website, but it will take me ages to get one up and running. I let perfect get in the way of good too often, preventing me from getting started on things I actually want to do. That being said, when I happened upon a WriteFreely—a simple FOSS blog platform—my interest was piqued! It's pretty much what I'm looking for: a simple way to write to no one, on my own little corner of the Internet. Something publicly accessible, but with no metrics, or assumptions that anyone will ever read it. A website, if that website was basically just a markdown file. It's so simple, so empty; it's a call to the void—and I'm ready to answer it.

All writing is licensed under CC-BY-ND with attribution to Foxfire. The FSF recommends this license for opinion pieces.