Thinking about Q.

Back when I was in college for my Bachelors, my parents gave me a post-paid mobile phone that had unlimited Internet access, but very limited SMS per month. This was a common theme for Indian telecoms back then – prepaid connections had thousands of free SMS messages, while post-paid had unlimited in-network talktime, and in my case, unlimited Internet access. The latter was a rarity and I really appreciated it. However, all my friends were on pre-paid connections and were diving into the free SMS world like crazy. I felt left out. So, one day I went out and bought myself a second phone (one of those epic indestructible Nokia 1100 phones), got a prepaid SIM and dived into the world of free SMS. For that first month, I got a package that let me send 9000 texts.

I was in heaven! I was chatting with all my friends, but also sending them all kinds of useless forwards. I would painstakingly send each message to my 60 classmates and ten or so hostel mates, twenty SMS recipients at a time (the technical limit for a group message in that phone). I reached a point where I started to annoy a few of them 😀

Pretty soon though, the supply dried up. There are only so many forwards a person received in a day at that time. That’s when my post-paid connection paid off. I would find interesting messages online, type them out on that rapid-fire T9 keyboard and save as draft, before going through the message forwarding rigmarole.

After some time, I went on a holiday. When I came back, my pre-paid pack had expired so I went to renew it. I learnt that while I was vacationing, my telecom was hard at work. They believed they had captured enough of the market and were ready to pull the benefits. The free SMS packs had reduced from 9000 texts to 900, and a few days later, to 600. This was barely enough to keep my interest and I moved on from this world. But it taught me a valuable lesson – anyone could setup shop as a message forwarder given the inclination and resources.

Years later, when WhatsApp forwards started flooding inboxes, I was over the trend even before it started. But I watched it with great interest. After all, what’s better than free messages? For anyone holding a smartphone, it was SMS-but-better-and-free. For a network engineer, it was nothing more than a few packets. It could have been a forwarded email or gchat message, but it was a WhatsApp message instead. Nothing to see here.

The likeness to SMS is what catapulted WhatsApp to the level where it is today. I don’t know about you, but MMS were never a thing in India. They were expensive and needed tech most people didn’t have. Hence when we think of WhatsApp forwards, we don’t think of MMS, just SMS, even though most forwards nowadays are a mix of well-crafted emoji-laden texts, and colorful images wishing you good morning and ten other things.

I’ve been reading a HuffPost article about QAnon, and its effects not on the cult’s followers, but on their families. It is both heart-rending, and deeply intriguing to see the parents of out generation fall for such traps. For the longest time, I assumed that the movement only existed online. Then, when it spilled blood, I assumed it was only a conservative thing. But reading the article, and reading about erstwhile Obama voters, and believers in alternative medicine and essential oils falling for the gargantuan myth of Q, I realized that it goes beyond just one side. It’s more a myth built to cater to anyone and everyone. Depending on whether you believe in aliens, are libertarian, or are just wary of oft-caught lying Mainstream Media, there’s some hook somewhere to get you in. After all, what’s better than one lie? A hundred lies, all built to cater someone or the other. If you believe in one layer of QAnon and not the next, all you need to say about the rest is that those others are nutjobs, but your beliefs are solid. Then, there’s no way to extricate you from the mess, because everyone else is objectively wrong, aren’t they?

I found some interesting things in the article – one of the people talked about chatting with their parents over discord. I had no idea the elder generation even knew about discord. But I believe the reason these specific ones know about it is because of discord’s private servers, which allow admins free reign over the content that gets disseminated to users. Also, the use of discord shows that the people controlling the movement are of a younger skew – those used to meme-making, shitposting, and gaslighting people for fun. If the people running the show were the same age as the people falling for the spin, they would be interacting wholly on other mediums – email, chat, twitter (perhaps), or something that I’m not into because I’m not in that generation. If this were happening in India (as some things are), it would be wholly on WhatsApp.

Another interesting thing is this quote –

And because QAnon adherents are conditioned to interpret opposition as validation, trying to debunk their falsehoods often only pushes them deeper into the movement.

This here is a masterstroke. Not only are you believing in the message, you’re also falling for the idea that anyone actively opposing you is either an agent of the “enemy” or is so misguided that they need help themselves! This, combined with the general distrust between the generations has led to a situation where children and parents are fighting for their definitions of the “truth”. The fact that QAnon has brought people to this place shows the true power of suggestion.

The thing that I asked myself when reading this article was – why? Why are people believing this nonsense? We’ve been reading about fake news, about MSM being a terrible source of information, about the slow and steady degradation of public discourse. But none of this should mean that our parents should fall down this trap of fake news. Why are they falling for it? Why is it so difficult for them to look at a news item with a critical eye before forwarding it or accepting it as the absolute truth? I thought about it a lot, till yesterday, when my wife shed some light on it.

