The Art Of Not Asking Why

Spent a big portion of the morning working on the Archive page. Added the old links that I took out of the navigation bar, expended on RSS feeds, and went into a rabbit hole of pages on Hugo for two hours 😅

A few more tweaks and I will be done. Considering bringing back the org-mode/Emacs category

This morning, I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea of web mentions. The explanation is simple enough, yet somehow I don’t fully get it… need a working example. Microblog (where I host my blog) implements this, and I want to make sure I take advantage.

Just another note (I’m on a roll today) that I just added TinyLytics to my site. In a nutshell, it’s a hit counter: it tells me you read a post, what country you’re from, and what OS you’re using. Nothing more (this is not Google Analytics!)

It’s hard to stay away from extremes these days. Everyone has an opinion, there’s so much noise, and we constantly get mentally bombarded in today’s social networks era.

Is it just me, or does it seem we use more unnecessary emphasis in everything we say? Instead of saying “I’m happy about this,” we say, “I’m super happy about this,” or “I’m super excited about this,” and there are those that would add “super super” to make sure we understand they are indeed excited. There’s the whole obnoxious “literally” that’s been around for years, and a bunch of other words. I like to grump, so I’d blame social media and move on.

But I can’t just do that, can I? Nope. Let me tag a few elephants (whales! super whales!) in the room, but I promise not to do more than that. It’s 2024, and we have an election coming up; there’s the Middle East stuff, the AI stuff, and the Ukraine-Russia stuff. Again, everyone has an opinion, a huge and loud one (me included; I’m human), so we have to go out there and let it out..!

A week ago or so, I encountered one such angry comment on Mastodon. It was your general provocative emotional post with an image. Since it showed something that challenged what I knew to be true at that point, I replied and asked for the source so I could read more about it. I was surprised (I shouldn’t have been, but there I was) to get an answer from the poster saying they don’t have one; they just got it from a friend who posted it on Twitter (they called it Twitter, so I call it Twitter. Personally, I don’t give a beep about how it’s called these days).

Why was I shocked? Because this was an educated, smart person whom I followed. This person posts good informative comments. As I checked this person’s feed, I was saddened to see post after post of similar magnitude, many of which were also challenging what I know to be true. Mastodon has an option to mute someone for a given time period, so I chose that, hoping that at some point, I could get back to “normal” with this person.

Look folks, I know I’m an idiot. I’m a grumpy dude in his 40s. That’s why I’m happy to learn more, because there’s always more to know. Just a couple of days ago, a friend challenged my emotional intelligence (or, apparently, lack of it), and after I cooled down, I re-read what I said to them in anger. Well yeah, I was angry and said stuff based on things I thought they said, not what they were trying to say. I didn’t have the mental capacity to understand them at the time because I was angry, and I knew that, but we were both too engaged in arguing to “take a breather,” which was needed.

When I was at school, one of the simple “tricks” our teachers had for us angry students was to tell us to step out and “go wash your face.” Everyone knew what this meant: splashing one’s face with cold water. It works for me, and according to a quick search, there’s some research about it. An extra tip from me: if you’re upset, close your eyes and hold the water (chilled) to your eyeballs for a moment. Press very gently so water don’t go through your eyelids, but enough to feel your eyeballs through the eyelids against your hands. If you have short hair or are bald like I am, you have another excellent advantage and can also get some cool water over your noggin. It doesn’t hurt to try, right?

So go wash your face.

You’d laugh. It’s so basic. And as I said, I don’t know much, so take it with a grain of salt. But it works - for me, anyway. If you’re angry and you find yourself at your keyboard typing away… don’t. Just hang on a bit. Don’t worry; you will still be angry enough to write the stuff later, only, hopefully, with more reason in you. And you’ll be able to link the dots for people, hopefully leading them away from obnoxious pukeboxes like Twit-eX. (Ha! I like the name. I’ll keep it.)

Have a good day, everyone, as much as you can, and drink plenty of water! (after you drink your coffee, of course).

Saw something controversial on Mastodon? Twitter X? Reddit? Not so fast. Check the source. Then look up the source (if you don’t know it) to see who’s the parent company (Wikipedia is a good place to start). Don’t know/can’t find? Please say so. Be honest.

