Here’s a muse; linking to external sites is probably one of the harder parts of blogging. Pages can go 404 and you won’t know exactly why, urls change even though they’re supposed to be immutable.

To blog while having pointers to disparate sources requires checking for dead links, and verifying that content relevancy hasn’t changed. The solution is to either archive everything (hard) or to not link at all (easy). High mutability is one reason why people take pictures of online content — it just works.

Following a bunch of blogs always resurfaces interesting stuff — here’s an entertaining article and video summary of modern rope climbing. Article is 2y old – must have updated recently. I like the humour.

Even though I know the risk of losing viewers by discussing math and physics…

Linux phones with minimum software feature parity can’t come fast enough. I’d get rid of all my Android devices instantly. My only saving grace is that I have some technical knowledge on updating/compiling Android os, but it’s a pain because the Android ecosystem is messy. postmarketOS looks promising.

It’s mesmerizing how an appeal to human nature can also be an appeal to contradiction itself. Humans operate in perpetual extremes and contradictions — if everyone wants decentralization today, they’ll eventually want centralization tomorrow, and vice versa. Philosophically, it’s an airtight appeal because the contradiction can be anything time/history allows.

old school cool funk

There’s this crow outside that insists on plucking coconuts. A while back I was in a coconut tree (don’t ask), and there it was — a crow setting up its nest. I assisted by creating more space and since then it’s been obsessed with plucking coconuts. It’s dropping young and old ones faster than I’m willing to deal with them. 4 in the last two hours..

My favorite way to know if a product/service works as advertised is to… use it. The devil is (usually) in the details, and the proof is in the eating. People naturally identify with the software/services they use, so getting an accurate picture (as an outsider) is tricky nowadays. A TOS can also give insight into a company’s product/service.

Every so often I’m reminded of how tricky Wikipedia is — especially for current events. It’s not magically unbiased. Inventing authoritative sources of truth with well timed edits for real world persuasive power is the oldest working trick in the book.

Words and identifiers are at most substitutes for intangibles that cannot be expressed. The power of naming matters more than the name itself.

Am I cool now? :)

“The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.”

Remember when it was thought that all combustible materials consist of two parts? Phlogiston and dephlogiston (calx). Goodness, someone today just made me remember the most random thing from chemistry history (from when I was in school).