Excursions

★ Liked “Dave Winer on the decrentralized web”

I think the “decentralized web” can’t be anything other than the web itself.

★ Liked “The Outline “slams” media for overusing the word”

It’s all about courting our love of sensation; nobody is really getting hurt.

★ Liked “The conventional wisdom about not feeding trolls makes online abuse worse”

The story of the internet has always been the same story: disaffected young men thinking their boorish and cruel behavior was justified or permissible.

And it was always wrong.

★ Liked “‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI alarmingly wrong ”

“Making real progress in AI requires a public discourse that is sober and informed,” Lipton says. “Right now, the discourse is so completely unhinged it’s impossible to tell what’s important and what’s not.”

I recently received a great feedback and a query from @cygnoir at Micro.blog.

The links you share are so interesting! I especially love that you give a bit of an excerpt. Are you auto-posting these somehow? If so, would you be willing to teach me (or point me in the right direction to learn)?

Yes, I do read a lot of articles on web and share each one I like. And the reason I share them is I want others to read them too. I think it is difficult to convince people just with a title. So I also include an excerpt from the post that may give the readers an idea what the post is about (sample)

For me this usually happens while am on mobile and so it is just isn’t simple to copy and paste. So I have a system worked out on iOS with iA Writer and Workflow apps that allows me to easily post the links with excerpt.

It starts with a template in iA Writer with placeholders for all the relevant sections - date, title, link and content that is to be shared.

--- title : “” date : {date} --- ★ Liked "<a href="{link}" class="u-like-of" rel="like-of">{title}</a>" > {content}

I then have a Workflow which prepares the actual file with this template. I trigger this Workflow from Safari as Action Extension, which runs through the below process.

1. Gets the current URL and puts it into a variable link.
2. Gets the title of the current page and puts it into a variable title.
3. Gets the contents of clipboard and sets it variable content.
4. Gets the current date in required format.
5. Picks up the above template and replaces appropriate placeholders with the actual values fetched earlier.
6. Creates a new markdown file with this content and opens it in iA Writer for further processing. And publish.

This system, though not perfect, works for me currently. I want to simplify it further - mainly using Micropub endpoint. But haven’t got a chance to implement that yet. Till then, I am going to use this one.

I have similar template and Workflow combinations for reply, image, link posts.

title: “” date : 2018-07-28 14:40:00+05:30 —

Time to be on a train, a rail road trip with family is always fun!

Every wardrobe has that one shirt that uncovers itself after many days, from beneath the pile of new, blot-less clothes and mirrors back the reality to you. The reality that you have been ignoring the most important possession of yours, your health. It just won’t fit anymore.

You reminisce when this was part of your go-to attire. When nothing else looked good on you, nothing else suited you, fitted you, this one shirt always did. And now it doesn’t. As if it never was yours.

It hasn’t changed much. You, on the other hand, have.

So now the choice is yours. You either accept the signal, get back into shape. Or ignore it, pay for the consequences later.

I think it is the same with life. And those forgotten habits, those expressions that had made you look good. That had suited you, defined you.

And that one event that makes you realise you have changed enough that they don’t suit you now.

That’s when you choose.

I hate podcasts, because the medium is demanding. It demands so much time from me, demands focused attention to follow along. I wish I didn’t find them so damn useful to keep giving in to the medium’s demands.

But to do so, I have to alter my regular habits to accommodate podcasts in the daily routine. Time that was consumed by music for majority part of my life is taken over by podcasts now. If I have even a minute free, earphones are plugged and I continue what I was listening to. There are times when I question whether the medium actually deserves so much of attention from me.

So every now and then I look and relook at my subscribed podcasts list to decide which podcasts earn their place. I relook at my habits to see what I can change to make this manageable.