Thank you.

Today was a bit of a downer, and I wasn’t in the mood. I also had to use my lunch break to get coffee since we were about to run out.

You know those times when you listen to something good that lifts you up? You don’t care you look like an asshole on a subway car, bonking your head up and down to the metal? Me neither. However…!

This did it. I recommend you listen with good earphones and high volume, and ditch YouTube for lossless if you can.

Polygon has a good introduction to Observation:

“Set in the year 2026, Observation’s story plays out on a titular low-orbit space station left stranded in the wake of some mysterious catastrophic systems failure. With no way to contact Earth or reliable means to ascertain the location of the Observation’s crew, medical officer Dr. Emma Fisher must repair the station’s systems, locate and secure any survivors, and re-establish contact with Earth to coordinate a rescue effort.”

“But you are not Dr. Emma Fisher. You are SAM: the Observation’s semi-omniscient operating system, rebooted following the blackout and tasked with assisting Dr. Fisher in the station’s repairs. Which is to say, you’re not aboard the space station. You are the space station.”

It’s a game geared toward people who like scary sci-fi stories happening in space and who enjoy puzzles and mystery-like narratives. In other words, me.

The game’s puzzles are easy, though it’s sometimes frustrating to understand the rules. I’ve gone in circles for a long time before I gave up and looked into a walkthrough to tell me that at this point in the game, I could blast through air vents or that the communication mode I’m looking for is in another tab on the UI for SAM, for example. These minor annoyances do not happen often enough to ruin an otherwise polished, well-made game.

You won’t find fast action here or explosions and guns (ok, /some/explosions), which I find refreshing. The game hooked me enough to want to keep going and see what happens next all the way to the end.

Even if you’re not a gamer but like a good sci-fi story, you should try it. The game is easy enough to pick up and play with a keyboard and Mouse on a modest computer (it’s 3D in space in parts, but the game wasn’t too demanding even when it came out five years ago), and you can probably find a deal for it somewhere on the web.

Changed my about section, and removed a couple of pages from the navigation (they are still there!) as I’m cleaning up a bit.

He did it! Prot created a function that converts denote links back to “regular” org-mode links, using some regex magic.

This means I can now upload org-mode files directly into GitLab, which displays org files natively. Take a look

I have a confession to make.

For the last two weeks or so, I’ve been toying around with the idea of resurrecting my college-days blog about the Middle East and international happenings in general. There’s no way any post that even vaguely touches the topic won’t turn on the flames, so I’ve been mostly avoiding it.

Everyone has an opinion; that’s human. At the same time, the internet is shit, and it’s getting worse. Services like Instagram and Twitter have a long tradition of censoring (or not censoring) users when they shouldn’t (or should), while AI companies vacuum up all this crap and spin it back, as large news outlets often use the same resources to break the news. It’s an echo chamber that’s hard to escape, filled with often the most noisy, not most accurate, information.

During college, our newspaper advisor kept repeating the slogan “Check your facts.” That’s because we often didn’t. It’s a human habit to run with rumors, like rabbits' perking up their ears at the possibility of a predator.

On my Middle East blog, I rehashed news from the media. Taking my advisor’s mantra to heart, I developed a habit to check my information from at least three sources. I then provided my own explanation, linking back to my sources. If I couldn’t find the sources but wanted to post stuff anyway, I’d say so on the post; more often than not, someone educated me, one way or another.

I was often scorned by opposing sides, sometimes on the same piece. There were angry comments from readers based in Lebanon about my lack of knowledge and worried emails from my family in Israel that I “lost my way.” I made a friend with a Palestinian woman on campus, who took to call me “cousin,” and we sometimes argued about heated topics. Another time, I was refused an official interview - but offered a meeting - with a Middle Eastern affairs professor at a nearby university about the history of the region. It was a hobby that got out of control: looking at it now, it was irresponsible of me to worry my family and piss off strangers. It was also probably unsafe, knowing what I know today about what happens to some folks who voice their opinions - and I’m talking about here, in the US.

