I might be slowly turning more lucid. Things are starting to take on a repeat. I was scanning mildly old tech news feeds and time travelled to old school 2012 high school.

There was a certain Kony 2012 of worldwide acclaim around that time too (randomly tangential but true).

I’ve been thinking about scams lately. The most elusive are both scams and not scams, i.e, scamming from the “superposition” (if you will).

Scammers thrive on confusion. If large groups of people say that a scheme worked, and others the exact opposite, then something’s phishy.

What makes ponzi, miracle man, and “dead donkey” scams truly ingenious is that victims may defend the scam. Since it did work or losses were minimal, the misdirection is completely on autopilot.

They say you can’t have virality without context collapse. There are times when I stumble upon stuff online that I kind of know the behind the scenes on.

Then I remember (again) that virality is often simpler than you’d think. One only has but to master the art of continually collapsing the context. It begins where the fates align and the contexts collide.

There are a lot more speech programs on Linux now. I was a bit curious and searched through the distribution package managers recently.

• Live Captions
• Linux Voice Control
• Speech Note
• Nerd Dictation
• Sherpa Speech
• Piper
• Numen

Some use Vosk or Onnx as runtimes.

Perhaps it’s just my imagination (related). Imagine you’re shown a bag making clip on YouTube (maybe from Brazil).

You (on a whim) zip on over to the channel for more sewing, only to be slammed with US engagement politics. The commenters (English) never seemed to have gotten the context that it’s a channel in Portuguese about bags (scroll to the end). Then everything magically disappears.

Do small channels like that just get randomly hacked, hijacked, and then sacked? Interesting.

Behold the modern day YouTube experience. That one gets premium points for landing an easy 6:26 (or 27) duration summary (embed).

There used to be spelling and grammar bots roaming around. They’d read your entire blog and mail in the misspelt words. If you replied, someone would respond to demo their ultimate proof reading solution.

One of them was really bothered by referer. I pointed out once that it was intensional and that came as a shocking revelation. Those bots were replaced by the swarm intelligence. Now everyone’s grammar and spelling is perfection.

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to speculative ambiguity. Let’s hope that blowing up rockets over the Caribbean never achieves normalization of the 3rd form.

Any time someone asks if an online thing is fake or real;
Instead of going for the all or nothing:

1. Yes
2. No

There’s always the more amusing but empirical:

3. There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.

I was shown this thing called SSI. It’s the sneakiest of tricks for primitively boosting any SSG. It’s supported in the web servers nginx, apache, lighttpd, and others.

server {
  ssi on;
  ssi_last_modified on;
}