Evolving notes, images and sounds by Luis Apiolaza

Category: meta (Page 1 of 6)

Keeping track of my links

I have been using internet since 1993, which means thousands of browsed sites, broken links, storing and losing information for over three decades. One obvious point of the exercise is that every time I have relied on someone else’s system I have ended up losing lots of information.

Delicio.us, Twitter, etc. have consumed my data and time without an ability to maintain a good archive of my information. The only data that has remained is the one I have personally stored under my own system/payment. I have been a slow learner in this respect, so I have started another section of this site, Aleph, just to store bits and pieces of information I am collecting while browsing.

The first post in Aleph briefly documents the rationale; actually it just links to Cory Doctorow’s post to that effect.

Looser social media

On 5th May I wrote something very simple and not new in Mastodon, which appeared to resonate with a few people:

I don’t understand the idea that the Fediverse HAS to grow to compete with service X or it will be irrelevant.

Firstly a network has to be useful to its members, who do not necessarily want to be driving the news cycle.

The need for continuous growth and influence comes from investors looking at making a profit, independently of how damaging the network becomes to members and overall society.

It is a simple position that predates the current dominant social networks, and I am sure people involved in the Fediverse for over a decade already had it in mind.

The quoted post was part of a much longer set of exchanges with other Mastodonians. Missing that context, some readers misinterpreted my post, thinking that I opposed any growth. Just to be clear, I am not arguing that the Fediverse should not growth, but that its success should not be primarily evaluated by how big it gets. Moreover, I have two additional considerations:

  • Grow *should be* distributed across many instances rather than over a few enormous ones. This improves the resilience of the network by increasing diversity and improving the ability to have meaningful moderation.
  • We should think of more diverse “social media” beyond clones of the current dominant commercial offers. Part of this could be going back to the origins of internet, loosely linking static pages, wikis, blogs, etc.

I have a strong preference for diversity of approaches towards online communication. There used to be multiple blogging software, a very large number of wiki versions and we have been confronted for multiple waves of consolidation. Not everything has to be federated and I envision a revival of RSS.

Social everything buckets

In 2009, Alex Payne wrote an article about the proliferation of Everything buckets, at least in the Mac universe. Software like Yojimbo, Bento, Eaglefiler, Devonthink, etc. Virtual scrapbooks with all sorts of information that does not necessarily belong together. Part of the complaint was about having applications that do everything poorly, instead of dealing with different types of data in separate programs.

In real life, when we are off-line, we rely on contexts. If I meet with friends or acquaintances of a social or sports club I tend to talk about whatever social or sport activity is behind the meeting. I can talk about other things, but people could be less interested or even prefer not to talk about that. I may know a few people I am willing to talk about anything with them, but I can count them with my fingers.

My gut feeling is that well-known social media completely ignores context and they are big social everything buckets. You throw any topic in and the expectation is that people should take it. Some sites develop filters, block lists, folksonomies for which one can opt-in or opt-out, but that still leaves open a good part of the bucket. In the Fediverse there is also another bucket restriction: Content Warnings, which reveal only part of the post and hide the rest. Depending on the instance, there is more or less enforcement of content warnings, with highly variable rules about what, if anything, should be behind a warning.

Some communities, say victims of sex abuse, prefer CW. Others, say people affected by racism, prefer not to have warnings. I think there is no technical solution, because it is not a technical problem. It is a social problem coming from sharing a context-less everything bucket. Communities are not identical to instances; some instances (especially the large ones) host many communities. There are instances, usually small, that host a single community.

There is an element of intersectionality/commonality behind (some) of the problems for which we use content warnings. There also are different ways of coping/grieving with those problems. Someone may have been affected by sex abuse and be OK to discuss the abuse. Someone else may be often exposed to racism but prefer not to talk about that. We also have variability within communities for each of these issues.

Personally, speaking as the brown immigrant with a non-native English accent, I have faced racism and xenophobia quite a few times*. Sometimes I like to share a few of those experiences, but I find it tiring to speak of them too often. I would prefer not to read about it al the time, because I’m already affected by it in real life. But that’s me, others prefer to share it all the time, which is another option. Personally, I have no way forward to “solve” this problem, except to acknowledge that there is no single way to make everyone happy while sharing in a place where context is absent.

