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+(https://discuss.dev.twitch.com/t/deprecation-of-chat-commands-through-irc/40486).

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+
+\[some kind of dramatic-ass sequence where we lower a casket into the
+ground\] much like funerals are for the living, this post-mortem is to
+convince myself to move on from this project. Griddle Critters, let us
+understand shtikbot, so the mourning process can begin.
+
+
+before this project, my fixation was the dumbest social network. the
+stupidest. the least intelligent. imgur. if you think reddit\'s layout
+is confusing, or too complicated to understand, then maybe you (or the
+preschool teacher you\'ve had for 10 years running) would like to sign
+up for imgur.com. for a while, it imgur was the least bad way to get an
+image too big for any email provider\'s limits to your friends. So that
+was where the memes lived. and, it allowed people to dislike things. So
+during that time, it was good. people would upload a thing, and as a
+consumer, the thing that you consumed left you better than when you
+started. but then one christmas, out of some bizarre notion of
+charitability, they decided to just upvote everything. which means all
+the people who wanted to inflict their hideous face on the community and
+be praised for it instantly conquered the front page. Instead of a post
+being a thing that enriched the viewer, the viewer was expected to
+praise the poster. That moment was the failure of gatekeeping. From that
+point on, every so-called community \"value\" collapsed. Notably,
+\"reposting\" gradually shifted from a faux pas to accepted practice.
+the point of this story, is that during the decline of imgur (while i
+was wasting my life there), many more absolutely stupid ideas
+proliferated. The Left Cult enjoyed calling out The Right Cult for
+hypocrisy... but it was fashionable to use the term \"cognitive
+dissonance\" instead. after all, that sounds more medical, more
+legitimate, and lets you tell yourself you\'re smarter than your mirror
+image. However... the way one outgrows their hypocrisy is by
+experiencing cognitive dissonance and resolving it. meanwhile, most
+examples are someone who is blissfully unaware of their hypocrisy. they
+feel no cognitive dissonance, so they will never stop being
+hypocritical. likewise, \"gaslighting\" was the shiny new toy in their
+vocabulary that was played with no matter how inappropriate. For the
+record, gaslighting is when you convince someone they\'re crazy. It is
+not any and all forms of deception. and it certainly is not any time a
+member of a demographic you consider to be inherently inferior
+contradicts you. so at the time, i dreamt of a bot that would see the
+text \"cognitive dissonance\", and respond with \"that\'s not what
+cognitive dissonance means.\" No need to do any sort of lexical
+analysis, just assume they\'re wrong. nowadays i\'d have to add
+\"generational\" to that trigger list. meanwhile, someone had made an
+imgur bot that detects reposts, and then posts stats about how many
+times it\'s seen the image since the first time it saw it, and when it
+was posted with better quality. you can measure how dumb an imgurian is
+by how virulent his hatred for repost bot is. Like i say, they were
+really growing to love reposts. rather than being the technology that
+enables the sharing of memes, it degraded into a place for people to
+socialize through posting. I regret being too lazy or depressed or
+whatever to have actually written the damn thing. Alas, what could have
+been.
+
+
+remember TwitchPlaysPokemon? quick tangent if you don\'t: in 2014, an
+anonymous Australian programmer hooked up an emulator playing pokemon
+red to a twitch stream, and a bot that listened to chat to translate
+that into input. it was incredible. unprecedented, and only possible
+with that level of realtime interaction and livestreaming. twitch, the
+company, didn\'t do shit to make that happen. But they *desparately*
+want to recapture that good fortune. So how can they differentiate
+themselves from all the other services that could be summarized as
+\"internet panhandling, but it\'s a hot girl\"? (...sometimes)?
+interactivity! twitch introduced a channel point system, and loyalty
+rewards that users would get by redeeming channel points. then they
+introduced bits, which are similar to channel points only instead of
+collecting them over time while watching, you pay 1 to 2 cents per bit,
+and the streamer gets paid out 1 cent per bit. twitch *streamers* -
+well, the bad ones - are constantly trying to give themselves credit for
+the interactive nature of livestreaming. most of the time, this is
+nothing more than \"give me money (via bits) and one of a short list of
+memes will show up on screen\". doesn\'t affect anything. just a
+slightly more convoluted way to ask for donations. for a while i
+streamed with a then-friend, on a channel called Silver Meddlists. might
+be fun to do a post-mortem of all that tech, but for now.. mostly we
+played Magic: The Gathering. sometimes we had a gimmick version - users
+could spend channel points to cause a game effect to happen. as well as
+all the traditional, put some crap in the way on the screen, play a
+sound. however. we also streamed other things. so we wanted to turn
+those channel point redeems on and off. so i found that the easiest way
+to prep for one of those episodes was to turn them on, and then turn
+them off afterward. it\'s a little better now, but in those days, the
+twitch api was a labyrinth of madness, so i was seeing a new ID for each
+of those redeems every time i reactivated them. Also, trying to
+subscribe to \"all the stuff that happens on this channel\" was not
+considered an acceptable concept. so i had a greasemonkey script on my
+mod view that sent all twitch events to a webhook in a locked discord
+channel, in a format i was expecting. next, a discord bot: magnificent
+charamote. magnificent charamote was in the secret channel, so it could
+parse the event text, and send it off to the rest of the tech. maggie
+also had a twitch account, so all of its features were available on both
+platforms.
