The Art Of Not Asking Why

I wanted to switch away from Arc to use Edge (work) and Safari (personal). I got hit by several workflow-related problems I didn’t anticipate right away, and today, I’m coming back to Arc bruised…

Feels like I was under a rock for the last two weeks… micro.blog has several new features, and I had no idea until today when I noticed (for the first time) the cross-posting button. I checked the News stream and it feels like I’m in a store jumping from one shiny thing to another 😁

So now, after I wrote about Arc browser and the middleman, and after watching a co-worker implementing a cool workflow in Edge (we’re a Microsoft 365 work environment), I’m considering switching to the old Safari/Edge combo again. @jack , are you still toying around with an Arc hiatus?

I spewed my anger at how The internet is shit, and it’s getting worse the other day. Yesterday, I saw an update video from the Browser Company, the folks behind Arc browser, which is now the primary browser on my Mac. These guys keep teaching their browser new tricks using AI.

While I’m not sold on that idea (more on that soon), their heart is in the right place: keeping Google and its ads and annoying pop-ups out of the picture entirely. In this video showing off the new features, there’s an example of what’s broken with browsing today.

For a while now, I wondered why every page I open starts the same way: a lengthy introduction that looks like a boilerplate of the last one I read, telling me everything I already know. For example, if I search for “how to skip the introduction in web pages,” the first result is a page with a huge header image, and then (ironically) a couple of paragraphs introducing the problem. The actual content starts a third way in, after a couple of ads, because of course. We’re so used to this by now that we can’t imagine a different way. By the way, I used Duck Duck Go to search.

Back in my day… (but seriously, ask anyone over 25), we wouldn’t have so many crappy results flooded with ads. The sites that start with “15 reasons why…” would be labeled as “content farms,” and you’d know to stay away from them; I think some search engines even filtered those out.

The problem, of course, is Google and SEO. Websites make money from Google (usually), and to make the most profit, they need to be at the top of the search results. Once there, the practice is typically to splash you with a couple of ads before you get to the main content to ensure their highest-paying advertisers will be satisfied that their ads made it to your rolling eyeballs before you click away in dismay.

Arc browser wants to get around this with what they call (for now) Arc Explore: " ‘A tool for automating a browsing journey from end to end,’ with the promise that you can ask for information on any subject or question and Arc will scour the internet and use AI to generate a summary with links and information" (from The Verge). I don’t like the idea of using AI because AI can (and will) also be manipulated. We will just end up with “AIO” instead of SEO. It’s fixing a problem with another potential problem. The solution, rather, is humans.

But with humans, we have two problems. First, we’re lazy and don’t bother searching as much as we used to. When did you last search for something with your desktop computer and go beyond the second or third page of your search engine? Do you know - and use - search filters for what you need? Or do you just pull up your iPhone and ask Siri to do it for you?

The second problem is finding human-generated results. Even if there is a place where a bunch of humans have good, thoughtful answers (say, an independent forum of a sort), chances are this place won’t be at the top of the page or even show up at all unless you specifically know what to look for. Reddit is one example that, for the time being, is still working OK (Reddit is full of humans, but how the company is run is a different story), but even results from there can get buried.

Over at geek land, AKA fosstodon.org, I often learn about “digital gardens” or human-created databases. Usually, these are self-made wikis or help pages. Private and personal blogs often have good content about specific (and often hard-to-find) content. For example, consider this post from Hollie about growing out hair. It links to my response, how to care for a blad head. Internet forums are built around the same idea, but finding them today and then finding a specific topic inside these forums is a chore compared to “just Google it.”

Fun fact: there used to be a day when you could ask your librarian to help you search a topic online, and not only they’d help you, but they’d also advise you on how to quote your sources correctly and where to find more information. Today, Google and AI are filling in that role. The big difference is that Sally from your library will not try to sell you tickets to a vacation in Florida when you look for information about mashed potatoes because Sally doesn’t get a dime for doing so. It’s just extra work you don’t care about, and she doesn’t have the time for. But there’s something else important here: human interaction.

