Category: Blog

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Blog social media

Today’s shadowban is tomorrow’s trend.

Today, ran across this article, which talks about how the future of culture is going to be built around things that algorithmic platforms reject. The article focuses mostly on copyright infringement, but I think the argument could be made for anything that is un-monetizable on social media platforms.

When you think about it, it’s a normal trajectory for subcultures. They start out as outsiders, then someone finds a way to present or expose it on traditional media. Case in point: the book that brought Hunter S. Thompson to the masses, “Hells Angels.” While I think there was already exploitation media made around bikers by then, it’s hard to imagine shows like “Sons of Anarchy” existing without there having been a ‘serious book’ about the subject. Now, there’s Harley-Davidson merch stores in tourist traps.

Online culture just accelerates this and drives things underground faster, plus provides the opportunity for the subculture to build its own platforms.

There may well be a template for this. Subculture first hides in plain sight, then gets exposed, then gets exploited, then gets filtered and sanitized, causing the less advertiser-friendly bits to hide somewhere else in plain sight.

This is a vast oversimplification, of course, and new types of media create new variations. I’ll explore this further someday.

This dance has long existed online, I remember that Usenet in the ’80s had a newsgroup called ‘net.culture.gay,’ and it was an eyeopener for anyone who wasn’t already in-the-know. It was both a gay safe space and a fairly open bridge for outsiders. Usenet, however, was a free service — the Internet hadn’t opened up beyond industry and academia, and there was no advertising, so no advertisers to offend. There was discussion there that couldn’t happen anywhere else at the time – not on TV, not in the letters page of a newspaper.

It’s harder and harder to imagine a truly free platform like those today. This was all paid for by taxpayers, in a corner of the defense budget (ARPAnet). Today’s content and scale costs real money, and with that comes gatekeepers.

But there will always be someone slipping under or jumping over the gate.

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Boot.dev is a fun way to learn Python

For forever, I had been wanting to learn Python. I haven’t been doing much with scripting languages in recent years, just the occasional shell script fix here and there. Last substantial thing I did was in Perl, back in the late ’90s. I built a Perl script for autogenerating static web pages about Los Angeles radio stations from a simple text file.

A few months ago, I learned of Boot.dev, which is a gamified platform for learning back end development technologies. It’s not particularly expensive to subscribe, and you can try it out for free before you commit. You are awarded XP for lessons you complete, are rewarded for keeping up streaks of daily learning, etc.

So far I’ve managed to maintain a 183 day streak of daily coding, which has been encouraging. The curriculum currently has tracks for backend development with python/go and python/typescript. I just finished a unit on memory management in C, which was a nice refresher course. The curriculum also covers things like basic Linux commands, use of git, and provides some guided projects and opportunities to build personal projects. The platform also has an active discord community, and is somewhat oriented towards people getting skills for their first programming jobs.

I’m basically using it to get some daily mental exercise coding, and to expand my reach on the backend of the stack, as mostly I work on mobile client apps. It is definitely a professional advantage , if not a necessity, when working with devops and backend engineers to be able to read and understand Python, Go, and Javascript.

Enjoying the journey so far, and about to start a personal project, which I’ll talk about in later posts.

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Blog

(Meta) Talking to oneself online

There’s a certain liberation to having a blog nobody really reads. I’m mostly documenting things I’m setting up just to understand it better as I go and maybe help others, but I’m not really thinking about an audience per se.

I’m in that age range where I’m old enough to remember Jerry Pournelle’s columns in BYTE magazine, though too young to have read his books, which seem to me to be more a thing of their time. I ended up reading more Robert Silverberg, who was a mainstay for short stories in magazines like Omni and Playboy. The one thing I remember about him was he co-wrote the infamous “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” essay. His work, as I say, was of a certain time.

Pournelle’s columns were basically him documenting how he was using computers and software as writing tools. He’d go on about updating graphics cards, new versions of WordPerfect, or whatever he was using at the time, building out new machines, etc. He’d talk about handing down hardware to his son, setting up a work machine for his wife, and other mundane tasks involved with keeping home computers running. He’d give all of the computers names. I think they were mostly custom-built from off-the-shelf hardware running CP/M, much of this was before the IBM PC came out, let alone luggables and compatibles.

It was interesting to read, you wouldn’t know that he wasn’t a software professional, but this was a fair amount of activity just to support his day job of writing. Overall there was this philosophy of not letting the tools get in the way of the work, to keep your eye on the end product.

So, that’s kind of what I’m going for. It’s a side-quest, though Jerry Pournelle probably got paid pretty well for his columns, which no doubt helped pay the bills between books.

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Blog Random Ideas

Brain sprinkle: LED Lava Lamps.

Was just thinking about how one would retrofit an old Lava Lamp to use LEDs. The classic Lava Lamp uses incandescent bulbs as both the light source and a heat source to melt and animate the wax inside. So, an LED replacement would require not only the light source, but also a heat source.

CREE makes high power LEDS which certainly put off some heat, but you’d really need a separate heating element to melt the wax. If this element or elements were digitally controlled, they could be pulsed to perhaps create variations in the thermal currents inside the bulb to give some sort of control over the wax motion.

The other thing you would be able to do is put in RGB LEDs, or even black light LEDs, which would give you the ability change colors, and maybe run different colors at once illuminating different areas of the glass enclosure.

This unit could perhaps be retrofitted into any classic Lava Lamp base, if you just made it in a bulb format. Newer lamps could be made with a redesigned base.

Of course, as with all ideas of this type, the next step is to search to see what has been done in this area already. And sure enough, the Lava company has an LED Lava Lamp, It’s really disappointing, though. Runs on Batteries, it’s all plastic, and has molded plastic in the shape of the wax bloop. Boring. https://lavalamp.com/product/ledll/

They also have this, an LED mini-volcano, which is probably closer to what I’ve described, but not something that could be retrofitted on a classic Lava Lamp.

And, they have https://lavalamp.com/product/llmyol/, a do-it-yourself Lava Lamp kit with a color LED base, stuff to decorate the lamp base and top, and different kinds of glitter to put inside. This is actually pretty close to what I’m proposing, but it appears to use different material for the motion, basically two types of oil that don’t mix rather than the classic wax. I should get one, it looks kind of fun. It’s battery operated, and pretty low-temperature, so very well-suited for kids.

Yup, this is where my brain goes when there’s laundry to be folded, and stuff that should be going to Goodwill.

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Sometimes healing from DV requires a trip to the dentist. You can help.

One aspect of domestic violence that is generally overlooked is that financial and physical abuse can lead to severe dental issues for survivors.

There are charitable foundations which match survivors with dentists who can help survivors with free or low-cost dental work.

https://www.givebackasmile.com is one such foundation.

This kind of assistance can be crucial in helping DV survivors recover a normal life. It’s hard to successfully interview for jobs or perform in a public facing job if you have damaged or missing teeth, and often poor dental health results in other health issues.

Note: will add more resources as I find them.

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Blog

Meta: WordPress has changed a lot

Apparently I’ve missed some major feature changes to WordPress since I last actively edited this site. The tools now enable more control for editing site-wide, and what used to be called a “block” in WordPress seems to be different. Blocks used to be layout components in the site them, but now there’s a block structure to every post. Looks very powerful, but now I need to catch up. Starting with upgrading my theme.