06 Nov 2023
summary
·
technology
A large number of articles, opinion pieces, blog posts, video essays, podcasts, television dramas,
and movies saturate the information landscape. It is bad form to say that there is more out there
than can be read by any one person. The dreaded information overload has arrived. A few acknowledge
the existence of this swarm of multimedia. The majority beckon an Algorithm, entrusting it with the
responsibility of collecting, filtering, and sorting them in the unknowable order that each
component particle of the majority expects. Opting out is futile. Not knowing about something is
superior to not knowing about its occurrence. What follows is a view of culture and society based
on the contents of 3 issues of the WIRED magazine.
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09 Oct 2023
artificial-intelligence
·
philosophy
·
technology
Rating: 5/5
I wanted to read a book which would delve into the philosophical underpinnings of the ongoing AI
hype: What was the root of the idea that humans, with all their confusions and complexities, can
ever be replaced by computers? O’Gieblyn’s column in the Wired magazine, Dear Cloud Support,
is my favorite part of the magazine. Her writing is lucid and her references come from far and
wide. I was not really prepared for the philosophical depth that is on display in this book:
O’Gieblyn goes to the very beginning of the world and starts with the earliest philosophers (Plato,
Aristotle) and ushers the reader through a series of “frames of mind.” She is not averse to religion
or science; nor is she biased to any particular philosopher or their ideas; quoting from a huge
variety of sources throughout the book to show the ways in which thinking has evolved. Her religious
upbringing and her current vocation as a technology writer feature heavily throughout the
book. After reading this book, I have a clear idea of where the foundation of the hype lies and how
it has gotten this bad.
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23 Jul 2023
advertising
·
economics
·
internet
Rating: 4/5
What would happen if all the free services that you use on the Internet, which are powered by
advertisements, stop being free one day? This is the premise of the Subprime Attention Crisis. If
you ask yourself this, you might realize that many of the services that we think of as free are
powered by advertising. For me, the most frequently used services that are ostensible free are
Google Maps, WhatsApp and YouTube. I use at least one of them almost every day. If they were to
become paid services, or the hurdles to using them without giving up too much data increased, it
would be mildly annoying. This calculus will be very different for an Internet user who uses Gmail
and uses it to receive important communication. Hwang’s argument is sensible and easy to
understand. He starts from the basics of advertising on the Internet and builds up to his myriad
theses: Programmatic advertising is very similar to the financial markets. Ad networks claims that
targeted advertising on the Internet is better than “spray everyone” advertising on TV. This claim
is a lie and that banner ads don’t really change consumer behavior. Commercial interruptions are
blocked by users using ad blocking plugins or because users reliably skip ads on video-only
platforms in under half a second. To back all of this, he presents a lot of industry research and
anecdotal evidence. This was a convincing case for being aware that free services could stop being
free any day, and there would be nothing really surprising about it. (Just the other day, YouTube
took a step towards blocking ad blockers.)
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22 Jul 2023
technology
·
vpn
·
wireguard
I have been using Wireguard for about 4 years now. I started with the basic Wireguard setup, where I
did everything manually and used the ip link
and ip addr
commands to create new links and assign
addresses to them. The wg-quick
utility is open-source and has built-in SystemD support. So, I
switched to using the configuration file that wg-quick
requires. With an ad-blocking DNS server, I
was able to use the setup for a long time without having to change anything at all. The client
support was excellent on Linux, Android and (even) iOS. I never really noticed whether I had my VPN
enabled. I kept it enabled at all times except when I needed to access some geofenced
service. However, I was still writing the wg-quick configuration files manually and most of them
were very similar. This caused me to put off adding new peers to my network as soon as I needed to.
Recently, I wrote a Golang CLI tool which generates wg-quick
compatible configurations for
Wireguard peers, based on a simple JSON input file. Using this tool, I was able to add a new
Wireguard peer and create a new network in less than 10 minutes. The path to that CLI tool is what
this post is about.
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17 Jun 2023
books
·
reading
·
technology
Recently, I have taken to reading magazine articles and long newsletter posts on my Kindle by
converting them to the ePub format, rather than reading them on the computer, where the process of
making highlights and taking notes differs from the process that I use for all the e-books that I
read. As I started doing this for some long articles (such as this one), I realized that the best
online options out there are not good enough. I have been using dotepub.com which seems popular and
converts to both the generic Epub format, and the Kindle-specific Mobi format. While it does a good
job with all the text, this particular article was particularly heavy on images, and all the images
were required to understand the text. When I converted the page to an Epub format, it told me that
it would not include all the images from the article. So, I set out to write a few scripts which
could fix that problem and actually export web pages as self-contained epub files.
