markjgsmith

Monday, April 8, 2024

The component overrides bug that I tracked down and fixed yesterday was a real tricky one. Glad I got that one fixed amidst all the head winds the world was throwing in my direction. Why are you so conflicted world? Why are you on the war path yet again? #

One thing I've noticed recently is that some of the biggest Trump critics online are in fact very Trump-like themselves. They might have completely different political views, but their behaviour, outside of their righteous political commentary, is almost a carbon copy of Trump's playbook. I wonder do they realise? Serious question.

Perhaps it's just a high performer boomer thing. Ok boomer, let's move on.

Update: Just to be clear, I'm not making commentary on my politics, only an observation about people's behaviour. #

I've updated several notes from the past week updating them to blog posts. I'm still trying to get the balance between notes and blog posts right. I want notes to be small enough they can be posted to social medias. I also want a bunch of days that have vaguely the right balance to test the interleaved homepage feature that I've been working on recently. #

Something else that's super weird that keeps happening, and this one has been happening for years, but I only just thought of a good name for it. It's the end of task yah. You are busy doing something important and you finally finish whatever it is, and low and behold, a seemingly random 'Ya' materialises from your environment. I don't know how, I've got a pretty solid idea of why it happens, but I do know that it's a thing. Happens so often.

The plot thickens. The even stranger thing is that whenever it happens 99% of the time I was literally about to get out of whatever hamster wheel I find myself in. And get this, it seems to happen more when the task st hand is painful. Come on world, it's pretty obvious what you are up to here. #

Two things that are extremely correlated with periods when they are starving and thirsting you are cigarettes and sexual harrasment incidents.

For the former, suddenly a huge uptick in people offering you cigarettes, or smoking right up in your face, or empty cigarette packets left everywhere you go. For the later, the massive uptick happens from both men and women, usually as a way to anger goad you. Often from men and women operating together. Also massive uptick in number of random people saying 'lie' as they walk past. Whatever do they mean?

I don't know how, only that it happens, like clockwork. #

People often say Bitcoin is money for enemies. It's meant to bring to the for that it's for everyone. Well it's worth remembering that RSS is information for enemies. Hardly anyone, actually no one, said this back in the early web years, but it's worth remembering. YMMV.

You kind of just have to hope that everyone is not a veloceraptor. #

The component overrides bug

The component overrides bug that I tracked down and fixed yesterday was a real tricky one. The bug got introduced while I was digging myself out of the massive hole caused by being blocked from cleaning up the codebase. It's layers upon layers of irony at this point.

Turns out you can't currently override core components, something that needs to change, because you should be able to override any components with your own ones. Core components, by the way, are ones included in the main static site generator app. It's quite an easy update but not a priority right now.

Anyway I wrote some additional tests in the main static site generator code, one of which was for overriding. Problem was I had forgotten about the core components special case, and the test was doing exactly that, overriding a core component. I got the test working, but it broke the feature everywhere else. The result in my website was that none of my custom components, were being picked up. The most notable consequence being the removal of multi-paragraph notes, which is a special feature I added to my website, outside of the notes plugin.

There are quite a few customisations like this that I've added on my website. It's easier to do it there since that's the only live site at the minute. The plan is at some point to move all the custom features that make sense to be in the plugins, to the actual plugins. But it's not a priority. I have much bigger, much more important things to get right first. The interleaved homepage is one of those.

Strange that the world seems so intent on blocking me from finishing the interleaved homepage, while at the same time forcing me to move my custom functionality into the plugins. Why in heavens would that happen? It feels like something in the universe is conflicted.

Life goes on. Hopefully no starvation and thirst today.

What do they mean when they say lie?

Yesterday I asked what people here meant when they say 'lie'. There was a massive uptick in people saying the word as they walked past me. Women, men, school children, everyone was doing it. I wasn't doing anything, just walking down the road or sitting observing the world.

Well this morning things become more clear. A taxi driver shouts loudly at a shoe shine / shoe repair bloke as he walks past to get his attention. 'Lie!'. It's clearly a beliteling derogatory term, on par with calling someone a dog. People are referred to as lies. Think about that for a second. It's basically saying you are so low you don't exist. You are a lie, not even real.

Relatedly often people walking past, say 'you are' which I guess is saying something like 'you exist'. Which is nice until you realise that a load of people are actually saying 'you our', as in you belong to us. As in our property. But I digress. Recently it's been a lot more of the later. It seems any term will get corrupted.

Back to 'lie'. They also use 'lie' to tell people to chill out, to wait. All this the same across most asian countries I've been to. So it has this dual purpose which means gives those who want to lord it over others, to be total assholes, to do it in broad daylight, and no one bats an eyelid.

I think it's worth pointing all this out because as we go forward into a world mediated by AI, we have to remember that in much of the world people treat other people very badly indeed, and there's no reason whatsoever to believe that will be any different in the near future. It's clear AI tools will be used by some humans to subjugate other humans.

Having said all this, it's worth noting that this particular set of incidents might all have been manufactured, including the taxi bloke and shoe repair guy. I say this because during the uptick yesterday, one of the incidents that happened was a women walking a dog talking with some police. As I passed she shouted 'lie' at the dog. About 30 seconds earlier two school kids teenagers walked past me in the opposite direction that I was walking, one of whom said, you guessed it, 'lie', as they passed. This morning I shouted to the taxi bloke 'you are lying' and he nodded looking a bit embarrassed.

So in summary, groups of people definitely create situations where they openly use extremely detogatory ways of addressing others in public, in broad daylight. And this doesn't even get registered by anybody around as not normal, or not acceptable. It's clear this sort of thing also happens for real. Why wouldn't it, the fakers are basically teaching on-lookers that it's an okay and normal way to behave.

Anyway, enough said, this sort of stuff makes my blood boil. How are we ever going to build a better world for all if this sort of thing is happening?