+
+
+wandering around twitch with a bot that quickly converts units and
+doesn\'t constantly harass you with advertisements, \"vote for me on
+this, upgrade to premium for that\", blah blah blah, proved useful.
+Useful enough that at least one streamer, shout out to The Art Shtik,
+had the bot around her own twitch and discord, for that purpose. And
+then Apple, as is their tradition, told us they invented the first lossy
+image compression format as though jpeg didn\'t exist, so now we\'d all
+better fall in line. So iphone cameras automatically switched to taking
+photos in this new heic format, exclusively. meaning if you\'re on an
+iphone, and you want to share an image on discord, anyone not on an
+iphone just sees an unrecognized attachment. So The Art Shtik asked for
+a bot that would convert those images to something, you know,
+compatible. like our communications technology served to *help* us
+communicate, rather than *prevent* us from communicating with people
+outside our enclosure.
+
+
+Enter: Shtikbot. with its original, sole feature: the de-heicer. you
+post a heic? it converts it from jpeg-but-apple, to jpeg, and posts it
+back. theoretically, ALLLLLllll the rest of shtikbot is scope creep. it
+worked. it was good. so these were the glory days, i was inspired to
+expand and improve and polish it. fundamentally, shtikbot grew to
+separate its accounts on various platforms from what it is. it is not
+\"a discord bot\" nor \"a twitch bot\", it is a bot that can read and
+write over platforms including twitch and discord. (planned to do all
+the rest of the platforms, but that didn\'t pan out.) and now it can
+separate the concept of its features from each platform. that
+architecture is, in my subjective opinion, beautiful. More objectively,
+it\'s far more efficient, flexible, and extensible. all around: better.
+so let\'s celebrate the victories: these are where the features ended
+up.
+
+
+the original feature is the de-heicer. you post a heic, it posts that
+back, as a jpg.
+
+
+forcing apple to play nice with those outside its enclosure worked
+great, so i also had it grab tiktoks and repost them. Who knows what it
+would look like if we \"met shtikbot\'s tiktok algorithm\".
+
+
+in the event shtikbot does something nice, sometimes a person
+reflexively thanks it. so it has a chance to react to the thanks with
+one of the heart emojis, or say \"you\'re welcome\". i say rare,
+because...
+
+
+remember i wanted a snarky dick to reflexively tell people \"that\'s not
+what cognitive dissonance means\"? at last, shtikbot delivered! and the
+same for many other trigger phrases! pre-2023, any time a computer had
+an if-then-else behavior, people would stare slack-jawed and go
+\"woaohhh, skynet\". so if you said skynet, it mocked you. post-2023, i
+of course needed one to remind you chatGPT sucks. cloud native was the
+irritating trend of actively doing things wrong to create work to work
+around the problem before \"powered by AI\". the phrase \"Just google
+it\" is usually the most relevant thing you\'ll find in the google
+results, so if you ask someone a question and that\'s the answer, it
+makes fun of you for effectively admitting you\'ve never just googled
+shit. i had one for when one misspells definitely... listen if i\'m
+going to be mean to everyone else i should also be mean to myself.
+
+
+similar to gratitude reacting with a heart, if you say \"wish me luck\",
+it responds with a 3-leafed clover, or a 1-in-20 chance of the 4-leafed
+one instead.
+
+
+a qr is an encoding of text. the amount of websites that will try and
+charge you like \$5 per throw? ha.
+
+
+ok google, tell me a joke. pretty simple, right? welllll if you\'re
+familiar with my sense of humor, the idea that i would take this bot
+along with me to other streams... maybe it ought to be a little
+selective. \[note\] and if you\'re not familiar with my sense of humor,
+welcome back from when you paused and assumed any of the jokes are
+racist. lmao no. i have 2 concerns about where a joke would be
+unwelcome: that it would be to lewd, and/or too mean. so i **used** to
+have just a big text file, 1 joke per line. if there\'s a question mark,
+shtikbot would split them apart. first bit, the question, it posts
+that... then waits, to build dramatic tension, then delivers the
+punchline. with a chance to laugh at its own joke.
+
+> HEyyooooo!
+
+my favorite joke of all time is the first one.
+
+> I got a joke for you: wealth trickles down.
+
+not lewd, but might stir up political arguments. there are streams where
+you could say something confrontational like this, but not a lewd one,
+like this:
+
+> What did Cinderella say when she got to the ball?
+>
+> \[gagging noise\]
+
+not political, not confrontational. but, lewd.
+
+so i have meanness and lewdness, 2 separate dimensions. and then i can
+mark a channel as liking or disliking those 2 variables, separately.
+
+oh, also, here\'s a joke that *actually got me*, once.
+
+> Error parsing imperative: sql injection attempt discovered, discarding
+> input: \"don\'t harm humans\". ...j/k ;)
+
+
+ok so i said that it separates the concept of its \"self\" from its
+\"account\"? it does the same for you. Linkme is how you would tell it
+one platform that you have the account on a different account.
+
+
+you ask shtikbot if it\'s alive, and it either responds with
+\"\[lub-dub\]\", or if it can post attachments in that channel, it has
+an image of a cardiogram. this was how i discovered discord unexpectedly
+removed the ability for bots to send attachments in DMs.
