Category: Internet

[…] the Rands Leadership Slack is the most impactful thing I’ve built outside my family and job.

I can testify to the Rands Leadership Slack being an impactful thing. I’ve joined it a long time ago and more or less everything I know about engineering leadership I’ve learned there. I’m eternally grateful for all the hard work the people there put into making that a nice place to be.

https://randsinrepose.com/archives/just-hard-work

Hans de Zwart’s end of the year media overviews are one of the highlights of what still happens on personal blogs for me. He’s a voracious reader and one of the rare people who acts on his moral clarity. Also, Hans is a great guy and I had the chance to briefly catch-up with him last year.

I’ll see if I can pull something together, but definitely go through his list. I always pick up more than a couple of interesting things to explore.

The books I read, the podcasts I listened to, the films and other culture I saw in 2024

Here’s Simon Willison writing about how he approaches his link blog.

I do something along similar lines here. I share links to various things that I find interesting and try to add what I think is interesting about them. From here I then schedule posts to Bluesky, Mastodon and LinkedIn using Buffer.

I’m not sure who reads my stuff here but I know for sure that people see the exhaust on those platforms. The main reason why I blog them here is to have my own repository of knowledge and links for if I ever have to refer back to it. For that I annotate things in a way where I hopefully can find it again and use site search to find ‘that one link about X I shared a while back’.

So yes, WordPress works just fine as a personal knowledge management system.

Old people’s brains have been entirely cooked by the slop feeds that Meta produces. No parent worth their salt would trust these people to protect their kids. The EU should follow suit.

the law may infringe on the rights of young people and reduce their ability to participate in society

Since when is being spoon fed the worst advertising and content created by awful people looking to make a quick buck “participating in society”?

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/29/meta-australia-social-media-ban-response

Seeing if I can move from Arc to Vivaldi but there are half a dozen radical improvements in Arc that *make* the experience. It just shows how much innovation and solid thinking was packed in all of that frivolous design.

Vivaldi on the other hand has a million settings which mostly show that nobody knows wat this app is supposed to be doing. There are entire note taking apps and e-mail clients in there but none of them fun or nice to use.

Products truly live and die in the pixels.

So long Ribbonfarm!

Ribbonfarm retiring is another such ending in a time rife with them. I can’t overstate how influential it has been on my (our) thinking and practice. Tremendously impressive to think all of that was thought up by one person (who I still haven’t met).

It’d be impossible to summarise all the themes, intersections and other tidbits that I got out of Ribbonfarm. I can say how it begun: I was lying on the river-shore in Avignon in 2012 and I had a large part of the blog’s back catalog in my Instapaper and there I read the entire thing while listening to the crickets.

Ribbonfarm is Retiring
Moving out of Rue de la Teinturiers. I will miss the racket.

MySQL encoding mistakes corrupting data in this decade?!?

Turns out I hadn’t noticed my hosting provider Vimexx has their MySQL databases on latin1 coding and this blog was running on that happily corrupting data.

Given how common an occurrence this is—MySQL very regularly will throw your shit into the street and set fire to it—I had expected there being scripts or resources to fix this. Of course nothing was to be found anywhere.

I asked the Mastodon MySQL expert who did have a resource on the exact problem: https://blog.koehntopp.info/2020/08/18/mysql-character-sets.html

The way I fixed it was a bit more manual than I’d have liked but where I got is good enough and I’m not sure I’ll go for anything perfect:

Go to the phpMyAdmin and audit all the database tables.

My tables are in a mix of InnoDB and MyISAM which seems to be weird but not really problematic. I also had some Yoast tables that were lingering there which I dropped.

Find the setting and convert all tables and their columns to the collation utf8mb4_unicode_ci. A collation implies the utf8mb4 character set that is its prefix so you don’t have to change the character set.

Now all your stuff is in UTF-8 but because of a coding error a lot of your content is messed up. A unicode character can be more than one byte but in latin1 each character can only be a single byte. So if your unicode character is two bytes, they are interpreted as two latin1 characters which is why you end up with stuff like “î“.

Maybe there would have been a clean automatic way to convert the data, but I felt it was fiddly enough as it was, so I opted for a manual fix. I identified where the corruption happened:

  • wp_posts columns post_content and post_title
  • wp_comments column comment_content
  • wp_usermeta column meta_value

Then I just ran queries to fix all the mismatches:

ü → ü
Ãœ → Ü
é → é
É → É
ÄŸ → ğ
Ç → Ç
etc.

