GPT based “Denial of Information” attack

Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research. Our analysis of a selection of
— Read on misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/gpt-fabricated-scientific-papers-on-google-scholar-key-features-spread-and-implications-for-preempting-evidence-manipulation/

I think we can define a new type of attack on the Internet. Much like the Denial of Service attack makes a service unavailable to ordinary users, a Denial of Information attack makes readily searchable information obscure by inundating it with generative AI based nonsense or outright misinformation.

This can be both a malicious attack or negligence.

A malicious attack would be threat actors specifically targeting information silos such as social media or SEO with misinformation intended to influence society.

A negligent attack is either in the form of misguided attempts by end users to use LLMs to churn out content faster, thereby inundating traditional systems with unverifiable data; or a negligent attack can come in the form of data retrieval infrastructure (such as search engines or LLMs) using generative AI to compile information without adequate gates to verify such information.

A Denial of Information attack is more insidious than a Denial of Service attack because it’s much more difficult to detect and even harder to neutralize due to the individualistic nature of information retrieval and consumption.

Addled

“I’m really concerned about you.”

This is how my wife started the conversation the other day, as she sat in the car.

I didn’t know how to proceed, but blood rushed to my face, unsure but embarrassed.

“What happened?”

“These videos you keep watching… You really need to stop. Go back to reading. You used to read. Go back to that. Do anything, but stop watching these videos.”

Ah.

See… while I was waiting for my wife to get ready to leave the house, I sat down and hit up YouTube to watch some Shorts. I’d been doing that a lot lately. Enough to know that the algorithm is irritating. Enough to not know that I need to stop.

This was an intervention.

“I know, I know. I need to stop. I’ve said it myself. The algorithm sucks too… It’s pinned me down and shows me only a few categories of videos. A few SNL shorts, specially the news ones. A few geeky shorts from a YouTube channel that focuses on DND and other table-top and online RPGs, and…”

That was my defense. It was clearly meant to deflect.

“That’s fine,” my wife countered, “but these videos suck you in. You can’t stop watching them. Trust me. I know. I watch them on Instagram. I know I need to stop too. But you definitely need to stop. This stuff addles your brain.”

“You’ve spent over thirty years,” she continued, “not getting addicted to any of this stuff. You read books. You read articles and blogs. You need to go back to those. We can’t all be addicts.”

She knows of my RSS feeds and Instapaper “habit”. I reckon a habit needs to be something you do regularly, but I don’t follow up on those often enough. Not anymore.

I thought for a second about how true her words are. My wife has been sucked into Instagram. It’s part true social network for her, with a constant line of communication with her girlfriends; it’s part addiction. Any time I see her phone, it’s open to Instagram.

My brother has been sucked into TikTok. He’s on it constantly. He sends me videos here and there. He is always mentioning it in our conversations. Taking decisions based on it. I don’t know if it’s an echo chamber for him, though I wouldn’t be surprised. Clearly… something has clicked for him there, the way Instagram has for my wife and YouTube Shorts has for me.

I’ve struggled against algorithms all my Internet life. From the time life on the Internet became easier thanks to search engines and ludicrously plentiful email accounts and social networks that just felt like natural connections (till they didn’t), I’ve had to constantly feed the side of me that says “enough” to someone else deciding what I should be seeing and reading and consuming. It’s why I’ve maintained some RSS feed reader or other since 2012, when I bought my first RSS reader – Fever. I’ve also been paying for Instapaper since I gave myself an annual subscription as a birthday gift a half decade ago. But it’s a struggle to keep that hunger fed. I’ve often burned down my RSS subs (numbering to around 400) to the ground and rebuilt them, only to realize that if I don’t have the firehose pointed at me, I get bored of it. It’s a constant push and pull of having enough to read and having too much to read in every single blog post. (Hence, Instapaper.)