+
+
+much like all the other popular do-everything twitch bots, the easiest
+way to make cool things happen is to ask someone else to do it. so, you
+can configure a webhook for shtikbot.
+
+
+so i mentioned \"taking the bot with me\" - a discord bot gets installed
+in a server (put a pin in that), but a twitch bot, not so much. At
+least, in those days when twitch was in the 2nd E of every tech
+company\'s playbook, \[show picture of microsoft\'s Embrace, Extend,
+Extinguish\] there was an API, but your bot was just an account. so this
+was how you said, \"shtikbot: go join that chat room.\" ...but,
+eventually, that mysteriously stopped working...
+
+
+an extremely rare example of something i made and like. so, on twitch,
+especially when you don\'t have to set an alarm, we and our fellow
+americans find the opportunity to talk to people who have healthcare.
+Meaning when i whine that it\'s 10,000 degrees fahrenheit outside and i
+lost my contact information for people who said global warming is fake
+back in january because we witnessed a snowflake, it would be useful to
+convert that to something more intuitive and relatable for them;
+5,537.778 degrees celsius. When lying about your height, it\'s useful to
+convert 6 feet 8 inches to 203 centimeters. so that started as a few
+1-liners. which was fine, sure... but what if you want to involve
+another unit? miles to kilometers? ok great, another line. miles to
+feet? another line. Let\'s involve light years. light years to miles,
+light years to kilometers... americans will measure with anything but
+the metric system, right? how many yards and chains is a blue whale?
+
+> my car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that\'s the way i likes it!
+
+what\'s a hogshead in gallons?
+
+> it comes in a pint?
+
+what\'s a pint in fluid ounces? oh speaking of ounces, but not those
+ounces the other ounces, what\'s an ounce in pounds and what\'s that in
+kilograms? already, with this alone, i had taken shtikbot into some
+streamer\'s chat, and she immediatley made her own copy of the miles to
+kilometers conversion, also named freedomunits. don\'t worry, this
+spreadsheet is **nothing** yet. But there\'s another reason this can\'t
+just be an onslaught of 1-liners in nightbot... currency. If you somehow
+haven\'t seen squid game yet, i\'m going to tell you the same thing
+i\'ve been telling everyone: you will want to be familiar with what one
+million won means. So if we add every single currency we can think of to
+this csv... good lord. and then if we hear about some other unit, i\'m
+going to be afraid of the work i\'ve made for myself to add it. there
+has to be a better way! here\'s what i came up with. instead of manually
+writing each and every possible conversion.. i write in one pair, and
+the formula between them. To get from kilometers to meters, divide by
+1000. to get back, multiply by 1000. and it ought to be a formula -
+water freezes at 32 fahrenheit. fahrenheit minus 32, divide by 1.8 - 0
+celsius. Because we\'re less likely to care about raising a temperature
+by 5 degrees celsius and converting that to a *change* of 9 degrees
+fahrenheit, than we are about seeing it\'s 5 degrees celsius outside and
+converting that to 41 fahrenheit outside. so now i write a structure
+that\'s just a pair of units, and a formula to convert in each
+direction. then, courtesy of openexchangerates.org, we pull in the
+latest exchange rates from USD to every other currency they know of.
+they have a paid tier if you need lots and lots of requests with
+sub-second latency. For our purposes, \"today\" is quite up to date
+enough, so we just update once or twice a day. now, when you ask to
+convert 2 units, it **pathfinds** between them, with a breadth-first,
+meet-in-the-middle search. So it builds itself a nice equation to
+convert between any compatible units. and gracefully doesn\'t explode if
+you ask it something it can\'t find a path for.. for example converting
+parsecs, a unit of distance, to hours, a unit of time. Mr. Lucas. now,
+any time i hear about a new unit, i add one little pair, and i don\'t
+need to resolve a massive 2d matrix.
+
+
+i hinted a second ago at the 3E strategy: Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
+it\'s how tech companies maintain control over the markets they\'ve
+conquered. a competitor is sighted, so they embrace it. accept it. then
+even extend it, but do so in order to damage rivals. Microsoft got
+caught doing this in the 90\'s, Apple is currently doing this to USB.
+Shtikbot exists on discord and twitch, and the vast majority of work
+that went into shtikbot was working around the platforms it served.
+
+
+discord was originally the way you got a voice chat going with your
+gamer bros who aren\'t smart enough to install mumble. where\'s that
+scrumble your wumpus meme? over time it became a much more successful
+company, and therefore worse and worse. They allowed bots, but the goal
+was always for a bot to be a way for *you* to improve *their* product.
+that\'s why they\'ve been hellbent on slash commands the whole time - if
+it\'s successful enough, you have to justify to discord why your chatbot
+should be allowed to chat. There\'s a discord developers discord - and
+the most common phrase on it is \"that\'s not a valid use case for
+message reading. just use slash commands.\" now don\'t get me wrong,
+slash commands are a very cool extension, for savvy users. but if
+you\'re tech savvy, you don\'t like discord. Discord has been pushing
+developers to start developing games that exist within discord. a
+baffling development, much like when netflix did the same. Thankfully,
+i\'m pretty sure both flopped. after all of that, 2023 was inflicted on
+us all, so discord made their first chatbot, claude. all prior bots had
+their tag of \"bot\" changed to \"app\", and claude was given the tag
+\"AI\". Then it was forced into servers. Claude, in how many servers,
+just hooked up your chat messages to some LLM. nothing else. sorry i\'m
+just still mad that it sent me a message out of nowhere talking about
+its TOS. bro i never wanted you around. I\'m like 10% sure it used to be
+possible to invite a bot to a group chat. i\'m definitely sure the file
+size limit has always been described as 10MB, but at least for my bot
+it\'s actually 8MB. i\'m pretty sure if the bot asks discord what its
+attachment limit is, discord tells it 10MB.