• If there is a podcast which I hardly listen to, it’s unsubscribed.
• If there is one whose last episodes I hardly remember, it’s unsubscribed.
• I rarely stay subscribed to podcasts that might talk about the same sets of topics (that means very few tech podcasts).
• I do not want news from the podcasts, I want views, perspectives.
• None with daily episodes. Rather I prefer podcasts that are spread across the week. So if I find that there are multiple (more than 3) podcasts delivering episodes on the same day, few are simply unsubscribed.
• I always listen at 1.2x speed. “Trim Silence” mode is always on in PocketCasts. I do not care of the lost fidelity. I recently tried to let the silence stay on and I felt everyone was deliberately being a slow speaker.
• There is a big reason I use PocketCasts. Overcast is a loved app amongst the tech community and I tried hard to use it. But it just doesn’t respect data usages limits. It either allows to download all episodes every time or not notify about a new episode at all. I, on the other hand, want to look at the episode, read what it’s about and then decide whether to download. PocketCasts’ a lot more flexible.
• I like if the podcasts, especially long ones, do chapters. It’s easier to skip over the topics I just have no interests in.
• I listen to ad reads if they aren’t robotic, if the host believes in the product. That’s least I can do to contribute for their efforts.

So, in one of the recent posts on indiewebifying the blot.im site, I was faced with a roadblock.

I could not find any way to format the published date that gets displayed on the posts. The post properties exposes just , which gets the default format of MMM DD, YYYY. And I do not think it’s a valid ISO-8601 as expected by the microformats2.

Well, I had reached out to David and apparently there is a yet-to-be-documented way.

As per the official document for developers, the standard way to get the post’s publish date is with property { { date } }¹. However, if so inserted, it inserts the date in a default format - MMMM DD, YYYY. Even though it is a format that displays well, it does not provide the complete information on date, up to time level. For the microformats2 dt-published time tag, it is important that the post publish date is inserted as valid ISO-8601. So to do that, just use the below code snippet instead of { { date } }.

{ { # entry } } { { # formatDate } } MM YYYY DD { { /formatDate } } ... { { / entry } }

Make sure you remove spaces in between the curly brackets (refer footnote 1). Wherever the snippet { { # | / formatDate } } is added, it would be replaced by post’s publish date in the format defined in between the tags.

In David’s own words, “any of Moment.js’ date formatting tokens work (formatDate is basically Moment.js behind the scenes)”. So you should be able to customise it completely as per your need.

Given the recent focus on the working on Micro.threads, I hardly had any spare time for working on exploring Blot. Micropub remains a distant dream. In line with the first update, I thought the best way to get going would be to IndieWebify the site first.

So I took some time out today and started with incorporating the basic principles. Some were addressed without much hiccup. Some have left me with some questions.

1. Web Sign In is enabled. However, it did throw a curveball. Given that I already have my primary site active, how can I include rel=me links point to any of the Twitter/Github services? Concern is primary as I cannot link my Twitter/Github profiles to multiple homepage. May have to identify a different unused profile?
2. h-card microformat is incorporated; so the site provides information on me now.
3. h-entry microformat is added to all the post entries. There is one issue though. I could not find any way to format the published date that gets displayed on the posts. The post properties exposes just , which gets the default format of MMM DD, YYYY. And I do not think it’s a valid ISO-8601 as expected by the microformats2.

Stuff to sort out next

• Webmentions, both send and receive. I think I may keep this for later. I do not think I want to bring in the interactions at this point
• Support for different posts types - replies, likes and reposts. I need to be able to add these posts type. However, more I think about it, I come to realise biggest benefit is going to be once Micropub is setup and site is able to send the Webmentions at the least. So even this might take some time.

A wonderful essay on what’s “obvious” to human and how the fallacy that “obviousness is driven by human bias”, which in itself is error prone, can lead to ungrounded, optimistic euphoria, especially around AI.

Knowing what to observe, what might be relevant and what data to gather in the first place is not a computational task — it’s a human one. The present AI orthodoxy neglects the question- and theory-driven nature of observation and perception. The scientific method illustrates this well. And so does the history of science. After all, many of the most significant scientific discoveries resulted not from reams of data or large amounts of computational power, but from a question or theory. (…)

Computers can be programmed to recognise and attend to certain features of the world — which need to be clearly specified and programmed a priori. But they cannot be programmed to make new observations, to ask novel questions or to meaningfully adjust to changing circumstances. The human ability to ask new questions, to generate hypotheses, and to identify and find novelty is unique and not programmable. No statistical procedure allows one to somehow see a mundane, taken-for-granted observation in a radically different and new way. That’s where humans come in.

