first post from the touch
this is a post typed from the iPod touch to see how easy it isto use. Aside from not having a proper keyboard it seems to work fine. Great for blogging on the move.
On at least three occasions toots that were written as a cry for empathy, or at least venting, were interacted with by apathetic people. For this simple reason I deleted two Fediverse accounts. I deleted my Mastodon.social account, and my FireFish.social accounts. I have a precise desire, when using social media. That desire is to find a community of likeminded individuals that I have such enjoyable conversations with, that I want to meet them in person.
Noise pollution is caused by apathetic people, people that don’t consider that people want to sleep, study, think or other things. If noise pollution was not a problem libraries and other places of learning would not require quiet. They would be as noisy as everywhere else.
For daring to complain about noise pollution I was insulted, and then mocked on mastodon.social. When I look to vent, or, ideally, find empathy, and I find apathy my instant desire is to tell the person to duck off. I didn’t. I decided to write one more toot. The second response encouraged me to block the apathetic individual.
I don’t remember what a second person wrote but it encouraged me to speak about normal people as sheeple, and to speak about the benefits of tight knit communities. One individual denounced the term sheeple and then wrote some rubbish about how not all accounts with a million followers are bad. I considered responding but didn’t. Why fight an uphill battle.
The trigger that got me to delete my mastodon.social and firefish.social posts was an ironic “I’m happy for you”. I am almost certain that it was ironic, although due to a lack of emoticons I do not know this for certain. What I do know is that I dumped Facebook early in the pandemic because of such interactions.
Sometimes I feel like giving up on asocial media. I feel like giving up on asocial media because the space is shared between generations, and use cases. Some people are utilitarian broadcasts, whose only desire is to find a mass audience. The second group are trolls looking for a misunderstanding, rather than a conversation, and the third group The third group are people, like me, who want to converse, but have to spend weeks or months finding pleasant conversations.
That’s why it’s tempting to give up on social media. It takes so much time and yet it’s so fragile. I’m thinking of returning to Facebook and Twitter because of how bad Mastodon is at the moment.
I wrote Mastodon above, because although I feel that Mastodon is a waste of time, due to how easy it is to be trolled, but very difficult to find empathy, it feels like working with WordPress and other Fediverse compatible instances is an interesting playground to play in. I love that my blog is somewhere so visible now. It is no longer stuck in a desert, it is at the front of my Fediverse streams, when i like and share my blog posts. I feel that this is the Fediverse’s unique selling point.
The reason for leaving Twitter and Facebook is/was to leave a toxic environment and look for a healthier community where it is fun to invest time and attention. With my experience of Mastodon, in particular, I feel that staying away makes sense, especially from big instances. The experiences we left Twitter and Facebook to avoid, are present on Mastodon.social.
The other, more rational option is to stay on smaller instances, and just wait until communities form. It might take months or years, but eventually they might arrive. This will take time.
Another option would be to use the web anonymously, using a nickname, like so many people do, to avoid trolls having an effect on your official persona. It’s the rational choice, but a social network where you have to hide behind an avatar is less interesting than one where people use their actual names.
Although Mastodon and the Fediverse are growing both places are still filled with solitude. We can devote hours a day, to try to find engagement, or we can take a break, write a blog post that is shared to the Fediverse, and let it do the talking.
Yesterday when looking at YouTube over lunch I noticed that they now show six videos at a time, compared to the 20-30 videos they used to show, back in the good old days. This means that you have six videos to choose from. The algorithm is cutting down our choice constantly from 30 videos down to 20. and now 6.
If we watch one channel’s content then that content will be shown exclusively until we grow tired of it, and then we will have to choose from a dozen or less content creators. Sometimes videos will appear in three or four categories. It’s hard to browse when there is so little choice.
In the days of renting DVDs for a night or two we would go into the shop and there would be a few recommendations but then we could go into the library and search for a while, trying to find content by genre, mood or more. Today that browsing experience is getting worse.
When I look for something to watch on YouTube or Netflix and Prime I want to have a real choice. I want to see a breadth of choice within a single screen. I don’t want to be forced to watch what algorithms force people to watch. If you recommend content because it’s popular, but it’s popular because it has been pushed on people, then it is not popular. It is spoon fed. The algorithms are cheating us and content creators. We’re being cheated because we have no choice, and content creators are cheated because they are invisible.
What I liked about YouTube is that it provided us with a breadth of content to choose from. We might have browsed for a few minutes and skimmed through thousands of videos but we had real choice to find ideal content. Now, with six videos being shown at a time we’re forced to pick out of six. This isn’t choice. This is scarcity. Thousands of hours of content are uploaded to youtube every minute and yet the algorithms get everyone to watch the same thing.
The problem is that I don’t know what I want to watch for half an hour to an hour so I don’t have key words that I want to look for. If I’m forced to see six videos, rather than browse, then I’m likely to give up rather than search. Usually we look at YouTube and similar sites to discover new content.
YouTube wants us to pay for prime but they take our ability to choose. They use algorithms that, because content is pushed on us, become worse and worse with recommendations. We can give feedback, but not proper feedback. I sign up for Prime, enjoy it for a few weeks, and then it becomes toxic and I take a break. The algorithms pigeon hole us, rather than learn about us.