So when it became as easy as opening the YouTube app (an app that lives on my phone’s first page anyways, due to the myriad other uses of the service) and getting dropped into an algorithmic feed, the question didn’t even present itself. I was constantly on it, filling up time at first – the interstitial time of waiting for buses, waiting for other people, waiting for the microwave to finish its dance. Then, I was finding time for it – standing at the microwave longer than I should, stealing moments when I should have been paying attention to my family, being awake for hours in bed. All of these video platforms are excellent for revenge bedtime procrastination, I’ve learnt.

But it’s time to pull back.

We can’t be going into our 40s getting sucked into echo chambers and algorithmic escapes. That’s not the way to live a life.

Immediately after my wife pointed this out to me, I cut myself off completely. Cold turkey, as they say. Then, a week later, I found myself going back into the warm embrace of short form videos. It’s just too easy to switch off your brain for a minute, or thirty.

But it’s time to pull back.

Maybe this time it’ll not be cold turkey. I might keep going back to Shorts every few days, only to taper off my usage over the next few weeks or months. Or maybe this is what remission looks like and I just don’t know it yet.

We’ll have to wait and ~~watch~~ keep reading.

ReplikaAI

Saw an ad on Instagram today for Replika AI, where it was touting the romantic relationships feature of the chatbot service, including photo sharing, role playing, and “caring and loving”. All of these, with an AI.

Replika started off as an experiment by an engineer who lost a dear friend. She had experience with chatbots and decided to feed her friend’s text messages into a neural network to create a “digital memorial” of him. Read more about it in this Wired article.

But the ad I saw today was something wildly different. It was gross and far from a “digital friend” or a likeness thereof. Over the years, while I’ve not used Replika much, I’ve kept my eye on the service. I stopped using it right when it started leaning into this romantic aspect instead of friendship. It started asking me to share pics of my day-to-day life, selfies to get started with the app after I came back after a break of a few months, and to voice chat with it. It felt gross the way the app was transforming right in front of me.

Now, wherever there are chatbots and turing tests, there’s the baseness and loneliness of humanity. I understand that. I understand that people were seeing this “friend” app and asking it romantic questions, and laughing when it was giving them even slightly romantic responses. But for the service to lean into that feels like a betrayal of the original intent.

Dystopian storytelling often pins on this idea of people being so isolated from society that only an AI gives them the comfort of a relationship. Heck, we don’t need to look to science fiction for that. Real news coming out of China about people’s social media usage behavior often shows how messed up the landscape already is.

But to see an app in the US be so blatant in its disregard for real human connection and its outright mission to replace it with a chatbot feels like something society and politicians should condemn.

What I also don’t understand is how this app isn’t violating at least one or more of Apple’s ridiculous App Store policies. Thoughts?

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.

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.

Instagram is not Facebook, and yet…

Instagram is not Facebook. It’s not a network of friends. The accounts you follow on there are a personal choice instead of a network effect of friends and acquaintances you meet in the real world (there are those too, but are they the majority?). Yet Instagram pushes the same crap as Facebook – “follow this account because someone you follow does”.

Why? Don’t the Product Managers understand the fundamentals of social networks? Or are they just hell bent on destroying value?

Companies, when they perform an acquisition, usually focus on recouping the cost of the acquisition. Or they want to build value by merging the brands.

Clearly, Facebook doesn’t care about the money. It’s pocket change for them. They are immune in terms of money. They aren’t immune in terms of user growth.

The only thing they care about is destroying competition. What’s sad is that they don’t realize that Instagram and WhatsApp are not rivals any more. They’re property. It’s always good to invest in and improve property.

This would be like Facebook purposely degrading their Android apps just to drive people insane and see what happens.

Oh, wait…

On the power of writing

I’ve been reading Susan Sontag’s Notes on “Camp” these past few weeks. I’ve really enjoyed slowly working my way through it, and taking down notes and interesting quotes from it. These are safely tucked away for now, but there was something interesting that happened, which I’d like to note –

Sontag starts off with –

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. […]
A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about
Susan Sontag, Notes on “Camp”

When I started reading this essay, I had little idea of what Camp is. Since then, I’ve visited New York, been to the Met, and seen all the things that inspired these thoughts, and things around them.

But to me, writing is the greatest tool humans have ever conceived, and the mark of a great writer is that by the time they’re done telling you about their ideas, you believe them and adopt them.

This is my last note on the essay, made today –

I love this idea. So much has been written about our human history, but the color gets lost almost instantly. The sensibility which informs the era being written about is the most difficult thing to capture, and thus the most valuable thing.
Nitin Khanna

As soon as I wrote it down, I realized that I was echoing an idea I had read three weeks ago from these very pages. That I have wholly adopted the idea Sontag presented, and that it is a part of my thinking is a testament to how powerful a tool writing is.

Sourcing information

We all do most of our browsing on our phones. When we come across something we don’t know about, we google it to find out more. More often than not, the link that gives us the most information is either Wikipedia or a news site.

If it’s current affairs, it’s a news site. If it’s general information, Wikipedia. Then why do we still google the thing? Why waste time on the middleman? Is it force of habit? Is it because we believe that google will give us the most comprehensive information and links? Is it just laziness?

Perhaps it’s all of the above. Google is our one stop shop for all information. Whether we’re looking to buy something, looking for a website which we don’t often go to, looking for some news, or solving some mystery on the web, google will give you the knowledge you’re looking for. That’s a great product, regardless of any other implications on privacy, advertising, politics etc.

So why should we opt to change this excellent workflow? (Need information, ask google, get information)

Because it’s worth it to go to the source.

Google often scrapes data from Wikipedia, but most of the time, it’s incomplete. It’ll be the first line or paragraph in a topic that’s complex and needs some more study to understand. Or, google will tell you a part of the information, expecting you to select a link to learn more from. So why not go to the source directly?
When the topic is a current affair, Google will show you links that it judges to be of your interest, or of value to them (advertising, collaborations with sites like twitter which will be surfaced above others). Instead, if you go to a solution such as Apple News (or Google News perhaps) and search for the topic you’re looking for, you’ll see a more balanced perspective because all Apple News is doing is collecting links from various news sources and presenting those to you. Notice that I didn’t say you should go to a particular news site for this, because if you want real news, you’d better be looking at more than one source.

Now, how do we make this easier? How do we give up our google habit and go to the source? On mobile, the simplest way to do this is to move your apps around. On my phone, the Wikipedia app sits on the main home screen and the Apple News app sits inside a folder on the dock (most of the time, I end up searching for the news app on spotlight search, but I’m trying to get rid that habit too).

This is not ideal. In an ideal world, I would not have to go to each app individually to search for the topic at hand. I would be able to select a word or phrase and use the share sheet in iOS to jump to Wikipedia or Apple News, neither of which seem to support this simple functionality.

But those are the technical details, which may change at any time. What matters is where we source our information from and why. I recommend that you start cutting out the middleman and go directly to the sources, sites, and services that you trust, because those are the same ones your middleman trusts too. As for the why, well, start doing this and you’ll see a change in how you receive information and perceive the news. Search is good, but search algorithms may very well not be.

Reverse Instant Gratification

More than a month ago, I subscribed my wife to some print magazines. We’ve never had those lying around at our home here (newspapers and magazines were common in India) and I just thought it might be a good addition to her media diet. Ever since, every few days, she asks me what the status of the magazines is. The problem is that print magazines have ridiculous starting dates for new subscriptions. The promised first set is not going to arrive till the end of April. This is just weird. I did some digging and found out that print magazines run on a thin budget for subscriptions and so the process to add someone to the list and publish specifically for them is a long-drawn out process. Or it’s just a scam so they can get you into the next year’s subscription for an exorbitant price. Whatever.