The essay is loaded with astute observations and arguments, made me thing. A must read.

I had recently started working on updating Micro.threads application to focus on discovery, specifically user discovery. My social interactions on the internet have never been dull or frustrated since I joined Micro.blog. And it can largely be attributed to the extremely fine community of users that exists on the platform.

However, I had also realised that there were a lot many threads, many interactions that I was missing on, because finding new users was still not easy. Discover section exists, but it helped primarily to get new, interesting posts. There was a major section of the platform which could assist me to ease this problem. And that is people I follow and their posts in my stream.

Manton had recently updated the default behaviour of a user profile’s “Following” section to display only “a list of who someone is following that you aren’t following already”. That itself is a huge improvement in identifying new users. But, for me, that too was a bit troublesome. I wanted to focus not just on the follow status, but the interactions; not just focus on whom someone I already follow, follows, but rather whom they interact with frequently.

So it was only just to build a system, first of all for myself that will discover more amazing users that I can follow, that I can interact with and learn from. And so I did.

I have been playing around with the user discovery section of Micro.threads. And I think it will help others too. Just head over to the Micro.threads -> Discover section and give the application a try. You may find it helpful. You may not. But I think the feedback you share would be useful for me, and hopefully to the community too.

I believe this just acts as a placeholder until such discovery features are available in the official app itself. Till then, this would be a playground to identify more ways to discover interesting profiles and threads on Micro.blog.

I have made some key considerations at this point while developing and rolling this out.

1. You will have to sign in with your Micro.blog user id and an app token, which is discarded the moment you log out. I have no intention to maintain any accounts or credentials. I plan to use the /account/signin API from micro.blog in future; for now, app token is the quickest, officially supported way to get going.
2. I haven’t optimised the performance of discover algorithm to the fullest. I plan to get that done that gradually.
3. I am inclined to keep the information shown itself improving, and also add more ways to unearth user profiles and threads.This is just a first version that I was satisfied with and could roll out. I am already working on the threads parsing and discovery which I think will get done this weekend itself.
4. I do not think I can get this perfect or can stay focused without the feedback from you all. So, any and every feedback is welcome.

I had recently expressed an excited opinion on Microsub, the “new” Indieweb spec. I could then see the potential of the standard and also the available solutions, the server and the clients, around it.

I have seen Monocle in action now and realise the power of Microsub standard. I do not think I can read feeds in any other manner now. This is fantastic!

The fact that there exists a hosted Microsub server in Aperture is a great start, it has given a chance to many to get started knowing the standard early. And I know people like Aaron Parecki are hard at work to continue improving the clients like Monocle. However, I think my excitement was premature.

No doubt, the core technology behind Microsub is solid and it can eventually redefine the way feeds are subscribed to and consumed. And bundled with Micropub to post actions of the type like, reply, repost directly to your website right from your reading view makes it absolutely magical.

So I don’t blame myself that I got excited about the standard seeing the potential of what can be achieved when all these Indieweb standards work seamlessly together. Seamless is the key though. For the last few days, I have been trying to use Monocle as my primary feed reader. Unfortunately, the whole system has some way to go before I actually can. I am just noting down the frustrations I encountered using the system.