Story time –

When COVID-19 started, we were inundated by fake news. WhatsApp forwards played a very big role in the first few weeks/months in creating an environment of fear and distrust among people. But along with the external noise, we also had friends and family forwarding every piece of information from all quarters, without verification. I’m not saying disinformation about COVID has stopped, but when there are no sources of information, it’s particularly vicious to forward fantasy as fact. Early on, a friend posted a “news item” on a group stating that the Pope has COVID. I looked at it and immediately guffawed. People will believe anything. My wife commented that it’s really sad this happened, as it shows no one is safe. That spurred me into action. I looked at the URL. The “news” website was not one of the many reputable (or even disreputable ones) I know of. First red flag. Then, I googled the news item. No one else was carrying it, and neither google nor Apple News told me the same. In fact, both were pointing to the same link I had as the source of truth. Second red flag. Then, I went to the site’s homepage and looked at other news article. Lo and behold, every single news item was “someone rich or famous got COVID”. Big red flag! Lastly, since I know the tools for it, I did a whois on the domain. It showed that the website had been registered just three days ago. Yet it had hundreds of articles about everyone from the Pope to your favorite childhood teacher getting COVID. That was the last flag that I needed. For the first time in forever, I replied to a forward, listing out the reasons why it’s fake. Of course, the response from the other end was “I just forwarded it”.
Yesterday, my wife told me that her Mom is considering the efficacy and safety of the vaccine. She received some signals that the vaccine may not be as aboveboard as we all thought it would be. This caused my wife a lot of anger and surprise. Why was her Mom listening to this noise? Of course the vaccine is safe. Of course she should get it! The funny thing is that my mother-in-law is receiving both signals – there are people getting it without a second thought and absolutely recommending it, and there are people who are steadfast against it, without any reason. What’s funny is that my wife gave me a very straightforward explanation for this – our parents are from a generation where the information coming at them has always been vetted, checked thrice, and editorialized. There’s little to no chance of an earth shattering lie. Conversely, we’ve grown up with the Internet, where every behemoth falls and sells our data and passwords to the most vile operators, and we’ve learnt through an infinity of forwards that everything coming at you should be taken with a grain of salt. Does this make us cynics? Sure. It’s worth being cynical when CNN tells us unequivocally that Iraq has WMDs and Facebook tells us that it doesn’t sell our data. That juxtaposition has led to where we are – teaching our parents right from wrong, just as Zoomers have taught us how to use snapchat and tiktok. (Seriously, how do you interact with an app that doesn’t have a visible interface????)

So that’s it – our parents, and everyone who has fallen into the QAnon hole, has fallen because they are a people who do not understand that everything from the Internet is not the truth. That they need to detach the message from the sender and take it first with a grain of salt and if it passes a cursory check, maybe accept it as fact. That we really, really, really need to stop forwarding Good Morning messages, as they’re killing the world.

But is that it? Is that the explanation? Maybe not. My favorite philosophy podcast – Philosophize This! – ran a very timely podcast in February on the book “Escape from Freedom” by Erich Fromm. Fromm talks about two kinds of freedoms – negative and positive freedom. Negative freedom is freedom from outside influences such as tyranny or oppression. Positive freedom is the freedom to do what you want, such as the pursuit of happiness. At first, people develop a freedom from others – from nature and the elements, from tyrannical governments, from social stigma. Then people start to explore the freedom to do what they want to do with their lives, to keep their identity intact, yet be a part of the world and be productive and happy in it.

However, while some people choose to embrace this freedom and grow with it, others want to escape this freedom. Why? Because with freedom comes responsibility, and some people don’t want that on their heads. This seems so natural – while some people see an empty canvas as full of possibilities, some will see it with dread. It doesn’t even have to be our entire freedom. We regularly outsource specific responsibilities to others – the work of filing taxes, of selecting which countries to invade, of picking the next video to watch, of thinking about God to believe in.

The podcast goes on to talk about another of Fromm’s concepts – one used to explain why some people supported Hitler’s rise to power. He talks about people who, in that era, wanted to escape the freedom they had by supporting authoritarianism. Such people are practicing a form of sadomasochism. Sadism, because they want to control others, and Masochism, because they want to submit to a higher power, and divest themselves of the responsibility of thinking further about the political path of their country. Fromm talks about how in the same person, both psychological traits exist simultaneously. The same person who despises a caste/creed/religion/sex, and wants to suppress them, also believes in the supremacy of someone else, or themselves, or an ideal, and submits to that willingly.

The other way that such people escaped freedom was “automaton conformity” – by becoming a cog in a machine. Once more, the end result is that they are part of a larger picture. But the way they do it is by simply conforming to a set of beliefs being presented to them, without question. Such people are looking simply to divest the task of thinking for themselves, because it’s either too taxing or too painful or too mortifying to face the reality of their existence – that their freedom and the freedoms of others can coexist and help everyone grow together.

There is a third way for some to escape from freedom is to be destructive. Whether it’s by destroying what they can’t control, or by people around them, they want to create an identity for themselves that goes opposite to freedom, life, and creation. They want to be known for their culpability in destroying someone else’s freedoms.

Fromm’s thoughts teach us a lot about how to think about QAnon followers. Some of them are truly hateful of the powerlessness of their leaders and the victory of one party over the other. They want to escape the reality of living in a world they do not recognize, because it isn’t the utopia they were promised. Thus, they fall into sadomasochism, giving power to some in order to take power and freedom from others.

