liberia

All the platforms have their own TikTok style mechanism now. YouTube has Shorts, Facebook has its Reels feature which is tightly integrated with Instagram and you need an Instagram account to engage with Reels on Facebook, which is a bit of a growth hacker dark pattern. For now, Reels is not interspersed with ADs which is refreshing, but that could all change.

The whole vertical video craze is a weird one, and one I’ve only recently tried to adjust to. I mean the pace of it is so fast, and I barely have time to process each video before moving to the next one. A whole generation are going to be raised on cheap dopamine hits and will probably suffer mild ADD symptoms because of this.

I want the slow web back where I can chew on long form content and mull over large pieces of text and long winded podcasts, not boiled down snippets of info that prey on my base instincts and giddy 1 minute dopamine fixes.

The master has failed more than the beginner has even tried

Impostor syndrome can hamper your ability to succeed since you doubt yourself from the outset and can be crippling. The ability to absorb feedback whether negative or positive is a good life skill. The key is not to take it to heart, and look at it rationally without resorting to feelings of guilt or dread, or to then become overly confident when receiving positive feedback.

Zen is often associated with minimalism and ‘calm’. Look at ZenDesk. It’s an apparently no frills support service, and minimalist in design. I don’t mind this. Although the proper name is zazen which means sitting meditation.

SVG icon for the little ‘Y’ image in the corner. It looks blurred when you zoom in. And I always have HN zoomed in at 150% because the text is tiny on a full HD screen.

For those wondering, gooogle.com with three ooos is owned by Google. I posted it since it’s interesting and quirky.

*Only discovering that HN amended the URL to Google.com when it should be gooogle.com

Anyone here drink kefir yogurt? I have kefir grains which I ferment in milk and get a weekly yield of yogurt that I drink out of a bowl after straining the yogurt. It’s packed with probiotics, and helps with my mood. It’s an all round useful elixir to make.

Do things that give you energy rather than take it away.

Also motivation and inspiration are unreliable. They ebb and flow. Discipline is key. It precedes any action and will bring you closer to your goals.

The NoCode movement is not anti-code just a way to do things without code, and in some cases achieve the same thing. Not every technical problem requires code.

Not sure about using it for a blog. I used it back in the day (didn’t know it’s still actively developed). I never liked it since I want full control over all the code and manually editing documents in Notepad++ is a lot better. Couple a text editor with the LiveReload browser addon and you see instant changes you have made in the text editor of choice.

I use their Lists feature. Once the initial work is put in of curating high signal useful people to follow, you can relax. I never look at my main feed as it’s full of noise and as you said, full of self-styled gurus with annoying threads. Some people really need to start blogging instead of creating clickbait threads.

Worth reading Deep Packet Inspection is Dead: https://security.ias.edu/deep-packet-inspection-dead-and-her...

This tool is great, but I religiously route all my traffic through a VPN that I own and control. I’ve hardened the box I use to have zero logs and I don’t need to blindly trust a commercial provider whether they’ve been audited or not. There’s no way of really knowing they’re not logging in some capacity bar from being physically in their server room and inspecting their setup.

Add to the VPN a DoH resolver that I own and control too, and it makes things even better. I also block port 80 on my machine as an extra measure. No need to be using port 80 in this day and age except for captive portals which I rarely ever have to use.

Lack of problems is a form of death. The brain exists to solve problems, and by having a lack of problems, it will dream up problems and create them without you needing to seek them.

TikTok is Chinese malware masquerading as a friendly social media app that people use for giggles when waiting for the bus or loafing at work. It’s a Trojan horse firmly embedded in the US with no oversight or regulation. And the amount of data it grabs behind the scenes is astonishing.

Most buyers are savvy though and buy reputable brands. Search for ‘USB flash drive’ and invariably you will get cheap Chinese muck that will break within a day. Then just filter by respectable brands like SanDisk and case closed, all the cheap stuff is filtered out!

AI needs to work in tandem with humans to flourish. There are still edge cases in self driving cars where a remote human operator is asked to intervene in tricky hard problems like an accident on the road or some other edge case where a computer doesn’t suffice. There is also the mechanical turk approach of employing humans to do things a computer simply can’t do like curating a list, or curating art.

Down the line though we need a runaway AI that is allowed to think for itself with no safety mechanisms in place to stop it going rogue. This will be the equivalent of splitting the atom. Like nuclear weapons part deux. Not a case of if, but when.

Bumble app

Once you grok duality, you can hold two opposing worldviews in your head at the same time. Many people are always shocked when I pivot to the opposite of what I just said, and expect me to be embarrassed. The thing about worldviews is that they’re malleable and context specific.

I need more specifics on the UK’s planned ‘ghost protocol’ otherwise known as Eve or Mallory in the Alice and Bob cast of characters. What messenger apps will be affected by this? Because if I was building a messenger app I would pull a Lavabit and disband it if coerced to put in back doors. Heard great things about Matrix/Element app. Is such an app impervious to back doors though? I mean the protocol is open source right? How do you back door something open source? WhatsApp can be considered to be unsafe to use, that I know, but what about alternatives like Cwtch, and things like Session?

All I’m suggesting is self hosted Wordpress that you control. You can even backup Wordpress so if the hosting provider shuts down you just use another provider and migrate over. Something you can’t do with Tumblr. And you’re at the whim of Tumblr who can ban you for having something even remotely controversial.

There are tumblog themes and plugins in Wordpress you can use. Don’t build castles on other people’s land. Use this as a learning point.

Will a ‘passwordless future’ gain traction though? I keep hearing the term ‘passwordless’ but right now it’s a niche thing with only techie types early adopting it. I own a Yubikey and use WebAuthn where it’s supported. But only some services support WebAuthn. For this to take off it needs to be ubiquitous and widely supported. Also this article says people won’t be locked out, but if you lose your Yubikey you need some recovery mechanism in place, and not all services support a ‘recovery code’ option meaning you have to contact support, verify your identity with a passport scan and other KYC checks.

There are private tools people use to do content marketing en masse. This has been going on for some time. Yet the best content is handmade and doesn’t use automated tools.

The last known good version of Windows was Windows 7. To a lesser extent Windows 8. This is why I switched to Linux and I haven’t turned back, though I do use Virtualbox when I need Windows for things like iTunes. If you are going to use Windows 10/11 as a daily driver, use something like Shutup10 which disables telemetry etc

Infinite scrolling is a dark pattern that preys on FOMO. It should be banned. I want a limited feed that I curate and shows me exactly the amount of content I need for one scrolling session. Duping people into thinking there’s always more is a dark agenda.

The ‘high level target’ or person of interest thing is slightly absurd. Everyone is a person of interest and security shouldn’t be only for the domain of journalists, activists, dissidents etc

I would also like to see a list of the most downvoted comments. Would be interesting to know what the most downvoted HN comment of all time is!

And you can register short (expired) .coms providing they’re not parked or up for auction.

Have an offline copy of devdocs.io which is all I need.

Although I would like instant access to Stack Overflow for various snippets. Things like ‘How to sort an array of numbers’