1. Keeping the read status of the posts in sync is flaky. Many of the posts I have read already are shown again. Some of the posts that should have already popped up are not available for some time. When they finally are, they are available in bulk. If I understand the standard correctly, it is the server at fault here. And it is only a single client involved at this point.
2. Subscribing to feeds with the server is not easy. Not user experience wise, but again in terms of the unreliability of the posts appearing in the stream. At times, there are 0 posts fetched; at other times, there is a bulk of hundreds of posts. It poses a challenge for the client.
3. And to the client. I think we can learn from the available feed readers and focus on the must-have features - which are primarily around showing available posts. Monocle currently cannot be configured to show only the new posts. Filter options are limited. Sorting options are limited. Marking read/unread is unavailable. Subscribing to new feeds is not possible (even though spec has a follow API which I hope Aperture exposes). Few of these might be nitpicking, but they are important when the reference for most new users would be existing feed readers.
4. The concept of Microsub server and client, former for maintaining the feeds and the later for displaying them, sounds great. However, to get people on board, we will need at least one application that does the job of both. Wish Monocle and Aperture were two components of a single application.

I know the standard is still a work in progress, especially the server and client applications. So no doubt there would be some kinks in the working. The intention of this post is in no way to demean the people involved or pinpoint at the failures. My intention is to capture my thoughts on why, even though I want to, I cannot yet use the current applications in place. The standard is making significant headway and I hope I would soon be able to benefit from the system. As Aaron says in his introductory post I referenced above -

My goal with this is to use this as my primary online dashboard to follow all kinds of content, as well as being able to interact with the content without leaving the interface.

Amen to that. Unfortunately, now is not the right time. So I am back to my search for that perfect feed reading service.

I had recently realised the project I had much plan for wasn’t updated since sometime back. So much that for an observer it very well looks to be “potentially defunct”. There are many reasons why I couldn’t push regular updates to this. Priorities at home and at work just didn’t allow me enough time.

However, deep down I knew I just wasn’t satisfied with what I had achieved. I had a huge list of things that I needed to implement and the effort required I thought was huge. But I just couldn’t look at the stagnant progress of this service. I found it useful at multiple times and I know it can be improved so that others do too. So, I have decided to take up the project, small improvements at a time.

To start with, all the threads, mainly from posts featured in discover section and Emoji collections, are up to date. Well, @manton’s hard at work and has already grown the list of Emoji collections. Well, all the Emoji Collections from Micro.blog are available at Micro.threads now. So I (and others) can now get all the recommendations for that one 🍕 parlour or one’s 🗺️ogue.

But there’s more. The huge list of limitations I talked about at the top? Yeah, I have decided to start addressing them small updates at a time. Firstly just by noting them down.

• Threads concept itself is limited. Currently it takes a post id, fetches the conversation (thread) and then pull out all the links and only show these links as a thread.
• Creating thread is a mess and so is updating it.
• No way for external users to generate threads. Keeping threads updated is a chore at this point.

So, I have been back to drawing board, working on the ways I want to address these and present what I have in mind. I have a clear objective with this service. What’s to come has already found its place on the homepage, just as a placeholder for now. I wish I manage to deliver it to my satisfaction, first and fore most. If along the way, it helps the community, well and good.

Back to work.

The recent experiments with blot.im has given the perfect opportunity to explore if I can get a Micropub endpoint created specifically for my needs. Till now, I have been using a custom fork of a endpoint from Pelle Wessman for my Hugo site. It has served me well.

However, I always wished if I could get one written specifically for my simple needs. One that I know and understand every part of. Given that I have no endpoint yet for the blot site, this is clear opportunity to create one geared for making this site micropub enabled. Hugo site will address my third-party-posting needs till then. So here’s the start. I will capture this journey, of course, here and will keep this updated with progress (I hope). Below are the things at this point that I need to get started.

• https://indieweb.org/Micropub#How_to_implement
• https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-python#introduction
• http://dropbox-sdk-python.readthedocs.io/en/latest/moduledoc.html#module-dropbox.dropbox

I want to explore python first as an option to get this implemented. I have come to realise that I do not like Javascript as a language. I can get work with it, but at times the inconsistencies and the constructs get in my hair.

Update: I had sent these questions to David, the developer behind Blot, on the support email address. And of course, given how gem of a person he is, he did address all of them quickly. I am updating the original post with his responses. This dedication of David makes me love this service even more!

I have some questions I need to explore and find answers for some issues in using Blot. Just jotting them down for reference. The list may continuously grow and shrink as I find the answers.

