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Excursions

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★ Liked “re-setting my mental clock” by @ayjay

I have always told myself that I have time to think about what, if anything, I want to write next, but I haven’t really believed it, and I think that’s been due to my immersion in the time-frame of Twitter and other social media.

★ Liked Privacy Policy for ascraeus.org

When you send a webmention to this site, you are explicitly providing metadata in your site’s markup, and this information is used to display your comment/reply on this site.

Webmentions is one aspect I need to call out that I collect information via, even though I do not persist any of the information. I think I may stitch something up inspired by this.

I read this nice article on how being a parent might (or might not) affect one’s writing. It made me think hard if parenting does affect my creativity. I just could not let the thoughts linger. So here’s a response.

h/t @herself

★ Liked “An Interview with Andy Hertzfeld - Architect of the original Macintosh”

We’ve all seen the legendary Apple keynotes and how personal computing has transformed the way we live and work, but what I was really interested to learn from Andy was what it was like to shape that vision from scratch, what it was like to work as an engineer when most people didn’t even really understand what a computer was, when the frontier of what it could become was wide open.

Amy Hoy writes so effortlessly about the web and websites as the internet around was changing. With one plaint to end with.

There are no more quirky homepages.

There are no more amateur research librarians.

It is good premis to explore, but wit such a shitty, linkbaity headline - “How blogs broke the internet”.

All thanks to a quirky bit of software produced to alleviate the pain of a tiny subset of a very small audience.

Blogs didn’t break the internet, it made the internet mainstream.

Not every user is a tinkerer — early natives of the web may have liked the web controlled that way. But most users have stories to tell. Blogs, might be quirky for some, gave them voice. And that’s no “tiny subset”.

Whenever I read a book instead of Twitter for half an hour, I’m like: “Oh yeah! Words can make you feel good sometimes!”

A great read. Defining facts is hard — and hence is writing about and surfacing it. It is not that no one is willing to be “arbiter of truth”, but rather no one can be. So people with agenda keep beating the algorithm with “natural” posts.

★ Liked How itty.bitty works

Good showcase of possibilities. Static goes next level.

itty.bitty takes html (or other data), compresses it into a URL fragment, and provides a link that can be shared. When it is opened, it inflates that data on the recievers’ side.

Article 13, which makes platforms directly liable for copyright infringements by their users — pushing them towards pre-filtering all content uploads, with all the associated potential chilling effects for free expression;

This is terrible — I cannot understanding the reasoning behind such a regulation.

And the commissioners drafting this portion of the directive do appear to have been mostly intending to regulate YouTube — which has been a target for record industry ire in recent years, over the relatively small royalties paid to artists vs streaming music services.

Ah, of course. It’s EU - has to have a Google angle.

So that foldable Surface “phone” running Andromeda OS? Yeah, that was just a concept after all.

The Surface Phone and Andromeda OS have been shelved indefinitely(…)

Microsoft has (had the experience of designing for foldable form factor). It even has right at this moment many of the pieces that could be stitched up to make a Courier. Unfortunately, just having pieces doesn’t mean you can immediately make a whole.

Showcasing and demoing, wooing even, the technology concepts in development is always easy, relatively. Especially to the tech minding folks (I include myself in that) who tend to think forward and imagine the potential use cases for themselves.

But delivering a product with it for masses is difficult by magnitude. I guess however these product are just boring to lend any coverage.

After a bit of playing around, I am still not clear on the purpose and benefit of IndieBookClub. Without aggregating the data from multiple users on all the books, the entries would remain just posts around books on individual sites. Aggregation is the key.

It’s time to catch up on C.B. Strike - second story “The Silkworm”. I like the characters, right from the books. And I had especially liked this plot and presentation from Rowling.

As we move away from the centralised web to the peer web, it’s time to rediscover, re-embrace, and reclaim RSS.

Siri shortcuts are amazing — potentially game-changing. Just default suggestions show the system is learning, suggests actions used frequently on mobile. This could be huge once iOS 12 is public, with app support.

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!

I always wanted to sort out my webmentions and the respective microformats in reply posts. Aaron’s post could not have arrived at a better time. Here’s hoping it comes out the way I want it to.

It turns out that culture is the most powerful force available to us. Culture comes from each of us, from the connections between. Culture isn’t created by presidents, Popes or kings.

Finally got the support for like and reply webactions — have handled the respective microformats. Favourite and replies are two post types that I think are very relevant for microposts.

I was facing an issue with my micropub endpoint while publishing via an external app.

The markdown block quote character “>” gets formatted as “>”. This causes further issues while generating a correct html.

It may be resolved now.

Every time I read about Google Duplex, there is a sense of uneasiness in me. I just can never put it in words. I am not sure what makes me sceptic about the technology. Is it not a useful technology? Or is it the fact that the technology demoed is just too good, sound too useful to be true? I think it is the later.

Google believes in openly demonstrating the things they are working on, the tech they are building. However, they oversell what the tech can achieve; they drumbeat the most ideal scenario without much thought to its ramifications, its pitfalls.

John Gruber, as always, again puts it perfectly in his post on Google Duplex’s latest demo.

I still think the whole thing feels like a demo of a technology (the human-like speech), not a product. Google claimed this week that Duplex currently succeeds 4 out of 5 times at placing a reservation without a human operator’s intervention. That’s a good batting average for a demo, but untenable for a shipping product at Google’s scale. With a 20 percent failure rate, Google would need an army of human operators standing by all day long, to support a feature they don’t make any money from. I’m skeptical that this will ever be a product expanded to wide use, and if it is, it might be years away.

Right now it feels like a feature in search of a product, but they pitched it as an imminent product at I/O because it made for a stunning demo.

Exactly. That completes my thought — it’s the tech that Google markets. Tech, not a product, can be marketed and sold is a fallacy that Google, for some reason, continues to believe.