Excursions avatar

Excursions

On my journey towards embracing IndieWeb, achieved - identify via microformats2, IndieAuth enabled, webmention addressed - receive and send mentions and of course, micro.blog syndication. Couple of open items - significance of h-entry for posts, way to process and display incoming webmentions.

Experimentation continues with IndieWeb projects — over to Webmentions. It is a really wonderful concept which enables responses to a post to be written on one’s own website. As Jeremy Keith wrote in one of his posts:

Basically, it’s an equivalent to pingback. Let’s say I write something here on adactio.com. Suppose that prompts you to write something in response on your own site. A web mention is a way for you to let me know that your response exists.

Even better, and simpler to follow explanation is put out by Drew Mclellan detailing what’s involved in implementing webmentions.

The flow goes something like this.

  • Frankie posts a blog entry.
  • Alex has thoughts in response, so also posts a blog entry linking to
  • Alex’s publishing software finds the link and fetches Frankie’s post, finding the URL of Frankie’s Webmention endpoint in the document.
  • Alex’s software sends a notification to the endpoint.
  • Frankie’s software then fetches Alex’s post to verify that it really does link back, and then chooses how to display the reaction alongside Frankie’s post.

The end result is that by being notified of the external reaction, the publisher is able to aggregate those reactions and collect them together with the original content.

I have got the webmentions (and pingbacks) enabled here — over to testing now. So there you have it. This post is also an attempt at sending a webmention.

Today has really been extremely productive. I have got many of the things sorted out. Posting from a workable CMS (thanks Netlify CMS), crossposting to twitter and of course to micro.blog. Delighted!

Exploring the option to enable an editorial process in CMS. So that a draft can be saved first before it is published. This will be a nice option to have for longer post.

Interest behavior. Understood how it works. It satisfies my needs. A post passes through multiple stages. For me, only important stages are save and publish. Trying Ready anyway.

Managed to solve the problem with avoiding issue with including title for microblog in crossposting. Solution? Of course, involved fixing the RSS feed — relevant even today.

It’s been about 6 months now that I got my static site up with Hugo. Pretty satisfied with what I’ve got running. However, though I am digging posting on mobile as git commits, I’ve been in need of a lite, static CMS. Exploring Netlify CMS.

Problem I am currently facing with Netlify CMS is it defaults to the title as filename for a new post. I do not want to use any for the journal entries, especially to keep crossposting simple.

I am since long fascinated by IndieWeb and multiple projects the guys are working on. One project that recently got me hooked is micro.blog. I have since been working on different feeds to get a custom microblogging of my own. The concept is great. And so looks the implementation. Time for some experiment.

How Dark Patterns are employed by health insurers

Dark patterns, dark algorithms, dark user experiences, what is that? You might ask. I will define them as the following for this piece:

Dark pattern - anything designed for malintention

Dark algorithm - an algorithm that is designed as a dark pattern

Dark UX - a user flow on the internet that is designed as a dark pattern

All of these patterns are designed intentionally, or if not, are the act of serious neglect. It was also super hard to aggregate these as recurring issues because there is no central place to discuss these issues and their prevelance, since sickness is taboo.

Ok cool, so how do these manifest in health insurance, you might ask?

Another reminder that businesses and their owners are inclined, or even at times duty-bound, to maximise the earnings for the stakeholders. Every day, the boundaries on what should be perceived as morally corrupt just get pushed farther.

It’s a troubling trend then that we are training the machines to do the same for us — imparting intelligence to maximise benefits for organisations who build these AI systems. A fascinating thread this that captures the fallouts of such training purely geared towards such optimisations.

Book Review: Origin by Dan Brown

A mystery thriller — what do I expect from a book that categorises itself as that? A deep, dark mystery to start with. Woven into a tight, intriguing plot. A protagonist as bemused as the reader about the main plot, but a lot smarter to overcome the clues and riddles en route. If it’s a Robert Langdon mystery, I am trained now to expect a bit less of the later. Of course, with abundance of information on art - the artists, the structures, the paintings - delivered as riddles relevant to the overarching plot.

Unfortunately, Origin fails on all counts for me. The mystery it intends to solve is too thin — the plot is stretched too long. It isn’t even a good Langdon story. All our polymath symbologist is made to do throughout is sit through the tiresome travelogues and some bootless scientific blabber. All in hope of an earth-shattering reveal — unfortunately even that fails to be one.

Langdon is flown to Bilbao, Spain by his old student Edmond Kirsch to witness his presentation with potentially far-reaching effects on the religions all around the world. And of course, humanity too. He has already unnerved a set of prominent religious figures by a special and exclusive preview of his discovery. “Where do we come from? Where are we going?” The enigmatic billionaire futurist has the world’s eyes with a promise to answer these longstanding questions. But a brain-washed assassin throws the world into disarray by eliminating Kirsch. Only hope rests, then, on Professor Langdon and the bold & gorgeous sidekick, Ambra Vidal, to uncover their friend Edmond’s discovery.

There are a lot of subplots involving, of course the brainwashing of the assassin and his quest to stop the protagonist duo on run, the family feud in monarchy and the struggle of the Guardia Real on whom and what to trust. And then their is Edmond’s most prized invention, his own personal Jarvis - the AI assistant Winston.

In short, there is a lot going on here. But it is presented in a bloated form where nothing captures reader’s attention or gets his pulse rising. All plot twists are easy to see miles ahead. The chapter-end cliffhangers just tend to delay some trivial or glaring surprises. Same applies to the now-renowned Brown template of holding back from reader a specific information that character owns. I admit it might be a style of keeping readers intrigued. But when the substance is not meaty, one just feels cheated. And finally the ending is anticlimactic — feeble, obvious and noncommittal.

What about the knowledge sharing sessions of Langdon, you may ask? Yes, there are a lot. And I have been forthcoming in my dislike for the irrelevance of them. This is what I had said in my review of Inferno. “Many a times, the novel reads as Brown’s travelogue of places during his research, just there to increase the page count.” That hasn’t been fixed in here too. Rather it has gone worse. In Inferno, at list the flabby travelogue were towards solving a clue. Here the sessions are just feckless, as Langdon wanders on, contemplating.

With Origin, Brown intended to take on a strong idea — about creation and destiny. About God’s existence. A deft rigidness while editing could well have turned this into terse, riveting story. Alas, it wasn’t to be.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars