Lucas Gonze blog

Ahoy, friends, I’m doing most of my new writing on a new site at writing.gonze.com. This is a custom domain in front of listed.to, which uses Standard Notes for editing.

The WordPress editor necessary for posts on some.gonze.com gets in my way. I prefer the editing experience in Standard Notes:

• I’m in Standard Notes all the time anyway, and have been for years
• listed.to uses markdown, which I know well
• The WordPress editor uses this “block” concept that I hate. Markdown is far better.

The downside of listed.to is that I can’t upload anything to it. It’s nothing but text. That’s not fatal – a text-centric approach is a good thing, and I can easily upload truly necessary images or audio to my shell account at Dreamhost.

I suspect that listed.to will not be maintained indefinitely. It’s a sideline feature for Standard Notes. That’s why I used a custom domain – so I can control the outcome when they are gone.

Of course, the converse is that listed.to may well outlive me and my Dreamhost account. But that’s a different threat. It used to be that we bought our own domains and hosted our own servers for longevity in the face of provider shutdowns. In practice, though, providers often outlive us. A domain starts around $20/year. A social network account starts at $0. A custom domain takes maintenance. A social network account can last nearly forever – even my ancient Myspace account still exists, albeit as a pale shadow of my blinged-out profile circa 2007.

When it comes to digital afterlife, there’s always archive.org. Whether it’s heaven or hell is a Good Place problem. The important thing is that on the Internet there is a definite afterlife, like it or not.

the weareallghosts netabel released my new collection of pieces entitled “Seclusion.” These pieces were created during the covid-19 novel coronavirus crisis.

A Sunday in May of 2020

Creative Commons music. On a netlabel. Hosted by archive.org. Blogged by the artist.

Deep social distancing.

Because of my work for Merico, I have started following China-related tech news. Two excellent bloggers on China:

Dan Wang

Noah Smith

You are commuting to work by bus. While sitting on the bus, you open your favorite social app. Even though it is your favorite app, you don’t trust it enough to share your location with it. At the next stop, a passenger gets on the bus. The passenger sits on the bus and opens the same social app. But the passenger shares their precise location with the app. Now, if this social app is reading accelerometer data on your phone as well as the passenger’s phone, the app can easily figure out that both phones experience the same vibration pattern. Indeed, both phones are going to record the same vibrations, e.g. when the bus takes off, stops, and swerves left or right. The app now knows that you and the passenger are together in the same environment, hence same location. Don’t be surprised if you receive a recommendation from the app to add this passenger as a friend.

https://www.mysk.blog/2021/10/24/accelerometer-ios/

A coordinated attack could take this even further. Each bus could be equipped with a phone running an app that (1) is recording the accelerometer data and (2) is recording the bus line and location. This data could be combined with an accelerometer signature recorded in a widely used app like Instagram.

In the case of a popular cause like the Boston Marathon bombing, it’s easy to imagine public support.

Further reading: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3309074.3309076

The study of mind needs a Copernican shift in perspective:

Cognition did not appear out of nowhere in ‘higher’ animals but goes back millions, perhaps billions, of years

Pamela Lyon in Aeon

Related posts:

Baldur Bjarnason argues that old-school blogs were always extractive and exploitive:

The blogging economy was filled with bad practices all around. People today don’t appreciate just how rampant these practices were. Most of us didn’t notice because we were in our tiny corner, all reading the same few popular bloggers (an early version of the modern ‘influencer’). But outside of that corner, blogs were done for Google and paid for by Google. After a few years of buying into the hype, advertisers started to push back.

Baldur Bjarnason

This way of thinking about it all is new to me. I can’t dismiss it offhand.

I have always thought of the fall of blogs as being caused by user experience. Centralized social networks have both distribution and better tooling. If I want my writing to be read, I use Twitter. This blog is more like an open journal.

Before social media giants, there were social bloggers connecting at the scale of Dunbar’s number. Literally, everybody knew everybody, at least in the Internet sense: if you didn’t know them you didn’t connect to them.

It wasn’t just relationships that were decentralized, though, it was also tooling. You used a blogging tool to write and a feed reader to read. It was a lot more work than the social media giants.

To like a post, for example, you would need to either reblog it or create an account and enter a comment – both manual operations that took 100x as long as an in-place Like, Retweet, or Reply button.

That was never necessary. It could always have been the case that blogging tools included the full stack of functionality. It can still be the case now. Back to the future.

My post of 2021/09/15 circled back to 2020/11/09, expectedly.

Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig.

Marcus Aurelius, around 170 AD

More than anything we are maintaining a mortuary here at the fish counter keeping all our skinned dead friends looking glam for the customer. We retrieve their corpses from the back, and then begin coaxing some semblance of “fresh” or “life” out of them.

The Secret Life of Groceries, published in 2020

1. A list of other blogs that a blogger might recommend by providing links to them (usually in a sidebar list), also known as a blogroll.

2. A writing and publishing system, like WordPress or Jekyll. The blogroll is in a sidebar on the home page and in all posts.

3. A personal aggregator and feed reader, like Google Reader. Uses the blogroll. Posts can be reblogged with commentary or replied to in a standalone post.

The big problem with Google Glass was not technical but social. Despite the company’s best efforts to make Glass cool, the people who first got the device tended to be of a certain type — overconfident, entitled, rich tech guys. Soon they earned a derisive nickname — “glassholes” — and at that point the device was done for.

A lot has changed since Glass’s release. Cameras and mobile processors are smaller and more powerful; now Glass-like tech can be built into spectacles without much sacrifice in style. There is also far less social opprobrium attached to wearable tech; earbuds and smart watches are not just for rich nerds

Farhad Manjoo in the NYT