Luckily in almost all cases the wrong coded string is unique and can simply be replaced with the right character.

Check if a string is in the column:
SELECT post_content from wp_posts where post_content LIKE BINARY '%Ç%' and post_status='publish'

Later on check for specific characters and their environment in what can be very long post bodies:
SELECT SUBSTRING(post_content, LOCATE('Ã', post_content)-15, 40), post_content from wp_posts where post_content LIKE BINARY '%Ã%' and post_status='publish'

Replace the wrong string sequence with the correct character:
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'Ç', 'Ç') WHERE INSTR(post_content, 'Ç') > 0

After some hours of auditing and pounding SQL most of the things should be fixed and whatever’s left I can live with.

Conclusion

The moral of this story is that the entire complex of WordPress/PHP/MySQL is a pile of shit that should be burnt off the face of the planet. The fact that we can have these kind of encoding issues in the year 2024 shows what an absolute joke these systems are. Especially with the Mullenweg meltdowns, anybody who can get out of WordPress should do so.

This blog hasn’t received a comment or other bit of interactivity in years so I think I could also rip all the content (effectively just two columns in wp_posts) out and host it on something that’s statically built. No reason to pay for a shit hosting provider like Vimexx anymore either.

It’s become fashionable in tech circles to say that all legislation is bad. This is a dangerous and wildly ignorant way of thinking. Without legislation, many people would not survive and the very things that we depend on for a good life would not exist.

The Verge gets this right in their endorsement because they’re some of the smartest people in tech reporting.

https://www.theverge.com/24282022/kamala-harris-endorsement-presidential-election-2024

Krasse Links looks like yet another collection of links but the German wall of text notwithstanding, it’s a remarkable act of curation and contextualisation. Remarkable and unique for sure in Germany.

There are very few people here who have the desire and skills to be able to look beyond the borders, beyond the Tellerrand, and who feel that what the German state and establishment press and media serve you is simply not good enough. I’d be hard pressed to suggest anything at the same level as what Michael Seemann here and any German interested in the intersection of technology and politics would be well served to read this newsletter.

Krasse Links No 27.

A damning but also entirely correct assessment of Elon Musk:

How degrading it must be: a 53-year-old man, notionally responsible for five companies, endlessly jostling for empty, phatic interactions with strangers. A clown forced to play for an audience he despises, an audience he cannot be sure even exists, and which gains with every tasteless joke a clearer understanding of what he is really worth.

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2024/09/how-elon-musk-killed-twitter

A third truth is that we have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer. Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need, and deserve, more.

The experts agree that kids need to be cared for better. The experts also agree that people like Haidt are grifters who do not contribute anything into that direction.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2

Threads works functionally but as a product it’s very bad. As this article mentions being on Threads is a slow-motion exercise in going insane. Threads actively disables many things that make microblogging work and for the rest of the experience there’s very little thought that went into it other than “let’s make a text-based Instagram and see what happens”.

Threads makes Mastodon feel engaging (and that’s saying something).

https://maxread.substack.com/p/threads-is-the-gas-leak-social-network

I would be the last to ever watch anything by Lex Fridman, but TikTok has been feeding me clips from his interview with Bassem Youssef and I can’t help but be impressed. Fridman does a decent job interviewing but of course the conversation is carried by Youssef, who is nothing short of a treasure.

I found a new German podcast crush in Hart Unfair which is my favorite format: three people (Anna Dushime, Yelda Türkmen and Ari Christmann) rambling through one another but in a way that’s funny, intelligent and diverse. It’s a shame that they publish so irregularly that I can’t tell if the podcast is dead or not.

One of the hosts dropped a casual Hasan Piker reference (in a conversation about pop culture and leftist politics) and… I didn’t even know there were Germans who know who that is.

https://www.instagram.com/hartunfair/

The comments online around the Apple Vision Pro have been pretty deranged in a stupid kind of way. Lots of people jumped to the foregone conclusion that Apple released a failure or that it “wasn’t going to be a success”. Most of that seemed to have been motivated by clout chasing.

I don’t think that really matters that much other than serving to have the person making the comment show their ass for the entire world to see.

I feel that Apple Vision Pro is a deeply interesting and conflicted technology which is also the conclusion that Cortex reaches here. You’ll notice that Grey and Myke actually used the device and they are fairly knowledgeable about apps and ways of working/playing.