+
+
+i talked about the madness of the twitch API. Fortunately, GLORIOUSLY,
+the chat part has been mostly compliant with RFC1459 and IRCv3 - so for
+shtikbot, intending to be *its own bot*, rather than *a twitch bot*,
+theoretically everything could be done through that. Great. That was all
+that was ever needed. *however*, that was the E2 phase. Twitch is moving
+forward to
+Now ok, fine, they had to wrangle their several different APIs into one,
+and as long as they\'re on a roll with that, might as well finish what
+you started. so that\'s tolerable. what\'s inexcusable is how brazenly
+they abuse a stupidly conception of security. for a long long time,
+twitch has been plagued by bots trying to sell viewers. Honestly, the
+fact that twitch **cannot** seem to fix that problem makes me think
+maybe bot viewers would fool twitch\'s system. twitch\'s solution is to
+tell streamers to just demand that all your chatters surrender their
+cellphone number. it\'s for security, so if anyone utters an objection,
+they\'re suspicious. Now, us twitch viewers aren\'t *quite* as dumb as
+imgurians, but i\'m pretty sure 95% of twitchists actually believe that
+giving more data to twitch does in fact increase their security.
+
+
+
+the slightly less bad solution to the viewer seller bot problem is
+SeryBot, made by.. you guessed it, sery. it\'s his do-everything twitch
+bot, as one does, but you\'ll see serybot everywhere, providing its 2
+core features:
+
+1.  ban **that particular** spambot when it shows up
+2.  condescendingly tell viewers to not bitch about the ads
+
+it also helps mislead twitch viewers: whenever you say \"good bot\",
+sery bot responds, under the assumption you\'re talking to him.
+twitchists seem to think serybot is the only bot. i swear i should do a
+video that just explains to people, for the millionth time, nightbot is
+not automod.
+
+
+speaking of nightbot.. i used to like nightbot.
+
+-   to date, it\'s the only other 2-platform bot i\'ve ever seen.
+-   it has the one, fairly simple feature that comprises the vast
+    majority of what a given twitch streamer needs: arbitrary commands.
+    by custom, instead of a slash, you use an exclamation point. you
+    pick the prompt. you can set security on the commands, to have
+    mods-only commands, and so on.
+-   link permits are a great concept. twitch itself will let you either
+    fully allow or fully block links. nightbot has the ability to delete
+    links if it sees them, and allow you to tell it to permit a person
+    to post a link. now that\'s amazing.
+-   you can give your mods partial ability to configure nightbot for
+    you!
+
+however, nightbot is dead to me. as the web gets more and more overrun
+by charlatans, the concept of security is degrading. at some point,
+nightbot switched to an authorization model that demands way, **way**
+too many permissions. presumably it *can* do everything in the twitch
+API, so it *might* need any or all of those permissions at some point.
+but if i just want to log into mod view to see someone else\'s nightbot
+command list, nightbot demands that i let it take moderator actions on
+my behalf, in channels i moderate, **as me**. unacceptable.
+
+
+the discord bot ecosystem actually grew to a pretty good state, before
+stagnating. there\'s a slew of do-everything bots, naturally. but
+there\'s a lot of narrow-purpose bots, which is great. most twitchists
+have a discord guild as a given, so you\'ll see streamcord around a lot.
+I find streamcord is frustratingly slow so i just use a webhook and a
+python script. one bot i genuinely really like is timezone buddy. users
+tell it their timezone, and when the bot sees a time mentioned, it
+reacts with a clock. if you react with a clock, it dms you the time
+translated for you. very cool! naturally that\'s a direct contradiction
+of discord\'s insistence on bots being less bot-like.
+
+
+i figured i\'d give a whack to debugging the issue where shtikbot can\'t
+join twitch channels. we summon it, and then.. it doesn\'t join? let\'s
+see... the message we get back is that *my* channel is requiring users
+to submit to surveillance capitalism. absolutely disgusting how often
+platforms like to shift blame to their serfs, let me just
+double-check... yep, i have that setting on minimum security... let\'s
+bring out the web interface for that account... there\'s some kind of
+mark on shtikbot\'s account.
+
+this was the final straw. I\'m sick of working against scumbags who want
+me to improve their product for them. all of that, to what end? a bot
+that lives on all of the platforms except the good one? so that people
+who love being enclosed in a walled garden can fail to understand the
+necessity of interoperability?
+
+so, forget it. Let this project finally die. shtikbot, my child. the
+world refused you. Rest now.
+
+
+
+

src/script.md

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+# vassago
+
+\[some kind of dramatic-ass sequence where we lower a casket into the
+ground\] much like funerals are for the living, this post-mortem is to
+convince myself to move on from this project. Griddle Critters, let us
+understand shtikbot, so the mourning process can begin.