But a week ago, one of the magazines showed up. It was a special edition which was already in print. That was nice of them, I thought. Perhaps it was an additional copy and they decided to send it to people who’d recently signed up. It being a nice surprise, Jahanvi settled in to read it one evening. Within forty-five minutes, she was done. Most of the magazine was ads and the rest was fluff. Didn’t take her long to parse through.

The same evening, we were watching one of her favorite TV shows. It comes on Hulu and trickles down one episode at a time, on weeks they deign us viewers important enough to shower their little trinkets on us. After the episode finished and the end-advert rolled, what was left was a bad taste in the mouth, a hankering for more. In the world of Netflix, Plex Media Server, and Amazon Prime Video, we’re stuck with Hulu and real-time TV. Pathetic.

That’s when we started discussing this topic – reverse instant gratification. In an age of instant gratification, when we give our time and attention to something that doesn’t reciprocate in the same way, that thing is getting the gratification that we ought to be deriving from it. When the magazine came, it was read instantly and we have to now wait patiently for the next. When the episode aired, we devoured it, and were left smacking our lips at the aftertaste of that carefully crafted forty-one minute drama. We gave to those things, the Reverse Instant Gratification that we feel we deserve from them. The system is RIGged! 🙂

Such is the state of affairs. We, the consumers, the binge watchers, the devourers of CDNs, are sometimes left hat in hand, begging for morsels of things running too live for our taste. It’s unfair! It’s unjust! It’s a mockery of everything Netflix holds dear! Just putting that out there.

Chivalry isn’t dead yet.

It was raining in Seattle yesterday. Not the usual Seattle rain – dreary, tired and barely wetting. This was real rain caused by a storm that is passing through the state. The rain was loud, wet and forceful. I went to Safeway last night after work, hoping to get some groceries and head home to play Fallout 4. I imagined it would be like any other time that I’ve done groceries and walked home – I buy the food, pack it in bags, haul everything in my hands and take a nice, thirty minute hike.

I was wrong. I saw the rain before I got out of the store. I was aware of it. What I was not aware of was that paper gets wet in rain. Seattle implemented paper bags for groceries a long time ago. So no grocery store inside the city is allowed to bag your groceries in plastic. Instead, they bag them in thick paper bags, which seem almost indestructible. That is, until paper meets water.

I should have remembered this. It’s a basic fact. But I didn’t think much of it and started walking. I was smart enough to separate the food into three bags, to reduce the weight and possibility of tearing. I told myself that if the weight turned out to be too much or if one of the bags tore, I could always get a cab home. I was also smart enough to hold the bags in one hand while I cowered under my umbrella for the duration of the walk. I was not smart enough to realize that doing so meant that the paper was now getting wet. I had gone a full block before my fingers strained. So I stopped, changed hands and moved on. Another block later, the fingers of my other hand strained under the weight. I eyed a nice, open garage nearby and moved into the dry shelter. It was well-lit and cool. That helped soothe my senses. I also placed the bags on the dry floor, hoping that my fingers would recover quickly. After a minute or two, I decided to head back out and so I picked everything up and got ready to move. I walked two steps out of the garage and the middle bag gave way. The straps had come off. I labored to bring the bags and myself back to the safety and dryness of the garage. Once there, I assessed the damage. The rain had temporarily subsided and I could easily pick up the bags in my arms and walk the rest of the way. But then I decided that this was enough.

