I was looking through the #Gab code repository for a Hacker News discussion, and it was a weird feeling.
In the #Dresden Files, early on, Harry Dresden talks about how he’d always been taught that Magic comes from life, from the heart, and is a force for good - and how incongruous it was to see that magic being twisted for horrible goals, by the bad guys. That’s what this felt like, to see the familiar open source tooling and conventions that I see every day, being used for twisted hateful purposes there.
Somewhere out there, someone writing an oppressive mass surveillance tool is running git amend
since they oopsied their last commit. Someone running a malware website is adjusting their CSS values. Someone profiting off child abuse is reading syntax discussions on StackOverflow. It’s a weird, icky feeling, to see these worlds collide.