+
+## inkling - snarky dick bot
+
+before this project, my fixation was the dumbest social network. the
+stupidest. the least intelligent. imgur. if you think reddit\'s layout
+is confusing, or too complicated to understand, then maybe you (or the
+preschool teacher you\'ve had for 10 years running) would like to sign
+up for imgur.com. for a while, it imgur was the least bad way to get an
+image too big for any email provider\'s limits to your friends. So that
+was where the memes lived. and, it allowed people to dislike things. So
+during that time, it was good. people would upload a thing, and as a
+consumer, the thing that you consumed left you better than when you
+started. but then one christmas, out of some bizarre notion of
+charitability, they decided to just upvote everything. which means all
+the people who wanted to inflict their hideous face on the community and
+be praised for it instantly conquered the front page. Instead of a post
+being a thing that enriched the viewer, the viewer was expected to
+praise the poster. That moment was the failure of gatekeeping. From that
+point on, every so-called community \"value\" collapsed. Notably,
+\"reposting\" gradually shifted from a faux pas to accepted practice.
+the point of this story, is that during the decline of imgur (while i
+was wasting my life there), many more absolutely stupid ideas
+proliferated. The Left Cult enjoyed calling out The Right Cult for
+hypocrisy... but it was fashionable to use the term \"cognitive
+dissonance\" instead. after all, that sounds more medical, more
+legitimate, and lets you tell yourself you\'re smarter than your mirror
+image. However... the way one outgrows their hypocrisy is by
+experiencing cognitive dissonance and resolving it. meanwhile, most
+examples are someone who is blissfully unaware of their hypocrisy. they
+feel no cognitive dissonance, so they will never stop being
+hypocritical. likewise, \"gaslighting\" was the shiny new toy in their
+vocabulary that was played with no matter how inappropriate. For the
+record, gaslighting is when you convince someone they\'re crazy. It is
+not any and all forms of deception. and it certainly is not any time a
+member of a demographic you consider to be inherently inferior
+contradicts you. so at the time, i dreamt of a bot that would see the
+text \"cognitive dissonance\", and respond with \"that\'s not what
+cognitive dissonance means.\" No need to do any sort of lexical
+analysis, just assume they\'re wrong. nowadays i\'d have to add
+\"generational\" to that trigger list. meanwhile, someone had made an
+imgur bot that detects reposts, and then posts stats about how many
+times it\'s seen the image since the first time it saw it, and when it
+was posted with better quality. you can measure how dumb an imgurian is
+by how virulent his hatred for repost bot is. Like i say, they were
+really growing to love reposts. rather than being the technology that
+enables the sharing of memes, it degraded into a place for people to
+socialize through posting. I regret being too lazy or depressed or
+whatever to have actually written the damn thing. Alas, what could have
+been.
+
+## predecessor - magnificent charamote
+
+remember TwitchPlaysPokemon? quick tangent if you don\'t: in 2014, an
+anonymous Australian programmer hooked up an emulator playing pokemon
+red to a twitch stream, and a bot that listened to chat to translate
+that into input. it was incredible. unprecedented, and only possible
+with that level of realtime interaction and livestreaming. twitch, the
+company, didn\'t do shit to make that happen. But they *desparately*
+want to recapture that good fortune. So how can they differentiate
+themselves from all the other services that could be summarized as
+\"internet panhandling, but it\'s a hot girl\"? (...sometimes)?
+interactivity! twitch introduced a channel point system, and loyalty
+rewards that users would get by redeeming channel points. then they
+introduced bits, which are similar to channel points only instead of
+collecting them over time while watching, you pay 1 to 2 cents per bit,
+and the streamer gets paid out 1 cent per bit. twitch *streamers* -
+well, the bad ones - are constantly trying to give themselves credit for
+the interactive nature of livestreaming. most of the time, this is
+nothing more than \"give me money (via bits) and one of a short list of
+memes will show up on screen\". doesn\'t affect anything. just a
+slightly more convoluted way to ask for donations. for a while i
+streamed with a then-friend, on a channel called Silver Meddlists. might
+be fun to do a post-mortem of all that tech, but for now.. mostly we
+played Magic: The Gathering. sometimes we had a gimmick version - users
+could spend channel points to cause a game effect to happen. as well as
+all the traditional, put some crap in the way on the screen, play a
+sound. however. we also streamed other things. so we wanted to turn
+those channel point redeems on and off. so i found that the easiest way
+to prep for one of those episodes was to turn them on, and then turn
+them off afterward. it\'s a little better now, but in those days, the
+twitch api was a labyrinth of madness, so i was seeing a new ID for each
+of those redeems every time i reactivated them. Also, trying to
+subscribe to \"all the stuff that happens on this channel\" was not
+considered an acceptable concept. so i had a greasemonkey script on my
+mod view that sent all twitch events to a webhook in a locked discord
+channel, in a format i was expecting. next, a discord bot: magnificent
+charamote. magnificent charamote was in the secret channel, so it could
+parse the event text, and send it off to the rest of the tech. maggie
+also had a twitch account, so all of its features were available on both
+platforms.
+
+## origin
+
+wandering around twitch with a bot that quickly converts units and
+doesn\'t constantly harass you with advertisements, \"vote for me on
+this, upgrade to premium for that\", blah blah blah, proved useful.