I fired up the Uber app and found my location. When I hit the ‘call an Uber’ button, the service reminded me that the fare was two point four times the usual rate, due to high demand in the area. I opened the Lyft app and it said the hike was one point five times. I was about to hit the request button when I noticed that the app said “one point five times over the usual amount”. In other words, more expensive than the Uber rate. I went back to Uber and guiltily hit accept. At least they have more drivers. To add salt to my wounds, the Uber app asked me to explicitly enter the numbers two and four into the app to make sure that I understand the higher cost. I entered them and asked for a ride. One quickly found me and was not too far either. I tracked as the car slowly found its way to me. Just as the car reached the road I was on, I got a call from the driver, a lady, asking me where I was standing. I directed her to me and told her to stop as I brought my baggage with me. She waited as I rushed in the now-light rain towards the car, with the three bags held precariously between my hands. I pried the door open with my fingers and tried to shove everything, and myself inside. In the process, the second bag gave way. and the contents spilled on the road. I apologized to her profusely, first for my tardiness and then for making her car wet with the bags. She asked me to make sure I was safely seated and when I was, she moved the car onwards. She asked me to confirm my name and destination, as is customary for all drivers of such services.

Almost immediately, I started apologizing, half to myself, for the foolish decisions I took today. She heard me out and asked me not to admonish myself, because it would be of no gain. I didn’t relent, as I wanted to pacify my own hurt ego and I said as much to her. She simply stated that mistakes happen by everyone and the important thing is that I found a solution to my problem and acted on it. Since the solution was working in my favor, I didn’t need to apologize for anything. After a few minutes of driving, she found an empty spot on the side of the road and got out. I watched as she went to the back of the car and take out a sturdy grocery bag. She came back to her seat and handed it to me. She switched on the lights inside the car and, shifting into gear, told me to tell her when I was done moving the now discrete contents into the bag, Sir.

That’s when I registered the accent – it was British with a hint of something else. I busied myself with the goods while I listened carefully, trying to ascertain her origins. She told me that while the ride was a short one, she still wanted me to listen to good music of my choice. She offered a selection – jazz, classical, country, folk and a few others I didn’t bother listening to. I asked her to put anything she liked. She said that my interests were more important here and so her choice did not matter. I asked for classical. She countered, asking if I wanted New York metropolitan symphony or the New York opera. I asked for symphony and she got on with setting the channel. She set the volume to a medium high, so that it engulfed the car, and asked me if I wanted it lower. Over the course of the car ride, I asked her to lower it to a conversational level.

I then asked me where she was from. She answered, Jamaica. “Oh,” thought I, quizzing myself about the history of Jamaica and how long did the British rule there, since they most certainly did. I could not come up with an answer, so I moved on to other questions. I asked her if she was polite by nature or was it something she saw as a professional courtesy. She said she didn’t quite understand the question. She’d been extremely polite and respectful throughout the ride, something I don’t often see in Uber drivers. Of course, I don’t get talked back at in any such ride, but the level of respect and regard she displayed is not something I see every day either. I certainly don’t get called Sir in my taxi. I explained this to her, in not so many words and she simply responded that she treats others with the same respect that she expects them to treat her with. What a delightful answer!

Finally, we reached my building’s doors. She parked and told me that she’s waiting right there for me to come back and return her bag to her. As a social contract, I left my backpack there and told her I’d be back to pick it up. I rushed back home, in the process of which, my third and final bag also gave way and so I shifted everything into her bag before I got home. I unlocked, dumped everything on the table and rushed back. Mind you, I didn’t know if she was still charging me for the ride and the expense was two point four times, so it was prudent that I rush back. I got there, knocked on her window and returned her bag to her, folded neatly to consume the least space. I thanked her for her excellent service, Madam, which brought a smile to her face and I took out my backpack from the back. In doing so, I started cleaning out the bits of my paper bags and the water drops I had left in the back seat. She told me that she’d do it, but seeing the best in people often brings out the best in you, and I told her that since I’d made the mess, I was the one who had to clean it.

I thanked her once again and walked back to my building. The interaction was a short, but fruitful one. She came and rescued me at the moment when I needed it, though for a price. She displayed kindness and respect where none was needed or deserved. A lesser person might have scowled or laughed in my face. She displayed a deep-seated professionalism which was more nature than habit. You know what? Chivalry isn’t dead yet. It has just moved on to better people.

Photo by irinaraquel