Writing about heated topics like these is hard on your soul. You become cynical. You believe everyone’s out to get you or want something from you, and there’s almost nothing plainly good about the world besides a walk in the woods, away from the human race. Perhaps this is why journalists adhere to the stereotype of bitter looks, cigarettes and coffee (I have a feeling NYT reporters are a stark opposite of that, but I digress). Being a good reporter means you’re constantly wrong, and people who don’t know you often hate your guts on principle. Fewer people today want to be journalists, and very few want to remain ones. It’s a dying field with no paycheck to show for the punishing effort. So, I chose to turn my back on it and chase a more rewarding career. The thing is, I never had a choice.

I recall a conversation I had with one of my journalism professors. It was in his hole-in-the-wall office, loaded with piles of books and old yellow newspaper from floor to ceiling, just like a scene from a movie. He told me no one in their right mind would choose to be a journalist unless they got the “germ,” and he was sad to inform me (so he said) that I got it. It had nothing to do with my writing (average at best) or editing (much worse) skills, but my appetite, or more accurately, my compulsion.

The germ does not make you a reporter or a blogger. The germ sits in your brain and eats your mind slowly with an impossible urge to resist: dig.

You read something, and you’re not satisfied, so you start asking questions. Questions lead to more questions. Before you know it, you end up having a couple of paragraphs written of your findings (or perhaps pieces of articles on the wall connected by pins and strings), because you got to do something with all the stuff you dug out.

At that moment, you’re not a human being with opinions about the world, but an instrument of need to write and explain, and god help you, you’re going to do it against all the good reasons and advice people throw at you. You keep doing this over and over, until you end up with a column, a blog, a wiki, whatever. You can try to bury what you find, but you can’t bury the need. You’re obsessed. You’re driven by a disease. That’s the germ. That’s a reporter.

Throughout the years, I wrote different blogs. I always had some sort of a graveyard with buried findings. At times I made it a couple of months without digging, but I never really stopped.

By now, you might think I’m writing my justification for some illusions and false confidence I have toward being a reporter. Nah, you got me wrong, sorry. Let me spell it out for you so there’s no doubt: I got a germ. I got an itch. I got a shovel, and if it breaks, I’ll use my bare fingers. I can’t help it. There’s nothing self-righteous or glorious about this.

This blog, or any other I’ll write, will probably die off someday at some corner of the web. Fine with me. That’s not the point, and I don’t think I have one anyway. I just have to dig.

Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools

I’m still looking into the sources of this article, but 404 Media has a good reputation so far:

internal communications reviewed by 404 Media make clear that deals between Automattic, the platforms’ parent company, and OpenAI and Midjourney are imminent.

This is not surprising. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tumblr will be shut down completely within the next 2 years either. Many users are angry, but I guess few will actually do something about it and jump ship.

I need to do something about my mobile layout:

Some fixes are obvious. I can decrease the owl’s bottom margin, preventing the description from splitting (the font might need to be smaller, too). Other fixes are more challenging. I should have fewer buttons, but which to remove or join together? 🤔

Whether you’re fully into the anti-AI movement or not, Reddit’s filing should light some warning lights for you:

We believe we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base…

…Given the value of Reddit’s data in sentiment analysis and trend identification, we believe that there is an emerging opportunity in data licensing. As LLMs continue to grow, we believe that Reddit will be core to the capabilities of organizations that use data as well as the next generation of generative AI and LLM platforms.

Reddit is selling your data and will happily continue to do so, to make more money. Training AI with it is just yet one more way to gain profit from your content.

Credit goes to 404 media (the article is free, but you do need to register):

The long-awaited S-1 filing reveals much of what Reddit users knew and feared: That many of the changes the company has made over the last year in the leadup to an IPO are focused on exerting control over the site, sanitizing parts of the platform, and monetizing user data. The filing says Reddit has already entered into contracts that will pay it at least $203 million over the next 2-3 years for “data licensing” that consists of “allowing third parties to access, search, and analyze data on our platform.

That’s what happens when you use Instagram for news – but is there an alternative? Lot’s of thoughts around this one.

Demoted, Deleted, and Denied: There’s More Than Just Shadowbanning on Instagram – The Markup

Meta declined to comment on why the war photos seemed less likely to appear than other kinds of photos on a hashtag page, despite the fact that they did not violate Instagram’s guidelines on intense, graphic imagery.