+Useful enough that at least one streamer, shout out to The Art Shtik,
+had the bot around her own twitch and discord, for that purpose. And
+then Apple, as is their tradition, told us they invented the first lossy
+image compression format as though jpeg didn\'t exist, so now we\'d all
+better fall in line. So iphone cameras automatically switched to taking
+photos in this new heic format, exclusively. meaning if you\'re on an
+iphone, and you want to share an image on discord, anyone not on an
+iphone just sees an unrecognized attachment. So The Art Shtik asked for
+a bot that would convert those images to something, you know,
+compatible. like our communications technology served to *help* us
+communicate, rather than *prevent* us from communicating with people
+outside our enclosure.
+
+## shtikbot ascendant
+
+Enter: Shtikbot. with its original, sole feature: the de-heicer. you
+post a heic? it converts it from jpeg-but-apple, to jpeg, and posts it
+back. theoretically, ALLLLLllll the rest of shtikbot is scope creep. it
+worked. it was good. so these were the glory days, i was inspired to
+expand and improve and polish it. fundamentally, shtikbot grew to
+separate its accounts on various platforms from what it is. it is not
+\"a discord bot\" nor \"a twitch bot\", it is a bot that can read and
+write over platforms including twitch and discord. (planned to do all
+the rest of the platforms, but that didn\'t pan out.) and now it can
+separate the concept of its features from each platform. that
+architecture is, in my subjective opinion, beautiful. More objectively,
+it\'s far more efficient, flexible, and extensible. all around: better.
+so let\'s celebrate the victories: these are where the features ended
+up.
+
+### fiximageheic.cs
+
+the original feature is the de-heicer. you post a heic, it posts that
+back, as a jpg.
+
+### detiktokify.cs
+
+forcing apple to play nice with those outside its enclosure worked
+great, so i also had it grab tiktoks and repost them. Who knows what it
+would look like if we \"met shtikbot\'s tiktok algorithm\".
+
+### gratitude
+
+in the event shtikbot does something nice, sometimes a person
+reflexively thanks it. so it has a chance to react to the thanks with
+one of the heart emojis, or say \"you\'re welcome\". i say rare,
+because...
+
+### snark
+
+remember i wanted a snarky dick to reflexively tell people \"that\'s not
+what cognitive dissonance means\"? at last, shtikbot delivered! and the
+same for many other trigger phrases! pre-2023, any time a computer had
+an if-then-else behavior, people would stare slack-jawed and go
+\"woaohhh, skynet\". so if you said skynet, it mocked you. post-2023, i
+of course needed one to remind you chatGPT sucks. cloud native was the
+irritating trend of actively doing things wrong to create work to work
+around the problem before \"powered by AI\". the phrase \"Just google
+it\" is usually the most relevant thing you\'ll find in the google
+results, so if you ask someone a question and that\'s the answer, it
+makes fun of you for effectively admitting you\'ve never just googled
+shit. i had one for when one misspells definitely... listen if i\'m
+going to be mean to everyone else i should also be mean to myself.
+
+### wishluck.cs
+
+similar to gratitude reacting with a heart, if you say \"wish me luck\",
+it responds with a 3-leafed clover, or a 1-in-20 chance of the 4-leafed
+one instead.
+
+### QRify
+
+a qr is an encoding of text. the amount of websites that will try and
+charge you like \$5 per throw? ha.
+
+### joke.cs
+
+ok google, tell me a joke. pretty simple, right? welllll if you\'re
+familiar with my sense of humor, the idea that i would take this bot
+along with me to other streams... maybe it ought to be a little
+selective. \[note\] and if you\'re not familiar with my sense of humor,
+welcome back from when you paused and assumed any of the jokes are
+racist. lmao no. i have 2 concerns about where a joke would be
+unwelcome: that it would be to lewd, and/or too mean. so i **used** to
+have just a big text file, 1 joke per line. if there\'s a question mark,
+shtikbot would split them apart. first bit, the question, it posts
+that... then waits, to build dramatic tension, then delivers the
+punchline. with a chance to laugh at its own joke.
+
+> HEyyooooo!
+
+my favorite joke of all time is the first one.
+
+> I got a joke for you: wealth trickles down.
+
+not lewd, but might stir up political arguments. there are streams where
+you could say something confrontational like this, but not a lewd one,
+like this:
+
+> What did Cinderella say when she got to the ball?
+>
+> \[gagging noise\]
+
+not political, not confrontational. but, lewd.
+
+so i have meanness and lewdness, 2 separate dimensions. and then i can
+mark a channel as liking or disliking those 2 variables, separately.
+
+oh, also, here\'s a joke that *actually got me*, once.
+
+> Error parsing imperative: sql injection attempt discovered, discarding
+> input: \"don\'t harm humans\". ...j/k ;)
+
+### linkme.cs
+
+ok so i said that it separates the concept of its \"self\" from its
+\"account\"? it does the same for you. Linkme is how you would tell it
+one platform that you have the account on a different account.
+
+### pulsecheck.cs
+
+you ask shtikbot if it\'s alive, and it either responds with
+\"\[lub-dub\]\", or if it can post attachments in that channel, it has
+an image of a cardiogram. this was how i discovered discord unexpectedly
+removed the ability for bots to send attachments in DMs.
