Ramblings
Quotes
"Mind is like a parachute: it only works when it's open"
-- Frank Zappa
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something,
build a new model that makes the existing mode obsolete."
-- Buckminster Fuller
"The vast majority of the content on the internet (by both size in bytes and
attention) is visual media content, yet we have almost no idea what's in it!
In a sense, images and videos are the dark matter of the internet. I also like
that analogy because that makes me an Internet Astronomer."
-- Andrew Karpathy
About Internet freedom
- Hyperlink is dead: some social media pages do not provide a way to link to
other pages
- Walled gardens everywhere: some social media services do not even open a
browser, you stay inside their domains
- Everything is a stream: popularity and novelty is what matters, history isn't
relevant, it's hard to minorities and non-popular/alternative ideas to be
seeing. The stream is the new TV. Machine Learning algorithms try to show us
only the most popular and personalized content, finding local solutions while
we want to explore the whole space sometimes. Diversity push creativity.
- No anonymity: some social networks are centered on a person name
- Search is dead: in some social networks, it's almost impossible or really
hard to find information
- Centralized and closed data: we do not own our data anymore, everything is
stored in a centralized and closed store. Centralization makes surveillance
easier
- Migration unfriendliness: it's impossible or hard to migrate your data out
from a social network
- Domains names are dead: we do not own anything, even a name
- Text is disappearing: there's much more video and images than text. We moved
from a "book-internet" to a "television-internet", from a non-linear
communication with nodes and links, to a linear one, with popularity-driven
centralization
- We're loosing intellectual power and diversity
Refs:
- https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426
About Mac versus Linux boxes
No matter what kind of hardware/software you use, what
matter is how much you hack it.
Refs:
- https://usesthis.com/interviews/zed.shaw/
