TrickJarrett.com

"Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy"

If it wasn’t already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without restriction.

Relevant to this, I came across this excellent resource for helping people get onto Mastodon and find their community.

I am curious to find someone more knowledgeable than me to dive into the technological implementations of both fediverse and atprotocol infrastructure to understand the longterm prospects for both. My current (ill informed) belief is that fediverse has the better underlying protocol, but Bluesky has the easier onboarding which has given it the short term growth that makes it a more viable longterm option.

This morning's work music

I don't always go for lo-fi music. I actually have a few go-to videos but this morning I felt I needed something more chill.

Boardgaming Monday

Yesterday, to distract, and take advantage of a friend in from out of town, four of us got together and spent the afternoon into the evening playing Feast for Odin: The Norwegians. As I posted on Bluesky, I continue to be aggressively mediocre at the game. I managed to get 3rd out of four, which is good as I am reliably one of the worst at boardgames in my playgroup.

S03E07 - Gone Quiet

I am struck by how much this quote from The West Wing sounds like a Trump quote:

C.J. Cregg: He got the question.

Toby Ziegler: Who?

C.J. Cregg: The Majority Leader.

Toby Ziegler: When?

C.J. Cregg: Last night. Local news, Cleveland, Ohio - oh me-o, oh my-o, oh Cleveland, Ohio! He got the question.

Bonnie: What's the question?

Toby Ziegler: "Why do you want to be president?"

Bonnie: And what did he say?

C.J. Cregg: [reading from a transcript of the interview] "The reason I would run, were I to run, is I have a great belief in this country as a country and in this people as a people that go into making this country a nation with the greatest natural resources and population of people, educated people."

C.J. Cregg: [makes a shotgun motion with her arms] Chk-chk, boom!

Tall vs. Wide Conservation in Economics

A shower thought this morning: I had a thought of how Piaget's Theory of Conservation (the psychology test about wide vs tall containers,) is very similar to the current state of capitalism.

I was thinking how the US economy shifted so dramatically during Reagonomics, moving from the broad distribution with money in the hands of individuals, to the focusing of wealth in the hands of corporations. During this the US economy has continued to add more money and wealth from the world, however rather than being more broadly distributed, it becomes heavily focused around the corporations and the chosen few.

But, because it has netted more wealth, it is heralded as a success.

Is this an actual parallel of the psychological concept? Considering it largely is referred to as a way of highlighting youth neurological development, probably not - but I have no idea and I found the similarities notable.

"Viagra-laced ‘erectile honey’ is flooding into France, officials warn"

France last year seized record quantities of illegally imported “erectile honey” laced with Viagra and other medications, customs officials said Monday.

The honey, which is mostly shipped to France from Turkey, north Africa and southeast Asia, is sold on the black market and at night shops, where it is hawked as an all-natural sexual stimulant, according to the French customs office.

However, it often contains hidden pharmaceuticals like sildenafil or tadalafil, the main substances in the erectile dysfunction drugs Viagra and Cialis, news agency AFP reported. Those drugs can be dangerous if they interact with other medications, such as those treating high blood pressure.

There are about to be a lot more tour eiffels across the French countryside.

Going to use this one a few times in the coming years

Full credit to effinbirds

The Two Best Episodes of TV Ever

The penultimate and final episodes of Season 2 of the West Wing: '18th and Potomac' and 'Two Cathedrals' deliver a one-two punch which can take anyone down.

From the frenetic chaos of dealing with the looming lie, to the heartwrenching loss of a beloved mother-figure on the show. I've watched these two episodes a dozen times and it still takes my breath away and makes my heart ache.

This perfectly encapsulates the feeling of death and mourning. I felt nothing less than what is on display here when my mother died, though I had nowhere as dramatic an opportunity to express it.

And to turn from that to these final moments of the season finale:

Just perfection.

Two important black men

"Zork: The Great Inner Workings"

Zork largely predates me, though of course I'm familiar with it. I played it a bit in college (who didn't? It's an experimental time for so many.) But I recall being fascinated by its functionality and flexibility. This article is a great read into the way which those programmers pulled it off.

Of course it's a Lisp predecessor.

"Donald Trump’s 19th Century Obsession"

Jamelle is a columnist for the NYT, but he really rose over the past few years doing videos about politics on TikTok. With it's hiccup and uncertain future, he has launched a YouTube channel.

