Another Emacs org-mode re-discovered feature as I’m improving my workflow:
Org-agenda is org-mode’s search engine. I include user names as metadata in work-related tasks.
to search tags & properties: C-c a m. For properties though: <name of property>: "<value>"
This morning, I finished my first written journal 📓 in around 20 years.
I started writing in it in 2013 and at some point I switched full-time into digital journaling (it was TiddlyWiki at the time if you’re curious). I’ll probably start my next written journal at some point this weekend. Here’s a picture 📷 of it:
The internet is shit, and it's getting worse
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.
My
Another thing I enjoy doing with Emacs org-mode is my habit of watching movies. Emacs reminds me it’s time to watch a good movie in a range of every three days to 10 days. When I watch a movie, I write the title and the year down and reset the clock - which will remind me to watch a movie again in 3 days.
On Emacs, it looks like this:
This is a habit graph. Each rectangle represents a day. The asterisk is when I watched a movie last; the exclamation point represents today. The green bar represents the time range (3 to 10 days), with the last day being in yellow, reminding me it’s the last day to complete the habit before I’m “in the red.”
So, in this case, I have today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow to watch a movie before I’m “in the red” for this habit. Don’t worry! It won’t happen.
When you open this habit up, you can see a list of the movies I watched and when:
Nifty.
Cory Doctorow doing what he does best: nailing it:
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 📚