Jan 14, 2025
Photo: by me, Aneesh Sathe, Malaysia, 2011
Font fight!
The fonts have assembled, their ligatures sharp their curves are shiny. They all line up with perfect kerning… or do they? Your eyes and mind are their battlefield.
https://www.codingfont.com/
I got JetBrains mono btw.
Decentralization is just partial centralization
Renée DiResta writes about the social media flux in Noema.
Decentralization places a heavy burden on individual instance administrators, mostly volunteers, who may lack the tools, time or capacity to address complex problems effectively.
Identity verification is another weak point, leading to impersonation risks that centralized platforms typically manage more effectively. Inconsistent security practices between servers can allow malicious actors to exploit weaker links.
While all this is fine, I have a completely different view about the ongoings around social media. I’d rather completely quit something than go through the pain of sorting through and tuning the place just right.
The internet has infinite space. Make your own blog, follow people you like (RSS feeds still work!) and ignore those you don’t. Nostalgic about back when Twitter was good? Well there was a time when the internet was good. It was good because the people with access created little gardens of their own (not just of the digital garden variety, but those too). Psst… it’s still good btw, the social media blinds you.
While I’m a staunch early adopter I’m also an early abandoner. The only thing I’ve been unable to abandon is blogs. I’ve never felt like it’s was better to shut myself inside a walled garden, but I would suffocate if I weren’t able to surf, what a wonderful word that is, the internet.
Obsessing is happiness
My happiest times have been when I was completely consumed by some task or project for days on end. I’ve learned hydropinics and grown an ungodly amount of mint in the Singapore Sun. I’ve made terrible mead, taught myself programming, then machine learning… countersteering a motorcycle? You should watch me lean.
All this to say that happiness is an entirely oblique activity. This was crystallized for me in this post about Betrand Russell’s Conquest of Happiness by the wholly awesome Maria Popova
The 1900s are here
Every 24th frame of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey posted once an hour
That cools projects like these exist is a testament to the eternal cool of the Internet. As I write, the bot is on its 1,899th hour. The exciting 1900s are coming up.
If you are new to Bayesian Stats start here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIqeFYUhSzU
#Art #Bayes #Happiness #Internet
