Excursions

I find the timeline here on Micro.blog gets overwhelming at times - it’s usually full of conversations that I just can’t make complete sense of without the context. It’s in dire need of some additional views. @manton Pls don’t take the feedback in a wrong way.

It was a slack non-productive post office time today. Binged watched one of those not-so-intelligent but extremely passable shows on Prime - just because my sister thought it would be fun. At times, it’s important to stop thinking and just be with family.

Finally I watched Durkirk. I do not know how I feel about it. Yet.

The weekend rounded off perfectly with a quality family time - a delicious home-cooked dinner followed by a well-fought game of Pictureka. There was eager hooting and rooting. And inane bickering and cackling. With loads of fun. Has to be the best way to embrace Monday ☺️

★ Liked “ Why Is Google Translate Spitting Out Sinister Religious Prophecies? ”

Sometimes, though, it does feel as though the algorithm is channeling uncanny spiritual energies—or even cracking a joke. After all, Google Translate interprets “w hy ar e th e tran stla tions so wei rd” in Somali, for instance, as “It is a great way to make it so much better.”

AI army is getting ready, humouring us up is the first step in their plan.

★ Liked “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me”

My debt was the result, in equal measure, of a chain of rotten luck and a system that is an abject failure by design. […] Like many well-meaning but misguided baby boomers, neither of my parents received an elite education but they nevertheless believed that an expensive school was not a materialistic waste of money; it was the key to a better life than the one they had. They continued to put faith in this falsehood even after a previously unimaginable financial loss, and so we continued spending money that we didn’t have—money that banks kept giving to us.

May be a devisive opinion, but student loan debt is a curse on our society. A person shouldn’t be indebted in attempt to kick start his life.

Throughout my whole life (one I controlled), I have attempted to not be under any sort of unavoidable debt. If that meant me not having or doing a thing that I want to, so be it. I know not all may share this perspective, may be not all can “afford” the life without a form of debt (ironical, but practical), I have been thankful that I was able to put my life on track without falling behind the world around.

The problem, I think, runs deeper than blame. The foundational myth of an entire generation of Americans was the false promise that education was priceless—that its value was above or beyond its cost. College was not a right or a privilege but an inevitability on the way to a meaningful adulthood. What an irony that the decisions I made about college when I was seventeen have derailed such a goal.

Perfect!

• ’’ tags : likes, link, social

🎶 Listening to Lag Ja Gale Se Phir. Extreme soothingness in the background, looking at the games clouds playing outside.

It still surprises me to find that there is no way on iOS to look at the call history by contacts - find when all was a contact or a number was called in the past. It is important many times and only way I see now is infinite scrolling.

★ Liked “Ten Years Later, “The Dark Knight” and Its Vision of Guilt Still Resonate”

Ten years after its release, there is somehow too much and not enough left to say about Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

Of course, because there was just so many lenses this film can be seen through, so many interpretations for every scene playing out on the screen. So what’s this film about? Every thinking mind has his own answer.

And yet it’s hard to look at this movie, made at a time of violent divisiveness in the country over issues of surveillance, of complicity, of violence born of fear, and not see a snapshot of a society — not Gotham’s fictional one, but our own, real-life one — ready to plunge into the abyss of fragmentation, of self-serving chaos. Maybe that’s why Nolan’s film now feels so poignant. Today, it’s hard not to feel that humanity’s worst impulses have won, that those without conscience or shame were allowed to sow endless dissension, hatred, and cruelty, using our own sense of guilt against us.

Interesting way to catch tip modifications by waiters. However, I am always surprised that in this age of digital everything, where even currency has gone digital, we are still forced to depend on scam-prone manual tip checking.

This always used to drive me nuts when different people used different varients of flag (-r Or -R) for achieving same result.

is there some good reason why recursive cp takes -R whereas recursive scp takes -r?

It was until I decided I had to get more information on why and headed out to POSIX manual.

If the -r option was specified, the behavior is implementation-defined.

If the -R option was specified, the following steps shall be taken:

• The dest_file shall be created with the same file type as source_file.

• If source_file is a file of type FIFO, the file permission bits shall be the same as those of source_file, modified by the file creation mask of the user if the -p option was not specified. Otherwise, the permissions, owner ID, and group ID of dest_file are implementation-defined.

• If this creation fails for any reason, cp shall write a diagnostic message to standard error, do nothing more with source_file, and go on to any remaining files.

• If source_file is a file of type symbolic link, the pathname contained in dest_file shall be the same as the pathname contained in source_file.

• If this fails for any reason, cp shall write a diagnostic message to standard error, do nothing more with source_file, and go on to any remaining files.

Since then, it is always -R that I (and most of the people I know) use — after all who likes the unknown behind “behaviour defined by implementation”?

It’s fascinating to think to think that anybody can replicate Facebook, “kill” them; but somebody with mass following can hit them where it hurts most - engagement. Take the engagement out and Facebook struggles for relevance.

Micro.threads Update. Refreshed user discover section to show more information for the recommended users. Can follow directly from the app, with option to open profile at Micro.blog.

Also refreshed the “Explore” section with background enhancement. Want to open this to all soon.

★ Liked “Being the change isn’t enough” by Daniel Goldsmith

It was great listening to @EddieHinkle and @macgenie talk about all things IndieWeb on this episode of Micro @monday. It was nice knowing about the journey of Indiegenous too. A good listen 👍🏽

Though I agree with Sundar here, I think the sentiment is missing the core issue EU raises - “rapid innovation, wide choice and falling prices” is for a market where Google isn’t competing - handsets. However it kills competition to it’s core services.

★ Liked “Software Development” by xkcd

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.

I have been following a daily evening routine these days to refresh my user recommendations. And I have started following so many new people whose updates I was missing out on. Pretty stoked, I think I have got a working system here!

★ Liked “Money Laundering Via Author Impersonation on Amazon?”

Reames said he suspects someone has been buying the book using stolen credit and/or debit cards, and pocketing the 60 percent that Amazon gives to authors.

Reason also for this NYT story?

Email indeed is the perfect, and oldest, decentralised social network for communication. You do not need a particular platform to be part of it. But that is also what makes it terrible. If you can’t control the inlet, it has to flood the house - bring it to stand still.

That’s the one reason that completely negates all the positives for the e-mail as communications platform. So many smarter people have tried making this a usable system. Alas. No success till now. Getting a decentralised platform up and taking it mainstream with its innate complexities is a huge ask, especially amidst the pull of the simplicity of silos. Just look at mastodon.social.

Simplicity matters. I struggled for days explaining to my dad why he need not have a “www” in his e-mail address. And not have a “@” while typing in the webaddress for Gmail. After a point, he stopped using e-mail, nudging me every now and then on why I wasn’t on Facebook where he could just @ me. Apparently, “it’s a closed silo” is not a reason enough.

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.

Update on Micro.threads User Discovery section. Rolled out some performance improvements. Added some context around the user recommendations.