1. What’s going on with \{\{Summary\}\}? I do not think it generates what it says it does - “first line”. It ignores lines with links, it ignores codes in the line. So what’s outputted is something inaccurate.

[David]: You can override summary in the metadata at the start of a file. If you know a little javascript, you can read the rules for how the summary property is generated automatically.

2. Can we override the behaviour of \{\{title\}\}? It is especially important for title-less posts as currently, the file name gets used by default. You need to explicitly set Title: to blank.

[David]: You can also override title in the metadata. However, based on what you are trying to do, I’d make use of the property. This refers to a markdown or HTML title tag in the file itself. For example:

3. Point 2 is also important for posts via just the image files. As of now, it adds the image name as the title. I would prefer not the post to have any title at all.

[David]: I think I have solved this point in #2, please let me know if not.

4. Can we override the behaviour of \{\{\{body\}\}\}? Just want to explore possibility to modify behaviour of URLs of image sources. Currently, relative URLs to blotcdn without scheme are added.

[David]: No, it is not possible to modify body. Please can you explain what you are trying to do? Would you like Blot to stop uploading your images to blotcdn? You can disable this behaviour on the settings page under Images > Cache and optimize images

5. How can we make reference to any Post parameter in a post? If we include the parameter (for example , it gets converted to the title on build? Can we escape the { and }?

[David]: This is not possible right now, it is a bug, I will fix it. Sorry!

A mystery of murders during a “Murder and Mayhem week”, amid “some role-playing and fantasy crime solving”. Now that’s one juicy premise. Alas, a juicy premise is necessary, but never sufficient after all to make a compelling read.

A widower Jane Stewart works as a manager at her ageing great-aunt and -uncle’s storybook resort. Things go awry for her when during her planned Murder and Mayhem week, one of her guests is murdered and the book he had won as part of a scavenger hunt is missing. It is now Jane’s responsibility - not just as the resort manager, but as a guardian to the treasure the book was part of - to find the real-killer and the missing book.

This is such a simple plot that could very well have been penned into a riveting mystery. But it wasn’t. I was so close to give up on this books at one moment - actually that was right at the moment it stopped being a murder mystery and veered into at attempted thriller around a treasure trove. Plot is thin. Writing is barely passable. Mystery is poorly narrated. There just isn’t enough suspense and urgency to hold the reader’s attention. A straight forward story, narrated in an extremely amateurish manner.

A word on the writing first, I think the way the book started was pretty promising. Author Ellery Adams did have a nice plot at her hands. However, the way she chose to present it is so unlike a murder mystery typically is. I wasn’t involved enough to care for anyone who was dead because the characters just weren’t built well. Add to that, a reader was informed, told, that a person was murdered — never shown. For that matter, every thing that happens is told to the reader, not shown. And that’s where lies the biggest fault of the novel.

An inclination from the author to kick start a series by making this much bigger than a simple, cozy murder mystery didn’t help either. All it does is introduce a string of unnecessary subplots and a meandering ending that attempts to set ground for books to come.

A murder mystery needs a meaty plot, strong characters and succinct narration. Unfortunately, this books fails on all count for me. Jane, the protagonist, doubts at multiple points in the book if she is worthy to be the guardian of a family secret; wishes if she had just been a Resort Manager. I, as a reader, wished the same.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Every post I write oftentimes has a link to an external post, either as a reference or as a recommendation. And every single time, I go through this struggle of deciding which word should carry the link. It was so naive of me to think Dave Winer won’t have written about it. Of course, Dave had.

He recently linked to his post on “The Rule of Links”.

Linking is an art. It’s a choice. You don’t link from every word or even every noun, or from the subject of every sentence. But when a reader reasonably would want to know more about the subject, the Rule of Links says you should link to it.

It has to be the word that makes the reader curious with any of the 5 Ws on the topic. But something that is always pestering me at the back of my mind is what does this link communicate to the search engines. Isn’t this link also one of the signals for Google to decide what the outgoing link (the page) is about?

So I believe the first link of this post is correct as per Dave’s rules of links. However, I don’t think that helps a search engine understand the linked page better.

It won’t be a stretch to think Dave believes a writer shouldn’t worry how a search engine reads a post. But given the reality of today’s web, one just cannot ignore how a search engine sees your page.

Also, I am a bit torn on the below perspective.

In the Web, after having visited a link, you can just hit the Back button to regain your context. (An aside, that’s why links that open in new windows are non-web-like.)

On this site, I do adhere to this principle for all the regular posts. However, for link-posts, I do open the post linked from the title in a new window. I do not create such posts just to share the link — for that, I would, well, just share the link on whichever platform. I generally have some comment to make on the post or the section of the post.

So in such cases, I assume the reader visiting my site wants to read my commentary. And I do not want to lose her attention by forcing her out to the linked post. If she has already read the post, great. If she hasn’t, she can do so in a new tab and then come back to the commentary.

Is it really appropriate to open a new tab on a reader’s machine just to not lose that reader? No. Shouldn’t I trust my writing to pull the reader back even if she gets redirected? Of course, yes. However, given our diminishing attention span amid the growing distracting portals all around, how practical is it to assume she will be back?

Recent drama, being termed #SandpaperGate, around Australian cricketers admited to tampering with the ball has raised so many questions. “We play our cricket hard but fair“ has been a pretty common response every time fingers have been pointed at Australian cricketers. And I sided with them more often than not. It is ok to wear aggression on your sleeves —that is till you plain start cheating. All because you think you need to, you have to win. That just doesn’t make any sense.

This win-at-all-cost approach is risky — once you start walking down this path, you eventually lose the sight of what the game is all about. “Spirit of the game” then are just some hollow words you utter every now and then to keep yourself entertained.

As has been so rightly said by Sambit Bal - “this is Australia’s moment of truth”.

It was desperation, Smith said, that drove them to this. But this was about saving a match, not lives. How far elite sportsmen stretch their bodies and mind in search of victory forms part of sports’ intrinsic appeal, but the attendant danger of the win-at-all-costs approach is that it thins the line between ultra-competitiveness and sharp practice.

I still do not understand what desperation Smith was talking about. The series was level 1-1. Australia still has one of the best new ball attacks there is. They have been playing some good cricket in recent times. So what’s there to be so desperate towards a win?

And how stupid was this “leadership group” to think and agree on such brainfart, given there are cameras all around? I really doubt these players are this naive.

I had recently expressed my hope for more people to own their identities online.

There is nothing wrong with attempting to control what you post online, to make sure it stays online till you want it to. I do also realise that it is naive to think no one getting online will find this process irksome. Even though well defined, the (open web) principles are not for all. The simplicity of using and posting on social media services will continue to attract regular users. However, here’s wishing that at least a part of these users are inspired to get their own personal domain.

An innate wish there is that more people would leave the silos behind and get online as themselves, express thoughts that are their own, not mindless reposts and shares, and at the site they control - their blogs¹. At the same time, the hope is the hosting platforms make it simpler to book such places online and get them up and running easily.

I think there has already been a huge improvement on this front. There are numerous platforms, like Wordpress, Ghost and others², that are making it simpler to get your own blogs up and running. They also allow you to link these blogs to your domain without fussing over hosting/maintenance. The promise is simple. Jump in with a free tier — if you are happy and if you want to, just switch to a paid account.

But then comes the million dollars question? What’s the point if what I write reaches no one? If no one reads it or talks about it? If everyone keeps shouting in the void without anyone listening, one better not spend the energy. After all, we are sociable. We like interactions, we want feedback.

RSS is a powerful protocol that could have solved this problem. Unfortunately, that’s what it remained, a protocol³. It needed a system to be built on top to gain any traction amongst masses. That’s where I believe lies an opportunity for Micro.blog. It brings in that social layer to the thoughts you pen on your blog.

You can either host your content there or get your posts from existing blog to the micro.blog timeline. You write on your blog, it’s visible for others on their timeline, just as a tweet or a Facebook post will on their respective siloed timelines.

