markjgsmith

World is still doing it’s nearly red tsunami but not quite thing, and continuing with it’s help but actually it’s malicious help thing. Got gifted two rice meals last night, but they had been left on the ground where historically they end up all covered in ants. The food pieces were well packaged but not the rice. I could have just thrown away the rice but the night before somebody had left some sweat bread which was nice, and I’d packaged up the wrapers to throw away, but somehow during the night they ended up in the gutter, I have no idea how. That shouldn’t be a problem because that’s how literally everyone throws away their garbage, except when I do it, it causes WWIII. Anyway I was woken up by an angry woman who made a big thing of opening up the garbage, like it was somehow my fault. Anyway all to say that throwing the rice away would have caused some sort of nuclear hostage situation.

I examined the rice with glasses on and it looked fine. So ate it anyway. Of course now the raspy cough I've had for the past few days, given to me at the end of the previous bullying cycle, has gotten worse and I was coughing up loads of gross flem all night. I’m practically back to being in the lung infection situation I had for the first 6 months of the year. No doubt some gang stalkers will be along in a minute to shout 'you learn' at me. Once again, either way I get blamed and mutilated.

So not feeling all that great today, no doubt I’ll get blamed for not being happy enough soon. Actually thinking about it, that already happened last night essentially. A strange young woman approached me to ask me if I was ok and have a chat, but she was doing that thing were she just talks quieter and quieter so you can’t hear anything of what she’s saying. Then she got sad that I couldn’t hear her. She eventually said 'keep going', I asked if she meant 'keep talking', she said 'enjoy life' and I just said 'oh yeah' and nodded, she looked like she was about to start crying and as she left made a strange gesture with her index finger and middle finger, sort of like what a priest does when doing a blessing. But it was very odd, almost like she hadn’t meant to do it. A few minutes later a motorbike gang stalker drove past in absolute histerics looking and pointing at me like it was all a big joke, or like I had just done a big joke. In retrospect it is a bit funny, but only because of how weird the situation was, I wasn’t trying to be funny, I was just trying to not say something that might cause this girl to burst into tears. It just seemed like the safest thing to just not say very much and just say yes enjoy life even though I am completely stuck here with no way to enjoy life.

The good news is that I was able to get the reusable workflow repo back into a good state by doing a fetch instead of a merge. The support team confirmed I was likely seing a bug, they will try to fix for next release. Hopefully the universe won’t blame me for forcing me to have to do a fetch, but it probably will, because that’s totally the sort of thing that gets right up it’s nose.

One soldiers on, another day.

Am I trying to be funny? Not really? Are you trying to be funny universe? Really? #

cat << EOF > We have control issues

Some interesting thoughts and discussions arising about control in some of today’s podcasts.

In the Keen On podcast, Keith Tear makes some interesting points while discussing Elon Musk and free speech. Under pressure Keith says he’s still left leaning, but he’d drop the left-right framing if it meant getting away from those that seek to control. His view is many are misguided in thinking being in control is the default state, but citizens are under no obligation to conform unless they break the law. I thought that was an interesting and strong way of looking at the situation. Also Andrew is a terrible tease. He eventually does broadly agree with Keith, but not before really giving him a hard time about it. His brand of humour has a unmistakable streak of seriousness to it!

Later a similar topic arose in the Rest is Politics US episode. Katty Kay makes a comment about someone being 'out of control' and it occurred to me how much we have veared off piste that being in control is seen as the default state. This makes even less sense in the US where such thinking is in direct contradiction with 'the land of the free' thing. To be fair to Katty Kay, I don’t think she said it in some nefarious I want to control everything rampage way, it’s just a turn of phrase people often use these days, maybe without thinking too deeply about the implications. But words do matter.

I think this control theme is something that’s going to come up a lot, and I think it’s tripping many of us up. And to many it might seem like people being overly pedantic, but to others, perhaps those that have had bad experiences in this area, see it as a very important thing. I'm often quite chill about this type of stuff, but actually given where technology is going, it might actually be a point that we should spend more time getting familiar with. The control anti-patterns can have some astonishingly bad negative consequences, especially with AGI on the horizon, we really need to be clear about this area.

I hope I haven’t misquoted what people were saying here, I don’t have time to go back and re-find and listen to the exact segments, but hopefully you get the general idea of the very valid points being made. Both podcasts are worth listening to.

The other thing that stood out was a bit from Anthony, apparently in Australia liberals are a movement that’s part of the conservatives. What's going on with that? #

Another good point by Keith Tear during his Keen On appearance today. Why is populism, when the people have a voice, OK in Afghanistan or Iran, but NOK in the US?

I also wonder about this. Are the anti-populists aware of this apparent double standard, or is there another way I should be thinking about populism?

Another thing I don’t get about populism, remember I’m a brit, isn’t the whole point of the entire Labour party to be about the people, the workers? Then why is it always right leaning leaders that are populist? #

John Gruber talks to Taegan Goddard, founder of Political Wire on the latest Talk Show. Pretty interesting discussion about the history of blogging, RSS, Moveable Type, Wordpress, Perl, podcasting, newspapers and building online businesses, and of course Apple. I find these conversations interesting because there’s always a bunch of stuff that I remember that they leave out, but also some stuff that I'd never even heard about. The internet is odd like that, and of course people have their preferences so often weigh the same things differently. I don’t think I’d ever heard of Goddard before. #