When you talk to Sally, you may also notice that there’s an interesting book resting on the counter. You stand in line, and the man in front of you is asking her about Nicholas Cage, which reminds you of an article you read about him the other day, and you might join the conversation. You might also notice that Sally has a cup of coffee from Starbucks next to her, and you’d enjoy sharing a local gem of a coffee shop you discovered the other day that makes cheaper and better coffee.

In the age of productivity and AI, all this “extra noise” is cut off. We don’t need it, so it’s irrelevant (but a vacation in Florida is, apparently). We’re starting to find out how lonely we all feel without these. That’s also what bothers me with Arc and the Browsing Company. The middleman is not the problem; it’s/who/ the middleman is. I understand the enthusiasm, but it’s misplaced.

I don’t want to finish another post on a negative note, so let me remind you that human-generated information is still alive and well - you just need to look harder. You know what? This gives me an idea for a fun challenge. Whenever I search next, I also want to see if I can find a human response by asking other folks. It may take longer, but I’d like to see what the human answer would give me versus the Google/DuckDuckGo one. Why won’t you try to do that with me? We might end up with a bunch of random, interesting questions and answers.

There’s one post I wrote I keep getting back to - the price of privacy. It’s a sad piece I originally wrote on my old blog back in 2020, and I read it again when I get the “something’s wrong with the world” tingle. Last night, I gave it another read.

It turns out one of my privacy heroes, Michael Bazzell (that’s one of the guys behind Mr. Robot, if you’re familiar with the show), has quit making podcasts. His excellent privacy community-led magazine, Unredacted is following a similar fate (there’s a new issue that just came out, but the opening words from him don’t sound very promising).

Coincidentally, I had an article to read from the excellent folks at 404 media, but when I got to it, I was greeted with a sign-in prompt and a paywall. While some of their articles are for subscribers only, which I am, I haven’t encountered many that required me to be a paying subscriber. I usually navigate away from writers on Medium or Substack because I dislike paying to read someone’s blog. To me, blogging has always been by the free Internet and for the free Internet.

404 Media is a different story because what they do is independent journalism, some of the best I’ve seen in recent years (you should try them out if you’re into good investigative tech journalism). So I read up why they decided to block almost all of their content from non-subscribers. The short answer is, AI:

“Requiring an email address to read our articles has, for the moment, stopped our content from being scraped and repurposed by AI. It will also, we hope, serve as a preventative measure against the impacts of the Internet being flooded by all of this AI-generated drek.” The article is long and goes into great details about how and where their content was reused without permission on different sites.

The right to privacy, which for me was always about owning content and the choice to share it, goes hand in hand with the right not to have AI bots scrape your content and spread it all over the Internet. As I said before, the struggle for privacy is not just about about not giving away our emails, phone numbers, articles and images. It’s the fact that we don’t have the option to say no anymore. No one bothers asking us - not really. It’s been this way for so long that when the AI craze came along, it was simply assumed that scraping our content to train it is how things work.

The day when some lawyer will threaten to sue me because I plagiarize my own words you’re now reading from a website that doesn’t even exist at this time is not too far off.

The Internet is shit, and it’s getting worse.

I remember my struggles with trying to keep things private and how hopeless it all felt until I gave up. Only the other day, I listened to some radio dude screaming about how we should stop using Google and how billionaires make the Internet a horrible place. But he’s wrong. It’s not them, it’s us. We are the users. We are the ones that give them power by embracing their products.

It’s so bad there’s no alternative, but most of us don’t even know it. Most folks would stop using Google and go to Duck Duck Go and use its recycled Bing results instead, which are not much better, or hiss at the mention of AI but feed it by using social networks that do just that. It’s the same story about the anarchist at Starbucks who opposes capitalism and types away their manifesto on their flashy Macbook Pro.

