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?

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.