Others see the rising tide of disinformation and the blinding lights of social media and rather than figure out the means to clarify the truth, they simply believe any incoming information and become packet pushers, sending out as many forwards as they receive without stopping to question the information within them. These people would be described well as banal, but they do not believe it. They want to know so badly that their version of the truth is the absolute truth that they start to believe it is, regardless of proof either ways, and without searching for it.

Last are the people who attacked the Capitol building on January 6th 2021, or those who planned the attack on the Michigan’s Governor. These people feel they have the right to destroy others’ freedoms in order to assert their own, or are willing to sacrifice their freedom in order to stop someone else from living out their own.

To think that each of these people are the same would be wrong. But they are a part of a larger whole, a whole that has been duped into believing the abject lies of a few mysterious individuals who stand to gain somehow in all this – whether monetarily, politically, or just for the lulz.

Is it as simple as this? No, but it’s a starting point.

Time, not Money

We have a new iPhone in the family. My previous prediction was that Apple will come out with a series of phones, and I’ll upgrade from my iPhone 7 Plus to whatever the large 4G model will be. Apple is certainly run by smarter people than me. They released no non-5G flagship phones. I took up an offer by Chase to use my accumulated credit card points to buy an iPhone 12 Pro. After a long six week wait, followed by a whirlwind shipment from China, the new phone was in my hands on a Monday, snug like a slightly bigger iPhone 4S. Sadly, it’s a small phone. Smaller than I had anticipated. I had reasoned that the Pro is 6.1 inches, my wife’s XS Max is 6.3, and the Pro Max is 6.5, so perhaps the Pro Max would be too big for us. But I didn’t factor in the form factor change – this 12 series is slimmer and taller, giving it the extra length in an awkward fashion. My thumbs genuinely collided on the very first day of using the phone and I knew I had to give it up. So, I’ve “upgraded” to my wife’s XS Max and she gets the shiny new phone with the epic camera.

After 4 years of owning a non-FaceID phone, I’m finally on one. It feels weird. I miss TouchID. It was wonky, but not as much as FaceID. I’ve gotten used to unlocking my phone without looking at it. I’ve gotten used to unlocking it with my hands down, so that by the time I face the screen, it’s ready for use. This doesn’t happen with Face ID. Even with the speed at which it unlocks, a habit built over four years will take some time to change. I do enjoy tap-to-wake. Someone created a jailbreak tweak for my phone to use the same. Raise to wake works wonderfully but I’ve always wanted tap-to-wake. Apparently, it is a software feature that Apple kept away from TouchID phones. I understand now why they did that. TouchID doesn’t need tap-to-wake because you can wake it by resting your finger on the TouchID. So you don’t need to keep the entire screen “awake” all the time to register taps-to-wake. This feature of the TouchID is simply not available for FaceID devices, so Apple almost had to bring in tap-to-wake. In once sense it’s a regression, both in ease-of-use (because TouchID doesn’t need you to look at the device) and in the options to unlock, which Apple should do something about by introducing a side TouchID button.

I do enjoy animoji a little, but it’s only to the point of being a novelty. My family has moved past iMessages. We use WhatsApp and Telegram. So animoji, while an curiosity for me when it came out and wasn’t available to me on my older phone then, is now just another feature I can’t care about.

We (meaning the missus) watch this vlogger who moved from London to Paris within this year. She’s a fashion afficionado, spending exorbitant sums on buying handbags and fashion goods at a cadence others would balk at, while real rich people would scoff at. I think she buys a good three-four expensive handbags a year, which makes her a favorite on this luxury goods stores. Apparently, luxury goods is a market you have to buy into. You have to prove your loyalty to the brand by buying smaller, more readily available goods before you’re allowed to buy big ticket items upon invitation. She often flaunts her invitations to buy Hermes bags. As if spending your own money needs approval from the seller.

She claims that she spends her own money, received from endorsements and influencer deals, instead of milking her parents’ sprawling medical care business, which she was destined to be a part of before she veered off that path to go into fashion blogging. I take that with a grain of salt. While she was in London, she was living rent-free and grocery-shopping-free with her sister, her husband, and two kids. Not sure how one pulls that off. Now that she’s in gay Paris, she seems to be living rent-free by mooching off her elusive and wealthy boyfriend. Still, not sure if anyone can afford what she does on her influencer salary. She doesn’t even resell her bags!

In one particularly telling video segment, she talks about how she washes her cashmere sweaters and tops in a regular washing machine, with cold water and soft detergent. She said (I’m paraphrasing), that many people have told her she should get all those clothes dry cleaned, but if she were to do that, she would be spending all her time on getting them from the cleaners and back, and never have any time to wear those clothes. As soon as I heard it, I pointed it out to my wife. She didn’t say money, she said time. She doesn’t think sending clothes regularly is a waste of money, but time. That there is the mark of a rich person. To her, the cost of this operation is better measured in time. I take her squawking about how she’s living off her own salary with even more salt now.