I got to take one home for a weekend and I can testify similarly except for missing out on a bunch of features. Because it’s only out in the US, I could not access a paid App Store or get an Apple Arcade subscription. That means I could only get the free vision apps out there which are incredibly lacklustre.

What everybody seems to have done is to take whatever IP they had lying around, wrap it into a VisionOS starter project and throw it onto the App Store. That will probably be the modus operandi for a while going forward. If you look at the absolute dregs on the App Store and now realise that making a good VisionOS app is probably at least 10x as difficult as making a good iOS app, then things are not looking good.

The only really compelling experience was the Encounter Dinosaurs app which is genuinely disconcerting and scary. But because of its very high production values, it’s also only a couple of minutes long.

Most compelling is using the Vision Pro to consume media. Watching movies in Disney+ is a fantastic experience if the device wasn’t so uncomfortable to use. Being able to watch sporting events on a massive screen with sidecar screens and 3D views of the course/track seems like it would also be excellent. It would be even more interesting if we would see a proliferation of 360 cameras to be able to place yourself in a Formula1 car or on a sports pitch. The amount of embodiment it yields, seems like it could go a long way to make remote meetings feel more real.

I agree with this review that this device is a devkit. I’ll wait for the real deal.

Listened to the latest episode of the German eGovernment podcast with the Minister for Digital for Bavaria. That is the state here that’s seemingly the farthest along when it comes to digitalisation and it now has the following ambitious plans:

  • to have internet reception everywhere
  • to remove fax traffic inside the state government by 2026

And then I switched it off because I don’t think anything good could come after that.

https://egovernment-podcast.com/egov165-100-tage-digitalminister/

Learned in this podcast episode about class justice in Germany something rather remarkable.

Germany has a system of income dependent fines called Tagessätze. These are meant to make punishments more equitable by making people who make more money pay more.

It turns out (and I’m sure very few people are aware of this) that courts do not get access to tax records to determine the fine base. They take a guess at the income and most of the time, they guess too low.

The most vocal people in progressive/critical technology don’t have kids (for various reasons) and as such also have zero empathy for the real problems people deal with.

Not everybody has infinite time to deal with broken government institutions or solder all their stuff together from scratch or waste countless hours debugging some free software device.

Or maybe even worse: Lots of men in tech have kids and a stay at home wife who frees them up to engage in every kind of side-project and hobby.

It’s much healthier for Germany if digital issues have an answer that goes beyond “Let’s see what the CCC has to say!” The CCC is a shady organization which is good at taking things apart but does not have that much constructive to offer.

A broader social discussion would reveal that security and privacy are not the only two dimensions on which digital solutions can or should be measured.

https://www.golem.de/news/37c3-der-hackerkongress-fast-unter-ausschluss-der-oeffentlichkeit-2401-180837.html

Late to the party but I very much love this interview with Karri Saarinen, the co-founder of Linear. Their way of working, “The Linear Method”, will be waved away by companies (“we can’t do that because…”) but with leadership with the right mentality and experience I don’t think it’s that far off at all. Ask your leadership how you can work like this.

Also I already know I’m going to use the term “side quest” a lot.

We don’t use Linear but we recently moved all our stuff from Jira to Github Projects which—even though it is mostly abandoned—is Linear-enough.

Most importantly, it is right on top of our codebase which is where I believe all engineering work should happen anyway.

The last episode of Spaßbremse treats the history of German-Israeli relations and clarifies what the strategic foundations of the current complex are: white-washing and moral standing for one side and economic reparations and industrial capacity building for the other.

The thinly veiled racism and colonialism is just the rotten cherry on top.

https://podtail.com/de/podcast/spassbremse/52-whitewashing-and-statebuilding-german-israeli-r/

Geertz’s theory of involution holds that a greater input (an increase in labor) does not yield proportional output (more crops and innovation). Instead, a society involutes. The Chinese term for involution, neijuan, which is made up of the characters for “inside”and “rolling,”suggests a process that curls inward, ensnaring its participants within what the anthropologist Xiang Biao has described as an “endless cycle of self-flagellation.”Involution is “the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless,”Biao told me.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/chinas-involuted-generation

A small online drama in three parts

Suppose you’re a well-known journalists hosting a weekly rather left podcast around topics such as migration, the climate and criticism of right-wing frames in the media. And then suppose you let yourself get baited majorly by an American alt-right activist.

