deathmtn

Grey noise and Sparse are good combo for when you want to occupy part of your brain with something slightly music-esque, but not so much that it wears you out or distracts you. (Sparse works in Firefox; in Chrome, it only works if you click on the page immediate after it loads. I guess I should fix that someday, even though I think Chrome was wrong to make that change.)

10-4-1-4-2-4. I'm very busy today, but I think it was worth making the time to get out there today. At least it does while the endorphins are going.

brownpau on getting out of social media

Five years ago in “Re-owning” I lamented that social media sites incentivized us to post our content to ephemeral walled gardens rather than our own web spaces. We spent years feeding our souls in short bursts to marketing data aggregators, in exchange for the momentary thrill of a fave or a retweet — or just because that was the online space where our family and friends had gone.

And then it got worse. These days posting to Twitter or Facebook feels more like being complicit in their own crimes of negligence against society as social media matures into a viral disinformation amplifier rather than an authentic communications medium.

He has an impressively long (and yet not even complete) list of links about the devastating effect of social media on nations around the world.

It's a handy reference. For me, a lot of reading about the harm that comes from social media has made it so that I sometimes splutter when I have to answer the question, "What's wrong with social media?" It's like answering "What's wrong with Trump?" A million reasons all get stuck in the same small door that is the part of my brain that controls sentence formulation.

I think the tl;dr version of why I got away is that they've built anxiety machines. They've quantified the things you say and have made you eager to see what numbers they get. And they use these numbers to get things in front of you that you'll react to. Whether it enriches you or makes you suffer doesn't matter. Whether the things are true or false doesn't matter. And while machine learning accelerates this, they don't need it to do this; you or your friends will share these compelling bits of content. It's part of the design.

As a result, people will get harassed and brigaded. People will act with a short fuse. People will doubt what's true and seek their own version of the truth. Trump and those like him will always win in those environments. The reason Nazis aren't kicked off of Twitter is because they create a lot of engagement. The people that agree with them engage. The people that don't agree with them will either engage with Nazi tweets or create their own threads about it that others engage with.

Whatever happens, Twitter increases MAU. You can tell Jack that he is shit and should get rid of the Nazis, but as long as you do it on Twitter, Twitter benefits.

The guy is just yelling "data" spontaneously now. We explained what it is; unsure if the meaning was absorbed.

I made two two purchase suggestions to my library yesterday, and they got back to me today. One book they couldn't find. The other they're ordering and will get to me when it arrives.

The library! Use it, people!

Again, unsure if I'm making the right call, but I'm skipping pull-ups today because of upper back twinging.

Once in a while, I get political news via GitHub activity.

You have made it harder for international companies to hire Australian talent, or have offices in Australia filled with Australian talent. Companies such as Amazon, Apple, Atlassian, Microsoft, Slack, Zendesk and others now have to view their Australian staff and teams as "potentially compromised". This is because law enforcement can force a person to build a backdoor and they cannot tell their bosses. They might sack them and leave Australia because of the law you just passed.

Wow. That is fucked up. I mean, not as fucked up as detaining children without their parents or allowing everyone to have an assault rifle after a school shooting a month for years. But definitely not right.

Liam composed a really nicepiano piece. It has this really quiet, woody darkness, possibly from a nice balance of dissonance and consonance. There is most definitely a tonal order to it, yet the score is riddled with accidentals. (Which, of course, doesn't say anything about tonal centering – I just tend to expect stuff that's "not in a regular key" to be atonal.)

Really good photos taken in Asia. The one with the star showing through the gap in the cherry blossoms and the cars rushing below is ridiculous.

To-read when it hits the library: Inside Paragraphs

Protesters did a really good job speaking out against the tear gas baron that funds the Whitney Museum in New York. This is really encouraging to see.

Despite it being hard to install if you're not really familiar with PHP, Matomo is solid.

It's a fairly (conceptually) simple app. It ingests your web server logs, puts some representation of them in a MySQL database, and provides a web app that presents an analysis of those logs.

When I first started looking for non-Google-Analytics traffic statistics software, I thought I didn't need any analysis and tried the venerable awstats. Well, I could not tell what was going on with that, and I especially couldn't tell crawler traffic apart from probable human visits.

Matomo (formerly called Piwik) gives you that information in a UI that's like Google Analytics before it tried to take on way too much.

And of course, most importantly, you get this information without providing Google with more eyes on the behavior of people that are just visiting your web site and didn't actually consent to being tracked by Google.

The thing that I am especially pleased with is that Matomo lets you avoid having to have extra JS on pages, which requires more bandwidth and more trust from your users. It can just read your server logs, which has all the information needed to figure out what's being visited, and what kind of traffic it is.

Already, I see a ton of traffic from crawlers and bots I know nothing about (though some of them are blatantly malicious). Of course, now I have to set about evaluating and blocking them, which is work, but it's better than the alternative.

I had a playground shin slam! I can't believe kids do this three times a day and live.

"Dr. Wily was interrupting me!" —A guy with no younger sibling

Life…finds a way.