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;
}

To quiet down Firefox’s network activity at the application level:

Set global (about:policies) policies in /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json

Block untrusted connections with proxy.pac [?] in policies.json. Enable the PAC file URL in (about:settings) network settings.

Additionally user.js is configurable (mine). Firefox derivatives do similar pre-configurations. Chromium derivatives have policy settings too.

There’s a quick way to test the offline behaviour of programs on Linux.

unshare -c -n bash

$ ip addr
1: lo: <LOOPBACK> mtu 65536 qdisc noop state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00

$ lsns -t net
NS  TYPE NPROCS PID   USER  NETNSID    COMMAND
999 net  2      111   user  3          systemd
888 net  1      222   user  unassigned └─bash

My interest in mainstream tech is waning. Maybe it’s from counting too many c’s in externalities. A lot of us have been lucky in tapering expectations against the professional marketing psychologists.

I’m something of an NFT expert without actually gambling at the tables (not nftables). I peered into the movements of the crystal globe and almost saw a vision.

There’s a draft on my other blog sitting around about coins as a currency, drafted in the local mania. Luckily, I lost my naivete then and wrote something about web browsers somewhere. There are true believers and then those who speculate on the bread and the fish.

I was told that it’s great that there’s lots of links here. Links are kind of a chore, but an obsessive habit (from academic times). There’s some semi automation happening but the main downsides are:

1. Checking if they still work
2. Checking if relevancy hasn’t changed

The other con || pro (take your pick):

3. Friends more in the know, may dissect && tear you a new one when the content and the link disagree (with reality).

Insanely knowledgeable people are also out there online too. On occasion, when I bother with emails, I always end up learning extremely fascinating stuff.

I must admit. I was so wrong in the past. I used to adamantly assure anyone who thought it hard to separate fact from fiction online, “it’s easy.”

That was, until I read on Internet News that our crypto king whiz kid (what they call my elders) was “in” Argentina (which has its own meme coin king allegedly). Our technical whiz kid was locally in exile that day.

The “it’s only a serious joke” shenanigans is so outer planetary, it might take disciplined historians far removed from this superficial era to intricately interpret this dance, but only if they safely receive archives of this slow moving, fast train of equi vocal, contradictory voices. Thanks for reading my book.