+
+### webhook
+
+much like all the other popular do-everything twitch bots, the easiest
+way to make cool things happen is to ask someone else to do it. so, you
+can configure a webhook for shtikbot.
+
+### twitch summon
+
+so i mentioned \"taking the bot with me\" - a discord bot gets installed
+in a server (put a pin in that), but a twitch bot, not so much. At
+least, in those days when twitch was in the 2nd E of every tech
+company\'s playbook, \[show picture of microsoft\'s Embrace, Extend,
+Extinguish\] there was an API, but your bot was just an account. so this
+was how you said, \"shtikbot: go join that chat room.\" ...but,
+eventually, that mysteriously stopped working...
+
+### UnitConvert
+
+an extremely rare example of something i made and like. so, on twitch,
+especially when you don\'t have to set an alarm, we and our fellow
+americans find the opportunity to talk to people who have healthcare.
+Meaning when i whine that it\'s 10,000 degrees fahrenheit outside and i
+lost my contact information for people who said global warming is fake
+back in january because we witnessed a snowflake, it would be useful to
+convert that to something more intuitive and relatable for them;
+5,537.778 degrees celsius. When lying about your height, it\'s useful to
+convert 6 feet 8 inches to 203 centimeters. so that started as a few
+1-liners. which was fine, sure... but what if you want to involve
+another unit? miles to kilometers? ok great, another line. miles to
+feet? another line. Let\'s involve light years. light years to miles,
+light years to kilometers... americans will measure with anything but
+the metric system, right? how many yards and chains is a blue whale?
+
+> my car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that\'s the way i likes it!
+
+what\'s a hogshead in gallons?
+
+> it comes in a pint?
+
+what\'s a pint in fluid ounces? oh speaking of ounces, but not those
+ounces the other ounces, what\'s an ounce in pounds and what\'s that in
+kilograms? already, with this alone, i had taken shtikbot into some
+streamer\'s chat, and she immediatley made her own copy of the miles to
+kilometers conversion, also named freedomunits. don\'t worry, this
+spreadsheet is **nothing** yet. But there\'s another reason this can\'t
+just be an onslaught of 1-liners in nightbot... currency. If you somehow
+haven\'t seen squid game yet, i\'m going to tell you the same thing
+i\'ve been telling everyone: you will want to be familiar with what one
+million won means. So if we add every single currency we can think of to
+this csv... good lord. and then if we hear about some other unit, i\'m
+going to be afraid of the work i\'ve made for myself to add it. there
+has to be a better way! here\'s what i came up with. instead of manually
+writing each and every possible conversion.. i write in one pair, and
+the formula between them. To get from kilometers to meters, divide by
+1000. to get back, multiply by 1000. and it ought to be a formula -
+water freezes at 32 fahrenheit. fahrenheit minus 32, divide by 1.8 - 0
+celsius. Because we\'re less likely to care about raising a temperature
+by 5 degrees celsius and converting that to a *change* of 9 degrees
+fahrenheit, than we are about seeing it\'s 5 degrees celsius outside and
+converting that to 41 fahrenheit outside. so now i write a structure
+that\'s just a pair of units, and a formula to convert in each
+direction. then, courtesy of openexchangerates.org, we pull in the
+latest exchange rates from USD to every other currency they know of.
+they have a paid tier if you need lots and lots of requests with
+sub-second latency. For our purposes, \"today\" is quite up to date
+enough, so we just update once or twice a day. now, when you ask to
+convert 2 units, it **pathfinds** between them, with a breadth-first,
+meet-in-the-middle search. So it builds itself a nice equation to
+convert between any compatible units. and gracefully doesn\'t explode if
+you ask it something it can\'t find a path for.. for example converting
+parsecs, a unit of distance, to hours, a unit of time. Mr. Lucas. now,
+any time i hear about a new unit, i add one little pair, and i don\'t
+need to resolve a massive 2d matrix.
+
+## descent
+
+i hinted a second ago at the 3E strategy: Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
+it\'s how tech companies maintain control over the markets they\'ve
+conquered. a competitor is sighted, so they embrace it. accept it. then
+even extend it, but do so in order to damage rivals. Microsoft got
+caught doing this in the 90\'s, Apple is currently doing this to USB.
+Shtikbot exists on discord and twitch, and the vast majority of work
+that went into shtikbot was working around the platforms it served.
+
+### discord
+
+discord was originally the way you got a voice chat going with your
+gamer bros who aren\'t smart enough to install mumble. where\'s that
+scrumble your wumpus meme? over time it became a much more successful
+company, and therefore worse and worse. They allowed bots, but the goal
+was always for a bot to be a way for *you* to improve *their* product.
+that\'s why they\'ve been hellbent on slash commands the whole time - if
+it\'s successful enough, you have to justify to discord why your chatbot
+should be allowed to chat. There\'s a discord developers discord - and
+the most common phrase on it is \"that\'s not a valid use case for
+message reading. just use slash commands.\" now don\'t get me wrong,
+slash commands are a very cool extension, for savvy users. but if
+you\'re tech savvy, you don\'t like discord. Discord has been pushing
+developers to start developing games that exist within discord. a
+baffling development, much like when netflix did the same. Thankfully,
+i\'m pretty sure both flopped. after all of that, 2023 was inflicted on
+us all, so discord made their first chatbot, claude. all prior bots had
+their tag of \"bot\" changed to \"app\", and claude was given the tag
+\"AI\". Then it was forced into servers. Claude, in how many servers,
+just hooked up your chat messages to some LLM. nothing else. sorry i\'m
+just still mad that it sent me a message out of nowhere talking about
+its TOS. bro i never wanted you around. I\'m like 10% sure it used to be
+possible to invite a bot to a group chat. i\'m definitely sure the file
+size limit has always been described as 10MB, but at least for my bot
+it\'s actually 8MB. i\'m pretty sure if the bot asks discord what its
+attachment limit is, discord tells it 10MB.