But it doesn’t allow repost. It does not glorify numbers of likes and comments and followers.

Such behaviours and numbers are the signals for bots to game the machine curation systems. Tristan Harris put this very well during one of his podcasts appearances.

Outrage just spreads faster than something that’s not outrage.

When you open up the blue Facebook icon, you’re activating the AI, which tries to figure out the perfect thing it can show you that’ll engage you. It doesn’t have any intelligence, except figuring out what gets the most clicks. The outrage stuff gets the most clicks, so it puts that at the top.

So what do we do then? As Don MacDonald pondered in one of his posts, is sharing a problem? Shall we just stop sharing?

I doubt that will be effective. It will work when we make it work. We need to take control of what gets presented to us to consume. It cannot be done by a corporate inclined primarily first to maximise its margins. It cannot be done by an algorithm that’s designed to gallop every signal and spit a feed to maximise engagement.

Once we start consuming, reading, healthy, we will think healthy. And we should think. And share, and respond we should. Let’s just make sure it is a space that represents us. A space that one can point to and say that’s my thoughts in there. My social presence, a signature. Let open web be that space.

This is such a feel-good post to cheer one up on how a town in Somerset realised the ill effects of loneliness, isolation had and combated the perceived causes head-on.

The Compassionate Frome project was launched in 2013 by Helen Kingston, a GP there. She kept encountering patients who seemed defeated by the medicalisation of their lives: treated as if they were a cluster of symptoms rather than a human being who happened to have health problems. Staff at her practice were stressed and dejected by what she calls “silo working”.

So, with the help of the NHS group Health Connections Mendip and the town council, her practice set up a directory of agencies and community groups.

Of course, the effects were obvious, there to be seen for all.

Helen Kingston reports that patients who once asked, “What are you going to do about my problem?” now tell her, “This is what I’m thinking of doing next.” They are, in other words, no longer a set of symptoms, but people with agency.

This really made me stop and ponder on where we, as community, have reached. I remember way early in my schooling days I was taught that human is a social animal. Slowly amidst the hustle of the life, driven may be by an overly cynical narrative floating all-around, the definition of being social has completely changed.

I remember when I was living with my parents, we used to plan visits to all our friends and relatives when they were not doing well. I used to question then why should you add misery to their already miserable state by being there and making them host guests. My grandfather had explained once, “They are down, and they need people around them to lift them up — more mentally than physically. Hospitals are only paid to take care of the later. It’s the former that is equally necessary and effective.”

I feel we are being deliberately obtuse to not understand that a dull, shallow “get well soon” message rarely affects. Agree, it may lend a moment of tickle. But it is the social contact that has a chance to heal one completely, not a social message.

The world is full of fascinating minds, with a stream of curious thoughts trickling onto the web - day in day out. I came across another one today by Jamie Thingelstad, a version number for oneself.

Yes, this makes total sense to me. A decade is indeed a major version — a chance to reclaim oneself, it’s ok then if it breaks a few of the regularities that worked for you, and for others, earlier. Your routine, your habits. Your likes and your dislikes. Your looks change, so do your thoughts. It’s new you. Hopefully one who is a better, more mature, more compatible than your last major version.

Every birthday is a minor version up. You attempt to change, just a bit. You are forced to change by the surroundings, just that bit more. But the changes aren’t groundbreaking. They are minor. You are still the same you. With more or less the same maturity and compatibility as your last minor version.

Each day hardly changes anything significant. You patch anything that was amiss yesterday. If everything went well, you just glide along the same. And of course, you do not want there to be a need for too many patches, just more regular stuff. So, a version increment, without too many broken things.

Is this analogy with Semantic Versioning perfect? Of course, not - it breaks if we go into the nitty-gritty details. But that’s not the point.

If we live our life with a hope and an attempt that every patch version fixes something broken, every minor version changes some things for better and every major version brings in more maturity, more compatibility, I think we would lead a satisfying life.

v3.3.162 Release Notes

Dave Winer wrote about Google’s recent strike on non-https sites.

When big companies try to force you to change your web site, say no. The web does not belong to them. Defend the web. The answer to Google is no.

