Here’s a final muse for current year. This probably counts as wise posting. On local news there’s sentiment that the world is now “post–truth”… but historically; since when has the world not been post–truth? Truth (verifiability/provability) is ultra rare and trust abundant :-)

The Internet/Blockchain/whatever is not a truth machine and could never be a truth machine. Inside events/stories/happenings everyone’s just as clueless as in past eras and technological differences become “functionally equivalent” — meaning you either waste time separating signal from noise in “fast” and “fake” information infinitum or waiting for “slow” and “official” carrier pigeons to arrive.

The blog linked in a previous post is a gem. Too bad the current site doesn’t appear to have all the archived posts, you need strong search–fu to find them on archive.org.

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.