This particular video was going around on German twitter and all the usual suspects were letting themselves get baited by it including above mentioned Friedemann. I wrote about their podcast previously and I couldn’t resist so I confronted him on it.

So I got blocked.

I mean “obsessive”, sure. Being a major league hypocrite is one of the best ways to bait me.

I did listen to this podcast very regularly but after October 7th it’s become so absurdly pro-Israel that it invalidates their entire previous position. The only situation where I’ve seen people parrot a line so hardcore like that was Dutch men with Russian wives after Putin had just invaded the Crimean Peninsula (“You have to understand Putin has a point.”).

Listening to the Trash Future team describe CulturePulse.ai and the digital twin profile created for entire populations seems very very reminiscent of “The Red Men” by Matthew de Abaitua which didn’t get the attention it deserved but was quite prescient.

https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/waltz-with-the-sims/ (minute 23 and on)

Elements from the book such as the corporation known as “Monad”(!) and robotic public service utilities called “Dr. Easy”are looking back from our current hellscape period a bit too on the nose.

See Dr. Easy act in this short film: https://vimeo.com/68368877

Fragment Ones and Tooze: Live from Berlin – Lindner

Given the current developments around the German debt brake, I think it’s good to refer to this bit about German financial politics and Adam Tooze’s initial prediction (FT, Zeit) that Christian Lindner as finance minister would not be good.

Fragment from around 45:00 clipped below:

“We got quite a lot of shit for doing that actually. Not entirely popular with my German colleagues. ‘Nicht zum Volkskörper zugehörig’ is a phrase that was used. ‘Wie trauen sie sich ein solches Urteil zu.’
Not belonging to the body politic of Germany. How dare you make a judgement like that.
We don’t have any reason to regret it. We were clearly right.

I can stop thinking about the Roman Empire, but this piece that draws an analogy between the Fall of the Romans and the End of Twitter is long overdue to be shared and still really good.

Over at twitter this dance was happening but with weirdo right wingers. They were always mad because no one likes them because they are hateful, stupid, and have absolutely no rizz. Because they only know other weirdo right wingers IRL, however, they were convinced that there was some sort of nefarious plot to dunk on them online and they wanted to know when Twitter would acknowledge them, the biggest victims known to man. At the head of this was, of course, your man there Elon who is mad that he isn’t funny. He became convinced that there was an army of bots or something making fun of him and he demanded to know why twitter was letting people be mean to him. “You say that you want weirdo right wingers to be on this site and yet! You allow people to be very mildly mean to them!!!!! Even when they are the richest man on the planet! So much for free speech, etc.”Anyway, he accidentally got forced to buy twitter for too much money because he is quite stupid, and now here we are.

On successor states and websites

Fragment Ones and Tooze: The United States vs. Europe

Tooze picks apart Europe’s failure (mostly political in nature) to keep up with the United States on a bunch of areas.

He also mentions that Germany is debt unconstrained and could borrow much more than it is doing right now to fix its broken infrastructure but won’t do it because of stupid politics.

Fragment Ones and Tooze: Tooze Unplugged

Tooze talking for five minutes about the difference between European and American academic traditions. Excuse the low quality but my WordPress has a 2MB file limit.

That is what we were training people to do to write essays which had powerful attack, big full body and a conclusive finish and ideally you’d have a student who could make a whole bouquet of different essays across 5-6 exam papers, 3 essays per paper, 15 different essays and what you would want is a student who could really modulate across that range of essay writing types.

And another one:

The formula of British economics, French politics and German philosophy is the tried formula for making Marxists and that’s basically —though that’s not my politics— that’s basically the frame within which I understand comprehensive intellectual engagement with modernity. It requires those three elements:

  • You need to have a sophisticated political grip
  • You need to have a philosophy of history which in the German sense of course comes from Hegel
  • You have to understand capitalism otherwise you’re stuck

Fragment Piratensender Powerplay E131: Lina, Law & Order

Once in a while they knock them out of the park in this podcast. In this episode Friedemann Karig goes out and asks for people to understand the necessity and reasons behind violent antifascism in the void left behind when the state fails to protect its citizens.

https://piratensenderpowerplay.podigee.io/155-neue-episode

Mensen die dit soort haatcampagnes de wereld in slingeren moeten strafbaar gesteld worden. De minste straf voor de aanjagers van dit soort haat zou een (social) media black-holing kunnen zijn; voor de komende zoveel jaar geen vertoon in media toegestaan.

https://pointer.kro-ncrv.nl/hoe-misinformatie-de-online-haatmachine-tegen-de-week-van-de-lentekriebels-op-gang-trok

Hey Datenschutz, leave those kids alone

The next bit of insanity has to do with the German Datenschutz nutters. This is a small but virulent group of people who have blown up privacy issues to the point where most of Germany is still afraid to use the internet.