When I changed my phone, I also tried to move my Apple Watch to the new device. It forced me to update to WatchOS 7. I’m loathe to do that, but this is a new watch and as such, I reckoned it wouldn’t die from the software update. It did not. In fact, I got a few nice new watchfaces and features. Now, my watch detects that I’m washing my hands and counts down from 20 seconds. Though it never seems to do that when I’m trying to show the feature to my brother or my wife. Once, I stopped washing before 20 seconds and the watch gave me a passive-aggressive message about how washing my hands for 20 seconds is a recommended practice. Since then, when I finish on time, it gives me a “Well Done!” and a haptic feedback.

It’s been a while since I posted publicly on my blog, and I had all these thoughts swirling around. So instead of killing them and tossing out some short-hand tweets, or making them their own posts, I decided to make one long, meandering post, experimenting with separators to see how it goes. Let me know what you think about this format!

Chasing away those bad thoughts

Source: Those bad thoughts – Chaitanya

Just came across this post in my RSS reader and yeah, I have these “bad thoughts” too. Mostly in the spur of the moment when I’m thinking of someone or something and a negative thought just pops in my head. I massage it away, telling myself that these things won’t happen. The lingering feeling of guilt remains – for having thought of someone’s death or a mishap.

But at the end of the day, they’re just figments of an overactive imagination. As long as there are enough positive thoughts to counteract these negative ones, it’s all good.

Gratis

I love bargain hunting for apps. And the best price for something is free, or so they say.

Whenever I chance upon an iOS App Store link that is set to Germany (‘de’ instead of ‘us’), I notice that the price for the app, if it’s free, is written in German as “gratis”. This gives me a bit of a kick, because the US version just says “Free” and it doesn’t ever encapsulate the true price of an app.

I’ve worked on a few personal project apps, websites, and services over the years, though I’ve never really released anything, specially not for any price above free. It’s because I know that from alpha to production is a hellish journey, filled with all sorts of pitfalls and work that I’m not suited for. From design to marketing to copywriting to user feedback collection, there’s a lot that indie devs do and kudos to them. But whenever we get something for free, we take it for granted. “Hey, they gave it away for free, so it must not mean much to them.” But the months of work, the blood, sweat, and swearing that goes into making anything in software makes it so that the app is never free.

Thus, when I see the price of free, even though I’m elated that I got something for free, I know that it’s anything but.

Gratis feels a better suited word for it, because a) it’s by the gratitude of the developer that you’re getting it without paying anything, and b) because you should be grateful back to the developer for it. All these words have the same root – *gwere – which, according to etymonline.com, means “to favor”.

So the next time you get some software for free, know that the person spent months working on it, and they’re doing you a favor by giving it to you for free. Maybe you’ll be a little more thankful to them for it.

Look at this app, do you think it’s “free”? It’s anything but.

Thoughts on Proficiency

When I was about thirteen, we had, as part of our English curriculum at school, a class on writing telegrams. The idea was to teach us how to write in concise form, with as much legibility as possible.

At that time, I was already somewhat good at the English language and started off the lesson with some gusto. The first task was to write a telegram about a house on sale. (Why? I dunno.)

The ask was to describe the house, throw in a price, and get away with the least number of words as possible.

Most of my colleagues wrote the following phrase –

Three bedroom one bath STOP

Where as I, thinking I’m smarter than the rest, wrote –

Three bedroom bath STOP

Now, in my mind, this was perfectly acceptable, but my teacher was quick to point out that there is a lack of clarity as to whether my house has three bedrooms each with a bath attached, or in fact, three weird rooms with a bathroom built into them. It was embarrassing in the moment, but a great lesson for me.

There’s a famous quote, which since I’ve forgotten, I’ll paraphrase here. It goes something like, “if you want to change something, you have to master its basics first.”

The gist of it remains with me to this day. When, nowadays, I see people using English in every shape and form, bending it to their will, I notice this trend more and more – people who are proficient at the language are able to bend it better, so that they do something innovative and fresh, yet are easily able to get their point across. On the other hand, people who are yet learning the nuances of the language are also using all kinds of shortcuts and short forms because of the restrictions put on us by messaging systems and twitter. But these latter people are often not able to get their message across clearly.

This is not to fault people for whom English is a second language. I recently saw a meme that said that if you see someone speaking broken English, have more respect for them, because it means they know some other language as their first language. Chances are, you who are judging them will not have the exposure and mental agility of knowing a second or third language.

Regardless, when people stick to the basics, they are able to make leaps and bounds of progress to build upon. This is true for pretty much every system/language/process in the world.

Have you ever come across a badly written passage by a neural network and it’s very easy to tell that it’s computer generated? What made you realize it’s not written by a person? There would be some basic level language mistakes made by the software which you’d pick up immediately. This gives people working on NLP a clear direction – make your algorithm better at the basics of the language, and teach it fifth standard level coursework instead of Shakespeare.

Recently, I was writing some code in JS. Whenever I’m writing quick getaway code, I opt for a simple for loop. But this one time, something irked me. Writing the same code over and over again is good muscle memory, and it frees up mental space to think about ways to improve one’s process (cue hat tip to Atomic Habits by James Clear, which I heard recently as an audiobook during a road trip). I started looking at map, which is a function I’ve gazed at before, but never bothered with. As it turns out, map fit perfectly in my code, as I wanted to apply the same function on every item in the array. So I replaced the for loop with map, and from then on, I’ve started looking at other things, like filter, to further remove the for loop from my code.