I love the medium of video. I love well produced content. I love content of a certain type. Google’s algorithms looks at users and recommends the content that it would give to teenagers to 40 years olds, and vice versa. The recommendation engine knows our age, and our viewing habits over a decade and a half. If people are worried about privacy, just look at ads and YouTube recommendations and you will realise that algorithms know nothing about us. Algorithms, by now, should know that I hate sensationalism. I realise that hating sensationalism is sensationalist. The point is that if recommendations for content are bad, then we are likely to take a break.
Once again I was out in the rain walking around a city. Once again I was looking downwards and then up. I was also looking around and navigating through a city I have been to before but only for a meal and on my way to another place. I went there for a blogobar event many months ago. More recently I went through the city on my way to a Via Ferrata near La Chaux De Fond. This time was different. I was meeting people who stare at their mobile phones when walking around city. To many of you this describes what you think is wrong with society. Too many people withdrawing from society, not interacting. This isn’t the case.
These people who met from 10am on a saturday until 1145 before a group picture was taken are ingress players. Ingress as you know from previous posts is a muntiplayer augmented reality game that people play by walking around in the real world. They walk towards buildings, monuments, statues and other sights of interest. As a group, as I wrote about yesterday we had three missions as a group. I only did two of these with the group. One of them required a physical walk up to the castle of Neuchatel and back down the slope. As we walked we saw parts of the city which I had yet to see. The second walk was from the train station down towards the lake side.
This is relevant for two reasons. The first of these is that I am a hiker and in summer I spend my weekends in the mountains. The second is that I have walked around more cities than I can remember. The best way to get to know a city is by walking. You gain a sense of scale. You understand it’s geography and you also see what points of interest are where and how they are connected. Rome is a city which I visited many times alone. I love the city because I love the life style contrast between Geneva and Rome. I also love the city because of it’s history. Where else do you park a car in a basement next to some Roman walls. Where else do you have two Millenia of history so visible?
Ingress today offered me an opportunity to meet with strangers and do activities with them, to see parts of a new city and to have company. So often mobile phones are associated with solitude and isolation. Through this account you may understand that mobile phones and especially smartphones can be inclusive. The conversations that we had through social media have faded as the noise has gone up and this is where social augmented reality games can pick up. They can provide a new opportunity for people to connect.
Next month I plan on going to Firenze for another event. So far over 600 people have signed up. They will come from around Europe and around the world to meet in a beautiful city with a rich cultural history. This will be the backdrop for the game. I look forward to visiting the city once again and meeting new people precisely because of smartphones rather than despite of them.
Yesterday I finished reading The Martian. I chose to read the book rather than watch the film, and I chose to read it now rather than months ago because I wanted to read The Martian after the hype and excitement had declined.
The story is simple to follow and the ideas are interesting. I feel that when problems occur for the character they are put in simply to demonstrate more technology and more ideas rather than to provide real challenges to the character. It is more of an essay looking at a hypothetical trip to Mars.
There is humour in the book as shown by some quotes.
Well, okay. I know the answer to that. Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we’ve dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true.
“It was like flying a cow,†Martinez grumbled, his hands racing over his controls.
“Brought product to surface of Mars. It stopped working. 0/10.â€
“first: Tomorrow I’ll be the first person to recover a Mars probe.”
Using advanced construction techniques (duct tape), I reassembled some of them into a square.
As you might not have read the book I will leave these quotes without discussing the context. There are one or two moments in this book where I laughed aloud. It is nice to read a book that makes you laugh.
The importance of a book such as a Martian is not the writing style or the story telling but rather the ability to imagine what future human exploration could be like. How would we get food. How would we survive on scenario or another. Are some risks more interesting than others. It encourages people to think about space exploration and some of the challenges. It is accessible to a broad portion of people.
For a few weeks I have tried to install NixOS on a raspberry Pi without much success. I have finally managed to get NixOS to work with a GUI/Desktop environment. I kept getting stuck at the command prompt but in the end I found a blog post that helped me.
The first thing I struggled with was finding a version of NixOS that played nicely with Pi’s processor. With some distributions you download it, install and it’s easy. With NixOS it took some searching to find the right ISO image that I also had to download a tool to unzip.
I think I could have got NixOS to work much sooner but I was confused by the command prompt. Every few seconds it gives messages about bluetooth devices and more. It made me think that the install had failed and that there was an error. I also had to learn to use the passwd command at the first prompt to set the password for the nixos user before moving forward.
When you install NixOS on an HP laptop, or other device you can download the standard ISO, make a bootable USB stick, and then install NixOS from NixOS. With the Pi you can’t do that. You have to do some things in the command line. The key step is to set the password, find the IP address and then SSH from xour usual machine. Once that is done it is easy to experiment with setting up NixOS.
Now that I have NixOS up and running on a Pi I can experiment with the OS. When I update the configuration file I can keep a copy of it. Any time I install Nix on a system I can re-use the config file and replicate a setup within minutes, rather than hours. I set it up on a Pi4 with 2gb of ram but I could move it to a Pi4 with 4 or 8gb of ram, when I see that it requires more ram. Now that I am at this point I can experiment with more flexibility.