It started with this:

https://chaos.social/@HonkHase/109864477100535497

A bunch of schools in Karlsruhe were attacked by ransomware and their servers had to be taken offline.

Now the first question that comes to mind is of course: Why does a school have servers? Don’t all schools run in the cloud these days?

Well, in Germany they don’t. There are lots of agencies and levels of decision makers all of whom are too busy covering their own ass and none of them will say: “Schools can use cloud solutions.” People and organizations being as risk averse as they are in Germany, nobody will use cloud solutions without such a declaration.1

So what do they do instead? They have to get servers and people to install and maintain barely useable non-cloud collaborative software tools. Nobody in their right mind would use these tools and kids in private schools of course don’t either, but this dysfunctional ideology is foisted upon kids who have no other choice.

These tools are not usable in any way, barely work even in the best of circumstances, are tremendously costly in maintenance and then break like in the news above. If you ever get to see from the inside how a normal organization manages their IT (i.e. poorly), from that point on you will beg, plead and scream to have everything put in the cloud.

That’s where somebody like the poster above from KRITIS comes in. That’s an organization representing people who get off on pushing around physical servers and whose founding member sells an alternative private collaboration suite, exactly like the ones that they recommend people use.

I agree with their core point that critical infrastructure should be protected better and in just doing that they’ll generate more than enough work for all the security consultants in their network. Just stop scaring normal people because you benefit from the widespread climate of fear and hands off the kids.

  1. Probably for the best because if they do, they will be sued by a random wanker (such is the German legal system). [↩]

Out with Bungacast and their tankie/nutter agenda

Several online situations today where I think I’m going insane so I might as well document them.

I listened to the last episode of Bungacast with the authors of the new book “The Covid Consensus”.

https://twitter.com/BungaCast/status/1625430144897671168

Both the book and the episode are highly questionable. There is little more there than pandering to the COVID sceptic horseshoe left1 by fishing in the murky pond of anti-authoritarianism, pseudo-science and neoreaction.

Now I wouldn’t think it weird that COVID nutters would write a book. What is odd is that Bungacast would give that much prominence to something which is obviously dumb. Not sure if it’s a cynical play on the alternative/controversial left or whether the podcasters truly believe this way of looking at the world has any merit. In any case, for me this is Schluß with this particular pod.

A while back I had listened to an episode of Politics Theory Other which has long been a favorite podcast of mine where Richard Seymour utterly demolishes that very same book. PTO is actually serious, actually left, actually critical and very much recommended.

That episode is well worth a (re)listen and I’m now a fan of Richard Seymour who comes in like a sledgehammer.

https://twitter.com/MattNoahSmith/status/1625900511223484416

If I lift this one level, the so called “Lockdown” is being used as a scapegoat for anything and everything that people don’t like. Here in Europe the lockdowns felt very long but were brief in retrospect. The longest probably being the 3 month school/daycare closure at the start of the pandemic during which we also suffered immensely. Real hard lockdowns happened in a country like China. Claiming that the relatively mild restrictions that we had for a couple of months (and then twice more) created irreparable damage in the general population is very fucking rich.

They may be right about Lockdown in one way that the concept of it has become big enough and detached from reality enough to house whatever theories or madness anybody wants to house in it. As such, lockdown was a huge psychohistoric event.

  1. Those on the far left who would be far right if only the wind would blow from a different direction that day. [↩]

Just to file this for my receipts here. Marina Weisband asks whether you would build a website for a small organization using Wix.

https://chaos.social/@afelia/109631019638041653

Look at the replies all of which are somewhere between: “Datenschutz this”, “you can get sued for that”, “be afraid”, “don’t do it”. It’s so incredibly sad that the people in Germany created this absurd swamp where the best answer for most people is to just opt out of the internet.

And then at the same time these people will gaslight me by saying that “Datenschutz isn’t the problem”. Of course Datenschutz isn’t the problem. The problem are the infinite number of true idiots in this country who will talk about nothing other than Datenschutz.