I’ve probably written hundreds of for loops over the years, across many languages and projects I’ve worked on. But it took that umpteenth for loop in JavaScript to get me to a point where I was comfortable with replacing it with something better. If I was a Software Engineer by education, I might have known about, and used map and filter all these years.

But since I came to programming as a tool, I first went through years of the basics, repeating them, partly in a fog of ignorance, till I was aware of my own abilities, and hankering to change things for the better.

There’s a flip side to this – I hate reading documentation. I rather jump into learning by doing. This is not just true for programming. I hate looking into English grammar. I can never tell you about what is a pronoun, what’s a participle, or what is the correct spelling of a complex word. But that doesn’t stop me from using English in my own writing, thinking, and blogging.

When I talk about focusing on the basics, I’m not talking about the grammar and structure of whatever it is you’re learning. I’m talking about the every day basics of doing. Focus on those, and once you’ve mastered those, you’ll be able to soar.

Thoughts on the upcoming Apple iPhone event

Apple is priced for an iPhone hit. What could go wrong?

“About 40% of Apple’s install base, based on our estimates, have not upgraded for three and a half years. If you combine that into a 5G, four phone release, we believe that really creates a perfect storm of demand,” Ives said, predicting that Apple could sell more iPhones this fiscal year than the 231 million it did in 2015.

It’s yet to be seen if consumers really care about 5G, too: A study from April found that “65.7% of consumers said they weren’t very excited,” while recent analysis has shown that 5G is in many cases slower than 4G. “5G coverage is still limited, and it’s unlikely consumers will pay extra for features they can’t use,” analyst Gene Munster recently said, adding that he expects 5G iPhone sales to quicken toward the end of next year once coverage has improved.

Watch Apple’s stock after the iPhone event on Tuesday. Facebook’s new Oculus ships on the same day.

I’m becoming a frequent reader of Protocol, if for no other reader than that they publish every day and the pressure of it flooding my RSS makes me scan it for interesting reading every day or so.

I’m one of those 40% install base that hasn’t upgraded in a few years. My family sometimes laugh at how old my phone is, since I’m on an iPhone 7 Plus, but when I buy a new phone this winter (because I’m not expecting to get it in the first run of phone sales, and because Apple screws up the first set of hardware anyways because of the sheer volume of hardware they put out), I’ll have a phone that’s newer than anyone in my family by at least a year and change, so that’s that.

But regarding 5G, I’m going to steer clear from those phones. First, I know that Apple will price them differently. But would you buy a phone with a network technology that’s not supported by a majority of the geographical area yet? Sure, in some places you’ll get faster-than-WiFi speeds, but those will be far and few between for at least two more years. Knowing USA’s shit record at rolling out new network technology (network vendors love spending on backend networking hardware that saves them money, but they’ve always been slow on customer-facing rollouts because those take a lot more money), I’d say 5G is still a good 5 years out.

This is the same as when we were buying a TV three years ago. The choice was between a Ultra-HD 65 inch behemoth that was moderately priced (this model’s price has fallen to CRT-TV rates now), or a 45 inch 4K TV that was grossly overpriced. I stayed away from the 4K even though my brother was trying hard to convince me otherwise. His ideas on 4K content being the norm are still not true, three years past. It’s just too much to expect from media and backbone tech companies to move too fast on expensive technology. Not their thing. Maybe with the coming 5G, 4K content will get a boost. But again, that’ll be 5 years from now, when South Korea will be swimming in a sea of 7G and 8K content.

Now, the fear is that Apple will introduce something radical in the 5G phones that will not be present in the 4G LTE phones. They’ve done this before with the larger phones getting an extra camera module, or OLED screens instead of LCD. They could very easily toss in a much better camera, making their 4G models less appealing, or add back the fingerprint scanner, which is infinitely more convenient than face scanning at night, or when you’re wearing a mask, or when you’re on the move, and so on.

But will they? They might have some ridiculous hardware thing up their sleeve – like a heart rate monitor (from Android phones of a few years ago), or a dedicated Siri button that you could customize to run shortcuts (again from Android phones a few years ago). Or maybe they’ll do something stupidly expensive, like throwing in a pair of airpods with the 5G phones (though this would fail if the airpods are not in the iPhone box, because them being a separate product will feel very un-Apple like, as in a small physical discount to get you to buy their product).

But most likely, they’ll toss in a year (or two) of their Apple One software subscription with the costlier phones. That would be perfect, because I couldn’t give two ~~shits~~ about their software subscription model. I’m not into Apple Arcade, or Apple TV+, or Apple Music, or News+, or extra iCloud storage, and certainly not their Fitness+ product.