*I almost wrote the typical “my fair share of” but the only fair share is zero.

I’m not a content creator

I struggle with the word “content”—as used in “content creator” or “content producer”—to refer to creative endeavours. Content as something included or contained into a blank space. Content as fungible filler, writing, sounds, images that can be easily (unnoticeably) replaced with something else.

“Content” diminishes creation. As an amateur I create writings, pictures, code and sounds for the sake of it, because I love (amare) doing it. Likely it is not at the same level as a professional who does it for a living, but these activities are a part of me.

“Content” reduces creation to units of commercial exchange, which are the opposite of why I, and probably many people, spend time creating and sharing what I do.

I’m a creator, but not of content, and I share my creations for free.

Flotsam 16: new laptop

In my job I get a new laptop every 3 years or so; at least that is how it works with Apple laptops. You get a new one, together with Apple care, and it is depreciated during three years. Keeping computers for longer doesn’t make financial sense according to the bean counters. Coincidentally, it is roughly the time for the laptops to start falling apart, more likely by design.

On terms of features, I reached 1 TB SSD disk around 6 years ago (I don’t use half of that), 16 GB of RAM 3 years ago (I used to be quite comfortable with 8 GB of RAM 9 years ago or so. What I am trying to say is that spec-wise I’ve been OK for the last half decade, at least. The peak of my computing was a Macbook Air 13″ just before the appalling Macbook Pro 13″ butterfly keyboard fiasco. In 2020 I ordered a huge 16″ Macbook Pro, despite 13″ being my sweetspot for laptop size, because of covid 19. We didn’t know for how long we’d be working at home—which in NZ turned out to be not very long—so I ordered a larger screen and, gasp, a real ESC key (again). I don’t have much love for the 16″: too heavy, too noisy, meh battery life, got too hot, etc.

This time I went back to Macbook Pro 14″ because: real ESC key (ridiculous to mention this, but I was traumatised by the touch bar ESC), no touch bar (yay!), SD card slot (I like photography), HDMI connector (FINALLY!) so I can skip on one dongle, proper power connector. The screen notch looks funny, but it disappears from my mind when busy writing. Overall impression: solid, hefty, fast. It actually feels much faster than the 16″ with Intel processor.

I test a lot of software that I don’t end up using, R packages, etc. so I avoid moving my old setup to the new laptop, starting from scratch and avoid carrying over all the cruft accummulated over three years. Then it comes the unavoidable boring task of installing the software I need for my work (the university already install MS Office and other software that don’t use, like Endnote). I installed:

  • Homebrew: unix package manager*.
  • R and RStudio: R stuff (see below for packages)*.
  • Apple command line tools: compiler, etc.
  • MacTex: everything and the kitchen sink LaTeX for mac*.
  • Zotero (including Zotfile and Better Bibtex plugins)
  • Joplin: notetaking in markdown*
  • NetNewsWire: reading RSS feeds, free, synchronises across mac and ipad*.
  • Calibre: e-book management*.
  • Digikam: photo management*.
  • Rawtherapee: RAW photo processing*.
  • Visual Studio Code: free text editor, don’t think it is fully open source.
  • Neovim: text editor*.
  • pandoc: text transformer*.
  • asciidoctor: text transformer*.

All starred (*) items are Open Source Software.

I use numerous R packages, but when I start with a new computer I don’t compile a list of packages to import in the new machine (lots of cruft) but I add a few packages that I know I use often and then add when I need to. Included in this list:

  • tidyverse: so I get ggplot, dplyr, reader, etc*.
  • data.table: sometimes I use this for fread() and data management*.
  • asremlr: multivariate + spatial genetic analyses.
  • rjags: bayesian stuff*.
  • rstan: bayesian stuff*.

I still have to install “a few” things (like QGIS) but I’m getting there. I’ll update the post later once I have added more software.

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