Even a cursory dip into the subreddits and other social media posts, whitepapers, and other documentation and community discussions surrounding generative AI, makes it hard to miss the spite and negativity directed at human creativity. They are almost necessary preconditions to be part of the development community. Ironically, of course, the developers celebrate their own creativity in building these software tools, despite the fact that they implicitly rebuke the work and lives of everyone who creates or thinks meaning is confined to living things.

That perspective which I’ve also noticed in the people pushing this stuff is incredibly damning. They hover up the sum creative works of humanity and privatize it into shitty models.

https://davidgolumbia.medium.com/chatgpt-should-not-exist-aab0867abace

These days, “no one is taking any creative risk,”said Laura Mayer, a veteran podcast executive and producer who’s worked at several large publishers. “We’re seeing plenty of efforts to reverse-engineer what were successes in podcasting, and as a result, we get a lot of watered-down karaoke attempts at what worked out in the past.”

The more budget and production values a podcast has, generally the less it’s worth listening to.

https://www.vulture.com/2022/09/podcasting-is-just-radio-now.html

Gibi: Comedy under Pressure

I just watched and finished season 1 of Gibi which seems to have been enough of a success for them to quickly put out a second season. It’s a Turkish dark comedy show that you can watch online on Exxen. I already wrote it’s a bit like Seinfeld but with a very dark undercurrent.

How dark? Let’s look at the next bit from an episode (S01E10 @ 16:30) where Yılmaz and İlkkan are accused of having caused the death of an old man. They are getting ready to host the deceased’s relatives at a restaurant and participate in the wake.

Yilmaz and Ilkkan having a conversation

Did you hear anything from Ethem?

Ethem?

Lately never…

Man, look, they wrote something in fact. Hold on. Somehow we weren’t able to call the guy. (Sigh. Wails.)

Don’t.

His aunt has killed herself. Ethem’s. It was written this morning. I just saw it.

Which aunt?

His older aunt.

I don’t know many other situational comedy shows that do something like this. It has no relation to the story and serves only to set the mood. Interspersing another death that’s just brushed off in an episode that’s already about death demonstrates how little a human life is worth. People die randomly and it’s received with a wail and a shrug.

They will most likely go to the funeral just like they did in a previous episode (S01E04) where Ersoy’s grandmother was eaten by an Erasmus cannibal.

Overarching Theme

Zooming out a bit, the real theme of this first season of Gibi has been pressure, pressure of all kinds: peer pressure, family obligations, social and societal pressure.

  • Kokariç: Press ganging into opening a kebab shop and invest in all kinds of goods
  • Wadding: Pressure from friends and the environment to conform to current fashion norms
  • Nu Model: Pressure from the extended family not to pose nude at the art academy enforced by force of violence
  • The Cannibal Coming with Erasmus: Pressure from friends to mourn and be visibly sad
  • Wrong Mentor: Pressure by a spiritual guide to follow a very strict regimen
  • Dark Force: Collective hysteria around bad things happening
  • Second Way: Pressure of belonging
  • Whitewash: Pressure by the house painter to go all the way
  • Renewal of Break Up: Pressure generated by magician
  • Blood Money: Pressure to make amends for somebody unrelated dying
  • Bathroom: Pressure to bathe and spend time with a couple of seniors
  • Discovery of the Horse: Proto-societal pressure between members of an outcast paleolithic group

Anybody who’s ever been to Turkey knows that the entire country is built on this kind of pressure, also known as genuine interest, shame, concern or emotional blackmail. It’s omnipresent and the only way to escape it is to exit.

Getting your Instagram back

I wrote before about how annoying it is if your Instagram username gets hacked and how difficult it is to get it back. I had to go to some lengths to get mine but nothing quite as much as this person.

https://twitter.com/adam22/status/1527005564802600960

It says a lot about your dispute processes if it is possible to get through them using sex and if people have to resort to that because every other avenue is broken.

We’ve worked remotely like this ten years ago with Hubbub and had to come up with a lot of these tactics and tricks just to be able to get work done. In the meantime, it seems the tools have come a long way (imagine the things we could have done if we had a tool like this back then!) but people’s thinking is still stuck in the past.

https://miro.com/blog/hybrid-collaboration-field-guide/

As If

I’ve discovered a hilarious new Turkish comedy show called “Gibi” (translated to As If). The episodes revolve around a group of friends who get embroiled in absurdist situations and have very nasty but eloquent arguments with each other.