I exclusively play one or two games on the iPhone – mostly sudoku and Call of Duty: Mobile. I have subs for Netflix and HBO and a good Plex Media Server. I prefer Spotify for their content and their high availability on Google Home devices. I find News+ to be a stupid, overpriced offering that everyone should run away from. I am impatiently waiting for Dropbox’s Family plan to drop, because that will ~~forever~~ solve all of my storage problems. And, well, have you seen the freely available catalogue of fitness videos on YouTube? Blows everything else out the water. Get lost Peloton, YouTube is the king of fitness videos!

So, yeah, if Apple sticks to only offering Apple One for free with their 5G phones, it’ll be very easy for me, and millions of others to stay away from those phones this cycle. Will this hurt Apple’s stock? Maybe.

I found it interesting that Protocol mentioned that Facebook’s Oculus ships the same day. Does it matter? No. Facebook took and effectively killed the Oculus. The latter was probably burning money like crazy and needed a sugar daddy, but Zuck isn’t the kind you want. Maybe, maybe, the next iteration of AR/VR will be propped up by 5G, ML-GPU chips, and Nvidia-ARM superchips. But as of right now, the more interesting thing Protocol could have pointed out is that Amazon’s Prime Day is on the same day as well! Amazon has granted me a $10 credit, which I’ll feel obligated to spend on something a lot more than ten dollars that day, as I ponder upon how much I’m going to enjoy my new iPhone, when I finally get it a few months later.

The Algorithm Dilemma

Last weekend, we watched the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, and over the week, I’ve been discussing the content with my wife. We came to several conclusions, including that there are some algorithms and some services we are too dependent on for our entertainment needs. But there are others we can very much get rid of and should, as soon as possible.

The ones we are dependent on are Instagram and YouTube. We’re constantly on Instagram from the moment we wake up to when we go to sleep. It’s unhealthy, and we’re trying to reduce our time on these networks, but it’s a way to cope with all that’s happening out there. We’ve pivoted from just using Insta for getting jealous about travel bloggers to using it for memes, current affairs, and TikTok overflow bloggers. YouTube is our coffee companion. Whenever we sit down after a long day of work, we use it to get the news, weather, movie and show trailers, and catch up on our interests.

In line with that, we’ve noticed that these networks have both gotten better and worse at latching on to our needs. Instagram has gotten frighteningly good with their ad-focus. I’m generally immune to ads – I rarely see them on my computers thanks to uBlock. But the ones I see on Insta are almost always tech focused and I’ve started really salivating on those. On the flip side, Instagram is a well known negative-thought-bringer and I’ve started noticing the general tone of negativity it brings in our lives. YouTube is great at generally recommending time pass videos, but it’s gotten horrible at surfacing new, good content. The same few videos are shoved down our throats every day, all day, until we watch them. Part of the problem is that our main place to watch YouTube is their Apple TV app. This app has terrible UI. There’s no refresh button and the app doesn’t make an API refresh call even if you kill it and start it again. It’s like the algorithm is stuck on these recommendations no matter what you do.

Lately, for my wife, the YouTube app has been recommending a YouTube produced documentary about Paris Hilton’s life. This is despite that she’s never seen any content related to Paris Hilton or her corollaries, has never seen anything related to obscenely rich and spoilt people, and actively avoided this video every day for the past five days. But, like the demon from the movie It Follows, that video recommendation follows her everywhere. Sometimes it’s at position two in the recommended list, sometimes four. It’s present in the Entertainment section of the app, and in the News section, and in Originals. It’s obvious why this is happening – YouTube produced this content and wants to earn it’s money back. It’s like they hired a Netflix PM and he (definitely a HE for ruining a good product) brought the same stupid ideas he implemented there, here. We’ve discussed starting the video and downvoting it. But my wife pointed out that the lesson from The Social Dilemma is that the algorithm doesn’t care about the vote. It just sees engagement as a good sign for their vested interests and will simply count that, discounting everything else. She has actively started skipping over the video, hoping YouTube will finally get the hint one day. Can’t wait.

One of the things our eyes were opened to was how inherently evil this dependence on shady algorithms is. One of the interviewees says, “but it’s easy to forget how much good these technologies have done, how they’ve connected long lost people and found organ donors.” Another says, “when we were building these, we just wanted to build a tool to connect […] but we forgot to look at the flip side of the coin” (quotes fuzzy and from memory, please watch the docu). But every new layer they peeled in the story felt like a revelation that every decision in these companies is made to cater to the bottom line instead of ever bothering to wonder if it’s good for the masses that use the social platforms mentioned. The design ethicist from Google at least mentioned thinking about how their actions affect millions. The folks from Facebook can’t be bothered.

The thing is, none of this is necessary. But it was inevitable. The Internet was always poised to take over the rest of media. A free travel blogger, vlogger, Instagrammer will always throw out the need to subscribe to a travel magazine. A labor of love tech blog will always dismiss the need to pay for PC Magazine. Someone posting news snippets and their commentary in their free time will completely upend the newspaper business. That’s just bound to happen. Video will always kill the radio star.

But this is not just because of the inherent freedom that comes with the Internet. It’s because our society, our norms, and our laws have always operated in whiplash mode, always catching on with something after it has just become passé.