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04 Jun 2023
book-review
·
dystopia
Rating: 5/5
This novel starts off with an imprisoned protagonist thinking of the past where the prisoner was
part of the very Revolution that has now imprisoned them. As the story progresses, philosophical
ramblings come at increasingly frequent intervals and the novel reveals the most valuable plot
point: watching the protagonist go back and forth between the belief that the “Revolution” was a
good thing, which will eventually attain its original goals; and the belief that the Revolution was
incorrect to say that “an individual is the product of one million divided by one million.”
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08 Apr 2023
compters
·
data-management
·
linux
·
tools
I switched from Ubuntu 22.04 to Debian 11 earlier this year. I was using Ubuntu’s LTS OS versions
for nearly 9 years before that, since 2014. The switch to Debian was because I stopped liking what
Ubuntu had done with the OS: The GUI has become a strange mix of Ubuntu’s old desktop environment
(Unity) and the Gnome Desktop Environment, which is standard and popular. I generally use the i3
window manager, so the Desktop environment was not too annoying; I could have lived with it if not
for Snaps. The introduction and use of Snaps was a continuous thorn in my setup. Each snap sets up a
new loop file. So, the output of df
is polluted with these strange loop devices that I don’t
care about. Also, Firefox installed using Snaps does not work well with the KeepassXC Browser
integration. So, the recommended way for installing programs on Ubuntu was actively getting in my
way. (There is also some Ubuntu bloatware but an equivalent of that is there in almost every other
non-base distribution, so it can’t really be counted against any single distribution.) I wanted to
do a few things differently with this reinstall.
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31 Mar 2023
book-review
·
capitalism
·
consumerism
Rating: 4/5
Ozeki’s novel is good at the beginning and good at the end. The middle drags on for a little too
long; I had at least a mild interest in figuring out how the characters end up. However, the
interest levels get pretty low. It is a book about books, art, culture, the decline of reading,
the increase of consumerism, capitalism, and the incredibly high number of things that are now a
fixture in the lives of a few people. It is a portrayal of the present, as a dystopia, by a Book;
that shows both the ability to buy things that jobs give people, and the precarious nature of those
jobs in a society with no safety net. The novel is mostly sincere, but sometimes it crosses over
into the cheesy. The novel has a character whose background is identical to Marie Kondo and whose
philosophy is very similar (I guess) to Ozeki’s.
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29 Mar 2023
book-review
·
fiction
·
parenting
Rating: 5/5
One should never arrive in an unknown place at night, everything is undefined, every object is
easily exaggerated.
This is a beautiful line. Every time I am booking a ticket to some new place, I remember this
line. I remember the dread and uncertainty of arriving at night. Despite knowing that arriving at
night is unwise, I arrived in Italy late one night in 2019. It was a timely reminder of my lack of
wisdom; a line like this makes the lesson a memorable one. Seeing the confused characters in this
book, my first instinct was to clamp down on their inability to decide and brand it rashly as
immature indecisiveness; then, gradually, I would see the lens fog up and doubt creep in. Were
they really indecisive, or do they appear unclear to us only in hindsight?
It was like a slight twinge that, as you keep thinking about it, becomes an unbearable pain. I was
beginning to feel exasperated.
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18 Feb 2023
artificial-intelligence
·
technology
Every conversation that I have been in over the past 3 weeks outside the home has been about
generative AI, and the vein of all these conversations is quite similar. Most of the people I met
are optimistic about this new “technological advancement.” I met a few skeptics who believe
that generative AI is adept at generating only a summary of what’s already out there and incapable
of coming up with something original. I agree with those skeptics, based on the screenshots
that abound on Twitter and my brief experience giving a handful of prompts to ChatGPT. The apparent
inevitability of the “next thing” in technology is can not be understood as one that stems from
rational thought: Rather, it is a cultural (almost religious) belief, and it pervades in the social
psyche. For a while now, there has been this unstated acceptance that new technologies will come
along, and those who don’t use them will be left behind in the dust. What if one were to ask the
question, what if the dust is good enough? One wouldn’t even think of it; when has dust ever been
“good enough”?. Is the cutting edge really something you want to be on? You better want to be there,
or you will be left behind. Even if you are standing still on the travelator of technological
advancements, you will be pulled along, dragging and screaming, on the unstoppable march of
technology.
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