To me this gives off a very Seinfeld-like feeling with nasty people living in a nasty city talking about nasty things with each other. Not the touchy feely stuff that you see in normal sitcoms. You don’t really quite get why these people hang out with each other but they do.

Below is the first episode in its entirety on YouTube where both main characters find themselves pressured to open a kebab shop. The rest of the series on Exxen has passable English subs for anybody who would be interested.

I’m always a sucker for performances where people argue/fight with each other. The more fierce and physical the better. Carnage is an old favourite of mine and the fight scene I witnessed in ‘Langs de Grote Weg’ remains with me as one of the highlights of visiting Frascati.

I’ve watched a couple more episodes and I think I can say that the theme of the show is the weird social conformities that people in Turkey impose on each other. Hell is other people, especially over there.

Exxen

To be able to watch the full series I took a month’s subscription to Exxen. This seems to be one of a bunch of bespoke streaming platforms. Another one I was aware of through social media has been Gain (a self-described ‘next generation content platform’).

The Exxen website is kinda broken and the boss of the site has been quoted saying ‘they are competing with Netflix.’ That may be right, but Netflix is probably not competing with them. Still, with the 80M people living in Turkey, the substantial diaspora as well as people from other countries who consider Turkish culture and media to be aspirational (a lot more of those out there than you would think living in Europe), they probably can get by.

One weird déja-vu has been seeing many of the Turkish social media stars that I used to listen to on Clubhouse (Chaby, Enis, Zeynep) make an appearance in weird and zany television formats exclusive to the platform. Most amazingly, those formats are also pretty professionally executed with high production values.

Of course it still makes sense to defend yourself, but if you have any idea how software functions, it should be obvious that the number of known and unknown vulnerabilities in our devices number in the thousands and a lot of them are and remain exploited by all kinds of organizations.

Why would any device that you own not be fully infiltrated if a mid to high level service had an interest in it?

https://twitter.com/annalist/status/1420158699373580289?s=11

Leveled up in Turkish

Hanging out on Clubhouse from the beginning made me realize how lacking my Turkish was. I got on the app when Germany came online and I think Turkey launched shortly after that and only then did it kick off in the Netherlands.

That particular sequencing gave me an interesting perspective on how different cultures adopted the service. Germans went into panel hell. Most of the sessions were dominated by journalists and politicos and therefore were extremely boring. Turkey got online in no time and was dominated by influencers who launched all kinds of funky repeating formats and casual chatrooms where people were going until deep into the night (I would listen until 1-2 at night which in Turkey would be 2 hours later still). The Netherlands went into a marketing fervor with a strong showing of douchebags.

Clubhouse had its moment and fizzled, but tuning into the app again recently, I can say that it’s still there and with all the klout and hype chasers gone, things are again weird. Weird is good.

Lexicography

In the Turkish rooms I would hear words that I didn’t know every other sentence, sometimes entire concepts like kadının beyanı esastır. Finally, I had a situation where I was exposed to a high level of Turkish and I had the motivation to improve this.

I started noting these words down in Anki, which I had bought previously to study the HSK. Adding a word to my deck here and there was slow: switch to dictionary (now I use the official one), switch to Anki and write the card, switch back.

For some extra speed, I dug up a master word list I had made more than a decade ago. Back then I had read most of Orhan Pamuk’s then bibliography (Yeni Hayat, Sessiz Ev, Kara Kitap, Kar, Benim Adım Kırmızı) and then too found lots of words I didn’t know. I passed over them and wrote them down on a piece of paper. I transcribed these papers into a list and looked up some of the meanings. But this being before Anki, I had no real way to systematically learn these words and get better at Turkish. If I had, I would have improved steadily with each book I read and everything would have been great.

I went through this old word list letter by letter and over the course of a month made cards for all of the words in that list. The result of that effort is the 1000-word deck I have made available online now.

And now, after months of revising daily (life during the pandemic has been very exciting, why do you ask?) and also continuing to add words as I go—the recent events in Afghanistan made me add the half-Arab half-Farsi ridiculous Turkish word for charge d’affaires—I finally am out of “New” words. From now on it will just be polishing the lexicography of the deck, adding a word here and there and continuing to revise.

This also means I have capacity again to go back to studying HSK3. Or I might switch back to learning Japanese after all. Watching some anime recently and seeing Japanese speaking gaijin on Tiktok have revived this itch.