As the documentary moved from the first half to the second, it started focusing on the political ramifications of the freehand these Internet behemoths got and a message came across. It’s not just social. Yes, YouTube is social and Facebook is a place for video. But Google is just as much to blame for inherently bad search algorithms, and Amazon for terrible facial recognition technology as Facebook and twitter are for letting foreign powers turn American politics into a sham, as WhatsApp is for enabling mass state-sponsored violence in parts of the world, and as tech companies are for promulgating the problem of racial and gender inequality while talking about the Internet as an egalitarian utopia.

After the docu, I sat for a long time in conversation with my wife and we discussed ways that we can improve our interactions with the Internet as it is today. We decided to move from Google Search to DuckDuckGo. We decided to uninstall the official twitter client and exclusively use tweetbot and others. We decided, over these past few days as YouTube inundated us with a Million Heiress’ documentary, that we will actively stop using the YouTube recommendations section and start using it’s Search and Channels to find content we want to watch. It’s not like their search is any better, since it shows only a fraction of the content on the service before giving up on you. But at least it’s better than their silly recommendations algorithm, which really needs an overhaul. Lastly, we decided that we’ll police our time on Instagram and tell each other to get off the network as much as possible.

In other news, I was recently reading an article about what Google is doing to keep bad results out of their Search, and here are my notes on the topic –

Google has a new plan to keep junk out of search

Google Search is every bit as important

Yup, we often overlook it, but search is actually way more important in people’s perceptions of the world than we think.

Social media has proved that “people read it and shared it” has no correlation to expertise, relevance or truth.

I would say that there always has been a more discerning, a more learned clientele of knowledge than the common folk. Though it’s not true that common people are in any measure lesser educated, they certainly are less discerning and more prone to peer pressure. If they see something being shared, they are more likely to jump on it as their new belief than some folks who would rather investigate, even though that investigation doesn’t take more than a few minutes in today’s information soaked era. Speed of information veracity has already reached a pretty good point and algorithms and machine learning continue to make it faster. But people’s willingness to ignore all that is also increasing.

So the technological solution is to create better tools to nudge people towards the truth. But the societal solution is what will matter in the end, and one societal solution is to make people less busy in their work lives, giving them more time to look outwards to what’s happening in the world. The current working generation doesn’t have the brain space to deal with everything going on in the world on top all the work they’re expected to do. We’ve all seen the chart where productivity has risen disproportionately to income levels in the last few decades. This has led to a form of inequality where the only people who have the time to ponder over important things are those who are either content with their current means, or have enough means to not worry about money. Now, this has been the case since the time of Socrates, but should not be the case today, should it?

Update: I was thinking about a simpler time when we used to own the knowledge that we bought – whether as newspapers, or books or magazines. Similarly we used to own music and video. But moving online liberated and democratized all these – people who could not afford music players or expensive books could enjoy streaming music, or ad-supported music videos, or read Wikipedia or blogs to gain knowledge. People have built entire careers through learning programming or handiwork on YouTube. We used to own apps on our phones five years ago, and today we’re moving to subscription models and rundles. But this means that if we want to share something, we have to do it on the platform it’s on. If you’re sharing an Instagram post, or a medium blogpost, the receiver is forced to login to see it. If you own Kindle ebooks, you can “lend” it, but only on Kindle. There needs to be a whiplash where we start paying for our knowledge again, for our media again, our ability to share and spread our sources. But that needs a perspective and longer term thinking that’s a longer conversation.

A couple times Mrs. Maisel displayed her naivete and privilege

Warning: Spoilers ahead, specially if you haven’t seen the latest season

I like the Amazon Prime show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It’s a story of upliftment, of empowerment, and of good comedy.

But there are times when the story shows a well crafted naivete and white privilege. These have really stung, because it becomes very apparent that while the good-natured comedienne grows as a person over time, she also ends up doing very real damage.

The first instance is in the first season, when Mrs Maisel spills the beans on the private life of a fellow female comic. She does it out of angst, and it’s truly misplaced. It’s not her place to tell the story. It’s not her right to divulge details revealed to her in confidence. The affected woman has created her own cocoon in a man’s world, a space where she’s comfortable being who she is, while her outside persona is completely defined by what she is told by her agents, audience, and powers-that-be. To dish out that bit of privacy is plain wrong. Further, the show and Mrs. Maisel herself, are appalled that the comedienne responds with an attack on the budding artist, as if this response is unfair and disproportionate.

As the first season unfolded, I did not give much credence to this event, thinking it’s just an obstacle in the hero’s journey telling of this tale. But looking back, this was a spiteful attack by one woman on another, who used her privilege to divulge details she was privy to, simply because she did not like the demeanor of someone who was forging her own path.

The second instance is in the latest season, where Mrs Maisel talks on stage about a person who is gay and not out of the closet, particularly because this person is black and revealing this detail about him would completely and viscerally destroy him. Mrs. Maisel is put on the spot and without thinking, again, about what is private and what is public, talks about the person’s affectations in a very blasé manner. While watching the episode, I was filled with dread. At any moment, the shoe would drop and her words would cause a maelstrom which she would calmly sit out of, while others’ lives are ripped apart. Luckily, the moment does not come. The public and those in power do not realize or do not take any action on her revelations, but what does happen, in the climax (spoiler), is that the person who has her confidence till now, simply drops her, showing her that her actions have consequences.