"Biden pardons Fauci, Milley and members of Jan. 6 panel"

It's no surprise that America is so broken that it has come to this. The next four years are going to be terrible for so many people. Having reached a point where this became necessary is very telling as the last act before the transition.

The lesson of J.R.R. Tolkien’s abandoned Lord of the Rings sequel

'The New Shadow,' which Tolkien left unfinished at his death, has a chilling warning about the dangers of historical amnesia and peacetime rot.

Today's coding output

Today was largely a lazy day except for some coding. Nothing was a major project, but I messed around with a few ideas and finally implemented a month calendar view for archives. Currently it's just in the sidebar of everyday to link the current month.

I also messed around with a few things:

RSS Headline Summarizer

A script which runs on my home machine where I can run a local copy of the Llama LLM, and I feed it the day's news headlines from my RSS reader, and it spits out a summary of the topics in the news. No real use, but was curious to mess around with the code for it.

Goliath

I worked on pulling all the links from my Bluesky and Mastodon feeds into its own RSS feed. This is a variation of something I had thought seriously a year or so ago which I called Behemoth. It would have been a combined reader for social feeds as well as RSS feeds, and other APIs I could fold into it.

Today was nowhere near that, and was just me poking around at the APIs for each platform, no full implementation.

Glowbug Calendars

As noted above, the calendar display for Glowbug. It's been on my to-do list for a while now and today was the majority of it. There's some more to do with reworking templating to allow the calendar to be set based on the page which is being generated.

--

Overall, it wasn't anything too strenuous, but just fun explorations and distractions during the day.

In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

A quote from Captain Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials.

I was reminded of this quote from this Reddit comment.

My Browser "Startup" Folders

This blog post refers to Magic: The Gathering. As noted, it is also now my job. So while I deeply love the game, I always want to alert folks I also have a bias.

Last weekend, I talked about my Firefox plugins. This weekend, I want to share how I use the browser, and one of the big step forwards for me.

In the 1990s, when dial-up internet was still in its infancy, my family was connected and (like today) my favorite game ever, Magic: The Gathering, gave me a very good reason to be online. I had discovered IRC, Internet Relay Chat. And specifically, I had found #mtg on "Efnet." It was a chatroom that could have up to 100 people in it on busy days. It was the virtual hangout for us. And that hangout, made it so I came home from school, and I got on the family computer, and I hung out for hours each day.

Remember, this was the origins of the Internet. This was back when kids were sent out of the house by default. Though that era rapidly came to a close. And this was the era when Internet access was metered. So, when one month I took the family over our 100 hours of online time in a month, it was a big deal and one I got into a bit of trouble when the parents saw my online time in a quantifiable way.

I share this tidbit from my past to show that my Internet addiction started early. My grandmother smoked her first cigarette when she was like 7. I started being online when I was 14.

These days, I wouldn't be shocked to learn I had weeks where I spent 100 hours a WEEK online, between work and home. Basically in my life, I have always been online. And it's been because of what is now my employer: Magic: The Gathering.

This entire story is to highlight how serious I take being online. I live in the browser window. Firefox is my workshop.

I used to agonize over finding the most productive or efficient start page for my browser. During Yahoo's heyday, had a feature which let you setup a custom start page on their site. Embedding weather, news, bookmarks, etc. Start pages have gone out of vogue, but I still want to be efficient and online as quick as possible.

I have a handful of pinned tabs which I keep always open in the browser:

• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• This blog
• RSS Reader for news and articles
• Wallabag saved articles
• Bluesky & Mastodon both have ones

But those are all personal stuff for me and not for work. Unfortunately, Firefox doesn't let you customize start pages by the tab container (one of the extensions I talked about last week). My solution is instead to maintain "Startup" bookmark folders. One folder for personal, one for work. I bookmark the tabs I want into each folder.

For work, I won't tell you what tabs I use, but I have settled on 3 tabs which I keep in the Work startup folder.

So if I need to start my Work browser system, I open a new tab with the 'Work' container in the browser. So all of those tabs are using work related logins and cookies, etc. Then I can right click on the 'Startup' folder and open all of the bookmarks into their tabs, and boom - I'm off to the races.