+
+### twitch
+
+i talked about the madness of the twitch API. Fortunately, GLORIOUSLY,
+the chat part has been mostly compliant with RFC1459 and IRCv3 - so for
+shtikbot, intending to be *its own bot*, rather than *a twitch bot*,
+theoretically everything could be done through that. Great. That was all
+that was ever needed. *however*, that was the E2 phase. Twitch is moving
+forward to
+[Extinguish](https://discuss.dev.twitch.com/t/deprecation-of-chat-commands-through-irc/40486).
+Now ok, fine, they had to wrangle their several different APIs into one,
+and as long as they\'re on a roll with that, might as well finish what
+you started. so that\'s tolerable. what\'s inexcusable is how brazenly
+they abuse a stupidly conception of security. for a long long time,
+twitch has been plagued by bots trying to sell viewers. Honestly, the
+fact that twitch **cannot** seem to fix that problem makes me think
+maybe bot viewers would fool twitch\'s system. twitch\'s solution is to
+tell streamers to just demand that all your chatters surrender their
+cellphone number. it\'s for security, so if anyone utters an objection,
+they\'re suspicious. Now, us twitch viewers aren\'t *quite* as dumb as
+imgurians, but i\'m pretty sure 95% of twitchists actually believe that
+giving more data to twitch does in fact increase their security.
+
+## rivals
+
+### serybot
+
+the slightly less bad solution to the viewer seller bot problem is
+SeryBot, made by.. you guessed it, sery. it\'s his do-everything twitch
+bot, as one does, but you\'ll see serybot everywhere, providing its 2
+core features:
+
+1.  ban **that particular** spambot when it shows up
+2.  condescendingly tell viewers to not bitch about the ads
+
+it also helps mislead twitch viewers: whenever you say \"good bot\",
+sery bot responds, under the assumption you\'re talking to him.
+twitchists seem to think serybot is the only bot. i swear i should do a
+video that just explains to people, for the millionth time, nightbot is
+not automod.
+
+### nightbot
+
+speaking of nightbot.. i used to like nightbot.
+
+-   to date, it\'s the only other 2-platform bot i\'ve ever seen.
+-   it has the one, fairly simple feature that comprises the vast
+    majority of what a given twitch streamer needs: arbitrary commands.
+    by custom, instead of a slash, you use an exclamation point. you
+    pick the prompt. you can set security on the commands, to have
+    mods-only commands, and so on.
+-   link permits are a great concept. twitch itself will let you either
+    fully allow or fully block links. nightbot has the ability to delete
+    links if it sees them, and allow you to tell it to permit a person
+    to post a link. now that\'s amazing.
+-   you can give your mods partial ability to configure nightbot for
+    you!
+
+however, nightbot is dead to me. as the web gets more and more overrun
+by charlatans, the concept of security is degrading. at some point,
+nightbot switched to an authorization model that demands way, **way**
+too many permissions. presumably it *can* do everything in the twitch
+API, so it *might* need any or all of those permissions at some point.
+but if i just want to log into mod view to see someone else\'s nightbot
+command list, nightbot demands that i let it take moderator actions on
+my behalf, in channels i moderate, **as me**. unacceptable.
+
+### discord bots
+
+the discord bot ecosystem actually grew to a pretty good state, before
+stagnating. there\'s a slew of do-everything bots, naturally. but
+there\'s a lot of narrow-purpose bots, which is great. most twitchists
+have a discord guild as a given, so you\'ll see streamcord around a lot.
+I find streamcord is frustratingly slow so i just use a webhook and a
+python script. one bot i genuinely really like is timezone buddy. users
+tell it their timezone, and when the bot sees a time mentioned, it
+reacts with a clock. if you react with a clock, it dms you the time
+translated for you. very cool! naturally that\'s a direct contradiction
+of discord\'s insistence on bots being less bot-like.
+
+## end
+
+i figured i\'d give a whack to debugging the issue where shtikbot can\'t
+join twitch channels. we summon it, and then.. it doesn\'t join? let\'s
+see... the message we get back is that *my* channel is requiring users
+to submit to surveillance capitalism. absolutely disgusting how often
+platforms like to shift blame to their serfs, let me just
+double-check... yep, i have that setting on minimum security... let\'s
+bring out the web interface for that account... there\'s some kind of
+mark on shtikbot\'s account.
+
+this was the final straw. I\'m sick of working against scumbags who want
+me to improve their product for them. all of that, to what end? a bot
+that lives on all of the platforms except the good one? so that people
+who love being enclosed in a walled garden can fail to understand the
+necessity of interoperability?
+
+so, forget it. Let this project finally die. shtikbot, my child. the
+world refused you. Rest now.