This second act showed me that while the character has some growth, she has not truly understood what her words mean, and that comedy, while often borderlining on the private lives of people, should not ever hurt. It should not transform from good-natured leg-pulling and cynical critique to a destruction of lives. Maisel often tells those around her that she talks about them on stage, and very clearly tells jokes that are too revealing. But to talk about things that she has no right to talk about, and doing it often, tells me that there’s a vein of this show which is highly unpalatable. This 1950s housewife who is thrust into the world because of events beyond her control does not have, as would be expected from a 1950s housewife, any semblance of her privilege, and its destructive powers.

The show is still good, and a few painful moments, which are followed by immediate punishment for her, do not take everything away from the series, but they do take away any respect in our eyes for such people.

Image Courtesy: IMDB

Streaks

If you came here to read about a fitness streak, you’ll be sorely disappointed. I’ve been on a different kind of streak lately – I’ve been reading a lot of RSS feeds. Specifically, I’ve been spending time going through a lot of webcomics.

See, I love reading RSS feeds. I definitely overload every feed reader I’ve used, but none so much as I’ve overloaded my current one – an app on iOS called Fiery Feeds. I have about 16k unread items on here (don’t judge me).

Out of these, about three thousand are webcomics. So I’m starting from there. I pick up an unread feed and blaze through it. Usually, that’s 60-100 items that I end up marking as read in a day. At this rate, I’ll be current in a couple of months. Of course, I’m focusing on webcomics because they’re super easy to read, with not a lot of context needed, and a quick read time.

But that’s not all. Comics are able to portray the ethos of their time very easily. Whether I’m reading a slice of life comic from a few years ago, where the biggest topic was the latest Starbucks winter theme, or I’m reading the latest xkcd, talking, of course, as everyone else is, about COVID-19, it becomes very easy to see the timeline and to consume the news of the day through comics. Of course, I also love reading more serious endeavors like Gaia and Slack Wyrm, which have enduring storylines, recurring characters, and a vein you kinda have to hold on to, preferably by reading from the first comic. These are just plain fun to read and follow along!

While reading may be all fun, I’m sure writing and making webcomics is not. All the hard work of describing the scene, the props, the clothing, is already done by the artist, and I just have to consume all those visuals. Compared to essays, where I have to read through to understand the story from top to bottom, and where my attention is definitely pulled away before I’d like it to, comics are easy to consume, though I’m sure the effort that goes into a good essay is perhaps less than that which goes into a good comic.

Now, once I get done with the comics, I’d like to continue reading my RSS feeds. I follow a lot of personal feeds, mostly from random strangers I’ve encountered online. It feels great to be in a space where I can just read a person’s diary entry, with some of their personal thoughts splashed on the Internet for me to see. Besides the occasional rant, most people put good thoughts on their websites, and it feels great to read those positive thoughts.

One of the reasons these “personals” are easy to read is because, frankly, of twitter. A lot of folks try to cross-post from their blogs to twitter and other microblogging sites. This means they have to stick to a length limit, and most of them try to get done with their thoughts in about 30 words or less. I wouldn’t say that’s the real average, because I’ve never measured. But birdbrained that we are, reading more than those has often ended in my attention getting pulled away, so people who post 30 words or less and express themselves fully still, are aces in my book!

But once I’m done catching up with the personals, of course I’d like to read more serious, longer stuff, which has been piling up. Most of the time, I’ll read a few paragraphs and either abandon the writing for being too dry, or shove it into Instapaper to catch up with it in a few years. My “long articles” section is at about five thousand entries, with writing from AI Weirdness, Linux Journal Blogs, and InkMango, to name a few. One of these days, once my habit is built and my streaks have left me with no webcomics to indulge in, I’ll dive into these heavier writings, and hopefully come out more educated. For now though, laughs are enough!

Quote

The latest Openbeta email includes this quote from Czech author Milan Kundera –

Everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: we are all writers! One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and lack of understanding will have arrived.

Source: I think we need to talk

Imagine a forest full of birds. It’s summer time and the cacophony is drowning out your thoughts. The birds are seeking out mates and the loudest and sweetest ones will win out, first. There will be some that will not find a mate, but most will. But every bird tries it’s best, without regard for the others. After all, it’s life and death and the continuation of the species at stake.

The same is true for twitter and Instagram and YouTube. A million content-creators and influencers and writers and thinkers all want to sell you their ideas. Not their wares, ideas. Not passion as is the case in birds, but ideas. These birds of the Internet are part of the cacophony that Milan Kundera warns us about, but even in the drowning noise, there is a message and we can hear it and respond to it. Thus, there is no universal deafness. We can seek out the message through word of mouth and search engines, through hashtags and link dumps. It gets noisy, but we build on top of the noise to make things clear for ourselves and others.

But we do not as yet lament, because we, the people who sit just outside the noisy streams of the walled gardens, know that the Internet is vast and needs more voices. Voices of those not heard till now, voices of those who can bring a fresh perspective. So no, Milan, there is hope as yet, and noise as yet to be made.