I don’t have answers right now, but I’d like to think that poking at this time and time again might lead to some one day.

Cory Doctorow doing what he does best: nailing it:

Pluralistic: I assure you, an AI didn’t write a terrible “George Carlin” routine (29 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

We’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job

Indeed. And:

It’s one thing to hear implausible stories of AI’s triumph from the people invested in it – but what about when AI’s critics repeat those stories? If your boss thinks an AI can do your job, and AI critics are all running around with their hair on fire, shouting about the coming AI jobpocalypse, then maybe the AI really can do your job?

The panic around AI and the generic, overbearing boycott doesn’t do us much good, either. AI is a tool. It can be used for bad, it can be used for good, but most of all - it needs to be used. It doesn’t work on its own.

I was looking into this post about Emacs as a comics reader, and I thought it would be nice to use Emacs as a quick way to check my desktop screen captures I take through the day so I know what to delete. Of-course, Emacs has an answer: the built-in image-mode already does a fine job at going through images in the same folder, scaling the images to fit in the frame or see at scale, and even animated gifs. All out of the box.

A Note from Our Executive Director: 2023 and my personal quest for software freedom

I’ve had to decide to make an unfair moral choice: do I maximize my chance of surviving with my heart condition, or do I allow installation of proprietary software in my body?

This is a fascinating story from a FOSS activist who had no choice but to have a proprietary heart monitor placed. No one (doctors, techs, hospitals) was able to “log in” and get the data they needed for her heart.

The Pixel 8 Pro can now read body temps, if you swipe it across your face arstechnica.com

Look, I’m not saying it’s not nice to have your phone do that for you, but, aren’t there enough things that our phones do for us? There aren’t even phones at all anymore.

The last week has been meh.

The weather makes me think I’m in London, even though I’ve never visited. It’s been endlessly gray, and I don’t remember the last time we had a sunny day.

There’s work. Nothing too bad in that department, but it’s been a lot of the same in different ways.

My insomnia has been hitting me hard this week, costing me two days of exercise. It makes me feel more like an ooze or jelly than a person 🥱, and I hope to make up for it today. I want to visit a local gym again, and if they work out their prices for me, maybe I’ll have a place to run again. I miss it, but not to the point of winning over the motivation to run outside in the cold and dump gray.

Even my journal is waiting for me to finish the last couple of pages so I can start a fresh Notebook (I finally got a Leuchtturm 1917) 📕, but there was nothing worth writing about.

I’ve made a couple of changes to my Emacs workflow recently (see the posts from the last couple of days; they are a bit scattered around). The biggest change is switching from weekly files to two project files, work and personal, and scheduling those for a range of days instead of a specific time during the day. So far, it’s been working quite well. I’m going through my Emacs settings again, and I think that maybe this time, I’ll finally get to upload it to GitLab to share with other folks. About time after what, five years now?

I do have a couple of ideas that I’m working on, but the meh kept getting in the way, you know?

Soup. My brain’s telling me I need to make some good hot soup 🍜. Not a bad idea.

“Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et dis-tinctam formamus ideam.” Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl 📚

Tried to write an org file and push it to my repository instead of using my wiki, but I ran into an issue with Denote. It doesn’t populate the list of notes (dynamic blocks) as it should. It seems Denote doesn’t “see” my org files at all. Unfortunately, I can’t look into this now because work. bleh.

Sometimes I can’t sleep. Or rather, I can’t go back to sleep. This has been a constant theme in my life for a couple of years, and this morning, I realized it’s a problem I need to address.

Quick math estimates roughly 30 to 60 million adults develop chronic insomnia in the US alone; this is based on several online sources that say roughly 10% of adults develop chronic insomnia, while a couple of research papers point to Manifestations and Management of Chronic Insomnia in Adults, which says “Approximately 40 to 70 million Americans are affected by either intermittent or chronic sleep problems, representing approximately 20 percent of the population.”