I am torn on this. On one hand, I absolutely hate that Google wants every website owner to go through the hassle of obtaining certificates and enabling https — even if it’s a plain simple text blog. But on the other hand, I realise that it’s too much to expect that regular users understand the technicalities of which sites have to be secure and which are ok if they are not.

Making all sites secure will shift the onus to the site owners rather than the readers. Those who know how to, will find a way to do so. Those who don’t are hopefully with platforms, like Wordpress, that are making it simple to enable https. It can’t be a loss for anyone, can it?

Ben Thompson of Stratechery has published a (another) great post on understanding AMP and the reasons behind its lure for publishers and success amongst users on web. It’s a must read to better understand how (and why) Google is aggressively pushing AMP across its product lines.

And of course, he also talks about the core argument against AMP - it’s an open, but still a proprietary standard from Google. And they are blatantly exploiting their monopoly in search and online advertising while promoting it.

The problem with Google’s actions should be obvious: the company is leveraging its monopoly in search to push the AMP format, and the company is leveraging its dominant position in browsers to punish sites with bad ads. That seems bad!

There is no better example than Google’s actions with AMP and Chrome ad-blocking: Google is quite explicitly dictating exactly how it is its suppliers will access its customers, and it is hard to argue that the experience is not significantly better because of it.

Yes, clearly Google wants to improve the end user experience by giving them a “better, leaner web” with AMP. Are they being monopolistic along the way? Definitely. Uncompetitive? Absolutely.

What happens when protecting consumer welfare requires acting uncompetitively?

Now that’s a loaded question — given that web is spoilt deeply with horrific and utter garbage ads spewed across, what other options remain than such hardball tactics?

I do not believe there is a convincing answer to that yet. I am sure the proponents of the open web, myself included, simply do not like Google’s utter disregard for standards in AMP. There are abundance of examples/opinions on problems with AMP.

What’s worrisome for me though is the fact that Google is markedly focused on elevating AMP’s experience on its own browser and in its own search. What if this experience of the web served by Google’s platforms turns so much better that eventually that becomes the only web user know of?

I recently read a great essay by Michael Harris where he dwells into his present-day struggles to read patiently, the old way. With focus.

Paragraphs swirled; sentences snapped like twigs; and sentiments bled out. The usual, these days. I drag my vision across the page and process little. Half an hour later, I throw down the book and watch some Netflix.

I completely empathise with this. I had realised early last year how difficult it had become for me to read, surrounded by the all-time connected gadgets. A ping here. A notification there. And out I was from my reading flow. Into the swirl of unnecessary, untimely, inconsequential “information” blurbs. What followed was a tap-swipe-scan-stare routine through the varied app icons scattered across the screen. Away from the book, the narrative.

That was also the time when I realised something had to change. First of all, the underserving notifications had to be purged.

Second, I had to start reading in a place where I am not surrounded by any connected device. So I take my kindle, walk to my balcony or to my terrace or to the garden and settle there. Without my phone. Or my iPad. Anyone needs my attention, they have to come fetch me. And I realised I was back to being more earnest while reading. Reading more regularly, speedily. Reading more. Period.

And it indeed is important that I read more for me. I realised the slackness in reading also affected my ability to pen words. I stopped writing. I knew the reason, but Michael puts it perfectly.

In Silicon Valley, they have a saying that explains why an algorithm starts producing unwanted results: Garbage in, garbage out. The idea is that an algorithm can only work with the information you feed it. Aren’t writers — all creators — algorithmic in that way? Our job is to process what we consume. Beauty in, beauty out. Garbage in, garbage out.

So maybe that change into a cynical writer can be forestalled — if I can first correct my reading diet, remember how to read the way I once did. Not scan, not share, not excerpt — but read. Patiently, slowly, uselessly.

I just couldn’t agree more. Fortunately or unfortunately, we are stuck in this information world. There is no steering clear of the frivolous interruptions we are assailed with from all sides. All I want is to pluck the opportunities I grant others to interrupt me.