I'm often convinced most humans are incurably moronic.
I mean, I know I'm likely being unreasonable by mapping actually witnessed/experienced behavior onto the masses. But certain idiocies just plain seem to happen incessantly. Here are a few coming mind that regularly have me rolling my eyes just before closing them and slapping my forehead whilst forcibly - and audibly - expelling breath:
- There are two cars on a road. The one in front is driving over the speed limit. The other is less than a car length behind it repeatedly veering slightly into the other lane. They're both in a "passing zone". But the car in back stays there putting on their show of impatience as though what ought to happen is the car in front go as fast as the driver of car in back thinks they should - which of course is infinity miles/kilometers per hour.
Last May, Mastodon server Kolektiva.social was compromised when one of the server’s admins had their home raided by the FBI for unrelated charges. All of their electronics, including a backup of the instance database, were seized.
It’s a chillingly familiar story which should serve as a reminder for the hosts, users, and developers of decentralized platforms: if you care about privacy, you have to do the work to protect it. We have a chance to do better from the start in the fediverse, so let’s take it.
A story where “all their electronics were seized” echoes many digital rights stories. EFF’s founding case over 30 years ago, Steve Jackson Games v. Secret Service, was in part a story about the overbroad seizures of equipment in the offices of Steve Jackson Games in Texas, based upon unfounded claims about illegal behavior in a 1990s version of a chat room. That seizure nearly drove the small games company out of business. It also spurred the newly-formed EFF into action. We won the case, but law enforcement's blunderbuss approach continues through today.
I like to return to Kandinsky's observation in Point and Line to Plane that simple visual elements take short time to perceive, while complex elements take longer time. The point is instantaneous, as is the staccato note, appropriately written with a dot under or over the note head. A line takes some time to follow with the eye, longer the more wiggly it is.
In fact, we are capable of taking in complex stimuli and making sense of them even in a brief glimpse, at least at a crude level. As you enter a museum, a few seconds of looking around might suffice to categorise works as painting or sculpture, assess their complexity, style, and probable epoch, and to decide whether it might be worth taking a closer look at the works. Similarly, a few tenths of a second of sound is often sufficient to identify a musical genre, sometimes even to recognise which song it is. The blasé visitor at a gallery show opening might inspect the room rapidly to find that there is nothing insteresting there, so better rush off to the next opening across the street. Certain art, minimalist works in particular, might not reaveal more about themselves the longer you stare at them, but some works of art benefit from sustained scrutiny.
I've been using Pocket since it was called Read it Later.
Pocket's origins are in the world of "Web 2.0" and RSS readers, a time before smartphones when blogs and RSS readers were the hot thing. It's been hugely useful to me over the years, so much so that I've published no less than three separate open source projects for managing Pocket collections via their API.
But Pocket's limitations have become increasingly obvious over the years. Earlier this year I took another look at Zotero, an open source reference management tool, and realised with sudden clarity that not only could I use Zotero instead of Pocket, but that it was really much better suited to what I wanted from a "read it later" application. I told myself I'd stop saving things to Pocket and save them to Zotero instead using the browser plugins and mobile app. Eventually I'd read everything in my Pocket "saves" and switch.
I'm in the process of adding manpage support to smolver, my Gemini server, and I've found the easiest way to do so is to simply refactor the main project README markdown file in such a way that when handed off to pandoc, the format looks like a typical manpage, no changes needed. This approach will save me from having to maintain separate documentation moving forward, and lets me kill two birds with one stone (both of which are on the project backlog): provide a manpage and cleanup the documentation (it was getting a bit unwieldy to read).
okay so Elon is definitely just running Twitter into the ground huh. okay
It's fascinating to me that the Gemini *protocol* magickally - i.e. by way of enough people talking about it as though it were so - becomes Gemini as a place/space, complete with people talking about content being "in [or - sometimes - 'on'] Gemini". And once enough beings obsessed with the notions of right/wrong believe it's literally a place/space, it starts making sense to them to discuss what content should/shouldn't live therein. And from there it morphs even further into being a mindset/attitude, from which emerges a seeming morality.
And (this is going to be intentionally hyperbolic for emphasis), since that's what a majority of people using the protocol seem to believe, it makes sense (per the right/wrong thingie) to them to consider those in compliance with that morality "good", and those who aren't "evil".
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