Most people usually fall asleep later than they should. This YouTube video from Health Triage speaks about an experiment where it was found that a group of people without technology and other modern interruptions would go to sleep before 10 PM, getting about 7.5 hours of sleep; this is in contrast to the little over 5.5 hours of sleep people in the US get, on average.

I counted at least six posts in this blog discussing lack of sleep. My journal and personal notes triple this number easily. On average, I have one sleep-deprived day a week, often two. Because it happens so often, I’ve also developed an unhealthy habit of “forced” sleep when I wake up because I know what lack of sleep leads to. This doesn’t help.

Being sleep-deprived sucks. I start my day at the same hour, but pretty soon (an hour or so), I hit a mental “soft cotton” cushion, which makes everything murky and slow. My lack of motivation to tackle projects, which is already lacking in general due to what falls under the umbrella of ADHD (interesting take in this study), turns into active resistance. For example, I need to argue with myself for 10 minutes just to be able to open an email.

In addition, I become more irritated by sudden noises or bright lights (similar effect to having a hangover). I avoid communicating with people and want to be left alone (being “grumpy”). Besides being rude toward people close to me, this also affects my ability to communicate at work. If I push myself (which I must), I often forget facts, misspell or mispronounce words, or even blank out mid-thought. Besides work and personal connections, I also don’t exercise or go for walks when I don’t sleep (I often exercise as soon as I wake up from a nap though), which in turn makes me feel lazy and guilty, another life “feature” I struggle with more often than not.

Because of the negative effects and how long this has been going on (the definition of chronic insomnia, for example, calls for at least three months of continuous issues; I’m probably somewhere in the 2-year mark at least), this is something I need to address head-on. I can’t just keep venting about it and hope it will disappear.

I’m aware of CBT treatment (some of this I’ve been doing with therapists) and sleep hygiene, the latter of which I don’t do well enough. I’m capable of falling asleep pretty fast, thankfully, and I should go to bed earlier, but I don’t. This is probably the first thing I should start doing immediately.

Other sleep hygiene-related things include drinking non-caffeinated tea at around 19:00 as a symbol (the last drink of the day) and possibly as a placebo. I should exercise at noon instead of afternoons (mornings are too busy) and finish by meditating for longer periods. Living in NYC means noises from inconsiderate jerks can and will happen (fireworks, motorcyclists revering their engines, construction noises), but I found that I can fall asleep despite those most of the time.

I’m also going to seek out a “sleep doctor” who might help me shed more light on this problem. Possibly looking into some homeopathic medicine as well, as it usually comes without side effects. For now, I’m going to try to nap… and edit this post when I wake up.

I feel much better now after a nap. Napping is not always an option, and it doesn’t always work. I’ve had days when I napped twice, even three times throughout the day. It’s a skill I’m developing (I keep waking up and convincing myself back into sleep if I can).

The research I did earlier into sleep centers did not yield good results. The few places I found have bad reviews. Generally, I’m trying not to look for a therapist for help since this is an option I’ve applied in the past a couple of times, and I know more or less where it leads.

This is one of those things I have to take the long-term approach, mixed with other areas of my life. Sleep hygiene should be a routine that ties into exercise, eating, and even social habits. On my wiki, sleep is one of the four elements of life, even though I still need to put that article up.

Does anyone on Windows want to try out Arc Browser (Beta)? They opened it up for today. I’ll need your email address.

I’m the proud owner of several cute owl logos for my site and wiki, thanks to Andy. The question now is, can I display one image for the microblog timeline (my current one), but a different one as my blog’s logo? @help

Piracy, preservation, and the devs who don’t mind if you have to pirate their game

“The video game industry started essentially mimicking Hollywood,” says Cifaldi. “There’s basically five companies that own everything now. That sucks in a lot of ways”.

It’s no longer about stealing (how can you steal something you can’t really own is another problem), it’s about losing games that won’t exist without piracy.