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A conspiracy to kill a browser

Great story about how YouTube helped with moving away from IE6.

"Our most renegade web developer, an otherwise soft-spoken Croatian guy, insisted on checking in the code under his name, as a badge of personal honor, and the rest of us leveraged our OldTuber status to approve the code review."

I swear that wasn't me. Although I would have loved to do it.

(first published on Facebook March 12, 2024)

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35th birthday of the Web

Celebrating the 35th birthday of the World Wide Web, a letter by its founder, Tim Berners-Lee.

Discussing some of the issues of the Web of today: too much centralization, too much exploitation, too much disinformation, all made even more dire by the development of AI.

What to do? Some of the solution the letter mentions are Mastodon, a decentralized social network, and Solid, a Web-standards-based data governance solution, but it recognizes that more is needed, "to back the morally courageous leadership that is rising, collectivise their solutions, and to overturn the online world being dictated by profit to one that is dictated by the needs of humanity." I agree with that, but find it a bit vague.

I first was terribly annoyed that the letter was published on Medium, as this is a symptom of the centralization of the Web. I say, completely conscious that I am discussing it on Facebook. Obviously, both of this should be happening on our own domains, and it also does: I link not to Medium, but to the Web Foundation site, and I also have this posted on my own site and on my Mastodon account. So, it is there, on the real Web, not just on the closed walled gardens of Facebook and on one of the megasites such as Medium. But there is no indication of engagement on the Web Foundation's post, whereas the Medium article records more than 10,000 reactions, and my Facebook post will also show more reactions than my Website (but the Mastodon page could be competitive with Facebook for me).

I want to believe that Solid is the next important step, but Leigh Dodds's recent post on Solid, and particularly the discussion in the post, didn't inspire hope.

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Gödel on language

"The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all." - Kurt Gödel
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Rainbows end

Rainbows end.

The book, written in 2006, was set in 2025 in San Diego. Its author, Vernor Vinge, died yesterday, March 20, 2024, in nearby La Jolla, at the age of 79. He is probably best known for popularizing the concept of the Technological Singularity, but I found many other of his ideas far more fascinating.

Rainbows end explores themes such as shared realities, digital surveillance, and the digitisation of the world, years before Marc Andreessen proclaimed that "software is eating the word", describing it much more colorfully and rich than Andreessen ever did.

His other work that I enjoyed is True Names, discussing anonymity and pseudonymity on the Web. A version of the book was published with essays by Marvin Minsky, Danny Hillis, and others. who were inspired by True Names.

His Science Fiction was in a rare genre, which I love to read more about: mostly non-dystopian, in the nearby future, hard sci-fi, and yet, imaginative, exploring novel technologies and their implications on individuals and society.

Rainbows end.

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From vexing uncertainty to intellectual humility

A philosopher with schizophrenia wrote a harrowing account of how he experiences schizophrenia. And I wonder if some of the lessons are true for everyone, and what that means for society.

"It’s definite belief, not certainty, that allows me to get along. It’s not that certainty, or something like it, never matters. If you are fixing dinner for me I’ll try to be clear about the eggplant allergy [...] But most of the time, just having a definite, if unconfirmed and possibly false, belief about the situation is fine. It allows one to get along.
"I think of this attitude as a kind of “intellectual humility” because although I do care about truth—and as a consequence of caring about truth, I do form beliefs about what is true—I no longer agonize about whether my judgments are wrong. For me, living relatively free from debilitating anxiety is incompatible with relentless pursuit of truth. Instead, I need clear beliefs and a willingness to change them when circumstances and evidence demand, without worrying about, or getting upset about, being wrong. This attitude has made life better and has made the “near-collapses” much rarer."

(first published on Facebook March 13, 2024)


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Feeding the cat

Every morning, I lovingly and carefully scoop out every single morsel of meat from the tin of wet food for our cat. And then he eats a tenth of it.

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Dolly Parton's What's up?

Dolly Parton is an amazing person. On "Rockstar", her latest album, she covered a great number of songs, with amazing collaborators, often the original interpreters or writers. In her cover of "What's up?", a song I really love, with Linda Perry, she changed a few lines of the lyrics, as one often does when covering, to make a song their own.

Instead of "Twenty-five years and my life is still...", she's singing "All of these years and my life is still..." - and makes total sense, because unlike Linda Perry she wasn't 25 when she wrote it, she was 77 when she recorded it.

Instead of "I take a deep breath and I get real high", Dolly takes "a deep breath and wonders why", and it makes sense, because, hey, it's Dolly Parton.

But here's the line that hurts, right there when the song reaches its high point:

"And I pray,
Oh my God do I pray!
I pray every. single. day.
for a revolution!"

She changed one letter in the last word:

"for a resolution"

And it just breaks my heart. Because it feels so weak. Because it seems to betray the song. Because it seems to betray everything. And also because I might agree with her, and that feels like betrayal too.


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Views on the US economy 2024

By most metrics, the American economy is doing well. But the perception of the American economy is much weaker than its actual strength. This seems to finally slowly break up a bit, and people are realizing that things are actually not that bad.

Here's an article that tries to explain it: because of high interest rates, credit is expensive, including credit card debt, and if someone is buying a home now.

But if you go beyond the anecdotes as this essay does, and look at the actual data, you will find something else: it is a very partisan thing.

For Democrats we find that it depends. Basically, the more you fit to the dominant group - the richer you are, the older, the better educated, the "whiter", the "maler" - the better your view of the economy.

For Republicans we don't find any such differentiation. Everyone is negative about it, across the board. Their perception of the economic situation are crassly different from the perception of their Democratic peers.

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Libertarian cities

I usually try to contain my "Schadenfreude", but reading this article made it really difficult to do so. It starts with the story of Rio Verde Foothills and its lack of water supply after it was intentionally built to circumvent zoning regulations regarding water supply, and lists a few other examples, such as

"Grafton, New Hampshire. It’s a tiny town that was taken over by libertarians who moved there en masse to create their vision of heaven on earth. They voted themselves into power, slashed taxes and cut the town’s already minuscule budget to the bone. Journalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling recounts what happened next:
Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. ...
Then the town was taken over by bears."

The article is worth reading:

The Wikipedia article is even more damning:

"Grafton is an active hub for Libertarians as part of the Free Town Project, an offshoot of the Free State Project. Grafton's appeal as a favorable destination was due to its absence of zoning laws and a very low property tax rate. Grafton was the focus of a movement begun by members of the Free State Project that sought to encourage libertarians to move to the town. After a rash of lawsuits from Free Towners, an influx of sex offenders, an increase of crime, problems with bold local bears, and the first murders in the town's history, the Libertarian project ended in 2016."
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Get Morse code from text

On Wikifunctions we have a function that translates text to Morse code. Go ahead, try it out.

I am stating that mostly in order to see if we can get Google to index the function pages on Wikifunctions, because we initially accidentally had them all set to not be indexed.


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