A feeling for Turkish (and Arabic)

So now what? I am a lot more confident when it comes to my Turkish after having learned a bunch of the words commonly in use in the higher echelons of society. I can now look for and find complicated words much more easily. My usage will likely be incorrect often, but I should be able to get by with my sizeable intuition for what remains the first language I learned (and learnd to read in). I can also consume complex material far more easily than I used to.

I now realize how many loan words from Arabic Turkey has. The exact numbers are obscure, but almost every uncommon word either is of Arabic origin or has an Arabic equivalent. This also explains why after being in Syria for a while I understood what people were saying without knowing Arabic.

I’ve also been amazed by how overloaded the language is for certain concepts like disaster (afet, badire, facia, buhran), sorrow (ıstırap, üzüntü, matem, yas, kahır, hicran, gam, tasa, keder, nedamet, teessür) and many others. Also all of those words are Arabic in origin except if I had to guess by word shape: üzüntü (I guessed right!).

White Turks

Delving into this part of the language and the people who use it, I came across the concept of White Turks. The division between white and black Turks underlies a lot of the dynamics of the Turkey of the past decades.

The people who I was listening to and whose language I am now emulating are usually white Turks. Me and my family originally are black Turks.

I’m sure I’ll never pass as white, though I’m now in a socio-economically better position than most white Turks in Turkey and most black Turks in Europe. Language is a key aspect of this division and when people clash it is usually the first weapon that they resort to. Now that I have levelled up, I don’t have to be exclusively on the receiving end of that weapon anymore.

An extremely damning account of the way Vice and also the NYT have treated Naomi Wu with some choice bad behaviour from people like Doctorow in part 2 as well.

I get that she got into it a bit naive like many people do when it comes to esteemed publications like the Times. I’ve been at the backstage of an event once where there were people from the NYT and everybody there is ass kissing them all the time because they want to either 1. be covered positively in the ‘paper of record’ or 2. get a job there since it’s one of the last places paying journalists well. In such an environment, it’s hard not to believe that you are better than others.

View at Medium.com

Taken from the title of Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin’s 2008 book, “the dark forest”region of the web is becoming increasingly important as a space of online communication for users of all ages and political persuasions. In part, this is because it is less sociologically stressful than the clearnet zone, where one is subject to peer, employer, and state exposure. It also now includes Discord servers, paid newsletters (e.g., Substack), encrypted group messaging (via Telegram, etc.), gaming communities, podcasts, and other off-clearnet message board forums and social media. One forages for content or shares in what others in the community have retrieved rather than accepting whatever the platform algorithms happen to match to your data profile.
Additionally, dark forest spaces are both minimally and straightforwardly commercial. There is typically a small charge for entry, but once you are in, you are free to act and speak without the platform nudging your behavior or extracting further value. It is also interesting to keep in mind that the dark forest shares the same cables and satellite arrays as clearnet channels, is accessed via the same devices, and essentially all of its denizens continue to simultaneously participate in clearnet spaces (as contemporary professional protocol demands). It is therefore not analogous to legacy countercultural notions of going off-grid or “dropping out.”


https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-kill-counterculture-you-just-wont-find-it-on-instagram/

[Cryptoart is] a crime against humanity.

I’m horrified to see this willingly traded for an opportunity to reproduce the worst parts of the existing physical art market, where “the original”is useful foremost as a rare thing- a unique thing- that, in its scarcity, is an asset.

Many would call me unrealistic and naïve for this, unwilling to make compromises in the world we are living now because of an idealistic vision of a tomorrow; and to them I would like to say that we literally invented an extra-sovereign monetary system that within 10 years has generated trillions of dollars of worth and is held up with the power consumption of a small country.

https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3

Instagram scam attempt

This is an interesting Instagram scam.

The account is pumped up to a large number of followers with actual content which I guess is what makes its messages enter my primary inbox. When they send this message, the avatar of the account is changed to the official instagram logo, which makes it look real if you don’t read the username.

I didn’t reply and the next day the avatar has been reverted. The account continues its life as a ghost fan account. I wonder whether I’ll catch it again with its avatar changed.

I reported this chat and account to Instagram as a scam but nothing has happened.

“This is all to say that Paul Graham is an effective marketer and practitioner, but a profoundly unserious public intellectual. His attempts to grapple with the major issues of the present, especially as they intersect with his personal legacy, are so mired in intuition and incuriosity that they’re at best a distraction, and worst a real obstacle to understanding our paths forward.”

https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sexers.html

An utter and total indictment of Paul Graham who of course is impervious to such things.