337 entries for 2024

The Three-Faced Interface

The YouTube you see has the same colours and layout as the one I see, and yet we’re not present in each other’s space like two customers browsing through the same record collection at a music store. The Internet is seldom used to ‘connect us together’ any more. No, we’re each in a private bubble.

In a sense, the new digital interfaces are like a reflective store-front made of one-way glass. Whoever approaches will see an image of themselves, reflected in what products turn up, and what messages they receive. The corporate can see them, but the person is encouraged to imagine themselves as walking through an uninhabited room with shelves that belong to them: my shelf, my basket, my account, my list, my favourites, my Amazon, my Google etc. In the 1980s there was no ‘my Walmart’, but now your data is reflected back to you as your own store with that possessive pronoun. In doing that, they get to present themselves as you.

‘Erica’ is legally in the same category as the bank’s supply of staples or fleet of vehicles, but they don’t give human names to their water coolers or keyboards. They only grant that to assets that form part of the new outward-facing interface. They encourage us to get on first-name terms with this combination of code and hardware, and by now all of us have experienced the proliferation of these named interfaces like Alexa, Bard, Claude, or Jasper.

AI chatbots give the one-way mirror a human name that’s different to your own. “I’m having a conversation with Erica”, you think to yourself as you transmit information to the (largely male) engineers of Bank of America. “She knows me so well”.

Stop travelling when you feel good somewhere.

Secret Llama

[LLM chatbot that runs offline entirely inside a browser with open models like Mistral and LLama 3. Needs WebGPU so you need to use Chrome or Edge.]

Other People as Crutches

[Perhaps obsession with individualism shames us if we are ’less disciplined’ when ‘alone’, while blinding us to how functional it is to live your best through other people.]

Write when hungry. Read when fed.

Programming require you to reify anything in order to act on it, whereas in the physical world you can directly engage with your environment.

It may be easier to change analog than digital.

I was wondering if it’s possible to load a local JavaScript file via bookmarklet (to get around Firefox’s character limit) but it seems file:// URLs will return an error. I can either load an https:// URL or embed my file inside an extension.

Let’s talk about a rabbit hole with foreign policy….

[Foreign policy supports domestic policy, so changing the former starts with deep systemic change in the latter.]

How can we reduce the size of homebrew-cask and homebrew-core folders?

[As of Homebrew 4, you can save space by removing certain packages only used for developing formulae or casks:]

brew untap homebrew/core
brew untap homebrew/cask

Exploits of Play: The Cheating Other

When the masses laugh, the powerful quake.

As one can observe their own thoughts and feelings, the same with how we relate to one another.

A Sick Giant

With more politically homogenous audiences, the market demand for truth goes down a little bit in favor of an increased demand for viewpoint confirmation

[Narrowcast media turns boring political reality into a sensational reality show to entertain everyone who finds politics boring.]

A scam is like a virus that converts trust into cynicism, but it’s the news, in the name of keeping things entertaining and addictive, that distributes the virus across the whole country.

Geographic bubbles mean many people barely know anyone on the other political side personally, so the only information they have on what those people are like comes from information bubbles. And those bubbles have increasingly become hate-mongering machines.

An enemy is one whose story we have not heard.

Let’s talk about how to change the world (Part 2)….

[Older people who consider themselves unable to contribute due to physical impairments have decades of life experience and can often offer advice to simplify or streamline the more intense work.]

[Having events where people can help can signal being more active than having meetings where people talk, and will attract doers.]

List of Patterns

This project is an abridged, hyper-textual, and copyleft manifestation of the 1977 architecture classic A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander.

Let’s talk about how to change the world….

[Bring independent means having a network, and having a choice about how things get done rather than doing everything yourself.]

attachment to a specific strategy is not strategic

On dexterity

He constrains himself only to the forgeable domains, often ones based on games of language, and so he is never put to the test. Since he can never definitively fail, he will never be cast out, but he will also never “pass” and become initiated. He remains anxiously in limbo, waiting in fear and hope for some immanent sense of identity to emerge from the undifferentiated mass, not realizing that he has already precluded the possibility of any critical event.

When being a nerd paid off

FAT32 doesn’t actually mark sectors as “deleted”. It marks the entire file as deleted, without permanently erasing any of its information until it’s needed. Testdisk knows this, and it makes recovery a breeze. The entire operation took 5 minutes.

People think that co-living community rules are whatever the first person told them.

memeable action