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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10 Dec 2022
media
·
rant
There has been a lot of media theory talk over the past year in the mainstream (newspapers, news
websites, television) and on the intellectual sidelines (podcasts and blogs). The discourse is heavy
on the origins and consequences of the continuing, effectively unstoppable, decay of communication
over traditional media. (Savvy authors might use terms like “signal to noise ratio.”) However, all
this discourse is suspiciously devoid of any advice for us, the spectators. Repeatedly, there is the
defeatist assertion that most people will probably be addicted to their screens despite knowing
how the screens manipulate them. I don’t think this defeatism is necessary. What should people do to
avoid the consequences that authors are expounding on? Should they try to cut their information
intake? Should they go “off the grid,” a concept that Opinion writers have made a cottage industry
out of talking about? The discourse has no response. Here’s my non-defeatist take.
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02 Dec 2022
book-review
·
dystopia
·
kafka
This novel is humorous. The characters and their interactions, the presumptions that they make about
each other based on trivial details, the protagonist’s (His name is K.) strange obsession over every
single alphabet in the letters that he receives, characters that have a job which they do only when
they want to. Everything in the novel is humorous. On the surface. Just underneath the surface,
lurks the boundless struggle and omnipresent hopelessness of a life in the world that
K. inhabits. (The world that he is in is eerily, and perhaps intentionally similar to our own.)
This is not a dystopia; the bureaucratic hell that K. is subjected to is one that many are familiar
with. The nightmare does not stop when you have procured every new document that the government has
ever issued to its citizens; it continues, for the government takes great relish in moving the
goalposts and confusing people; keeping them inside their Web browser until their citizens are
exasperated enough to just close the tab and move on. The only difference between the citizens of
our world and K. is that K. does not move on.
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13 Oct 2022
advertising
·
media
The newspaper represents the canonical form of media. This medium is devoid of the strangeness
inherent in 24-hour TV, and has been around long enough for its form to reach a state of
equilibrium; a state that can be understood. Of all the pages in a newspaper, I want to talk about
the entertainment pages. What is the point of the entertainment supplement that accompanies
newspapers? These supplements often start with a headline in which an actor is promoting a
movie. The key however is that the actor says something unrelated; or “reveals” a secret about their
work or life so that the reader is first trapped into reading the article. Eventually, the reader
will find out that they are promoting a movie. I did not know this for a while; when watching
television shows where guests would come on the show as “judges,” I was not able to recognize
immediately that the people who came on the show were there only when they were promoting
something. Once I realized that actors go on TV shows for only that reason, the connections were
much easier to draw. Whenever a new movie comes out, the people associated with the movie try to get
as much footage as they possibly can. This is simply the way marketing works; a banal truth. Is this
media blitz anything except marketing? Why do the media organizations become tools in this
marketing? Why do people fall for this not immediately obvious marketing ploy, despite years of
formulaic use? Those are the questions I am going to attempt to answer in this post.
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27 Aug 2022
communism
·
economics
·
history
The primary source for this list is Dalrymple’s account of his visits to 5 Communist countries as
described in his book The Wilder Shores of Marx (Dalrymple). Dalrymple visited these countries in
the late 1980s, and several of these countries have since turned to democracy. The 2 other major
sources that have influenced me would be movies about life in Eastern Europe during or right after
the 2nd World War (such as Pianist (2002)) and Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. More recent sources
include the Vox episode about Cuba released in 2015 and contemporary travel vlogs from North Korea.
For lists such as this one, it is hard to pin point where exactly the idea originated from. I would
say that the list is an amalgamation of the information provided by the sources I have mentioned and
the impression they had on me about the life of ordinary people in the remaining Communist countries
of the world. Other media has also influenced me, notably Casey Neistat’s reflections about his trip
to Cuba, Conan’s hilarious series of shows from Cuba and the Korean drama Crash Landing on You, in
which the protagonist is a North Korean army officer. (An upcoming review of McGregor’s The Party,
an account of the governing system in China, will clarify why China did not conform to the typical
Communist regime expectations either when Dalrymple visited the other states or today; its curious
mix of capitalist economics with Communist ideology has borne the greatest success story in the past
half century.)
(I structured this as a list after reading Dynomight’s post supporting lists as a tool for effective
communication.)
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23 Aug 2022
capitalism
·
internet
·
progress
·
technology
After nearly a decade of using the internet daily, it is clear that users have little control over
what is displayed on their screen. The control has been ceded to capitalists wishing to sell you
something. I am not just talking about the algorithmic social media that is the rage these
days. (TL;DR Tik Tok is becoming more popular than Instagram because their algorithm is better and
Instagram is getting anxious about it.) I’m talking about advertisements. Newspapers, radio and
television have never given the viewer any option about the advertising content that they
hear/see. On those mediums, it was easier to distinguish between content and advertising. When the
commercial break begins, I can mute the television. With newspapers, I can skim past pages that are
advertisements. When an ad is disguised as a search result marked by a greyed out “Sponsored” label
which is very small and designed to be hard to notice, the user has no choice but to engage with the
ad as if it were a legitimate result.
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