4grams

I was at a concert last night and it struck me just how much I LOVE seeing how people who showed up to share an experience can be so different. My kids were pointing at strange looking people but it just made me smile more and more as explained why I loved their expression and courage to literally wear it in public.

Diversity, new experiences, unexpected is how life should be. I am tattooed, mine are pretty ordinary but last night someone commented on one of mine on the way out of the show. She thought it was strange, so I explained it and we had such a lovely conversation. She had recently beat cancer and was about to get her first.

I don’t know, it’s early and this resonated.

This is a great write up, not only in content, but also in spirit and tone. An enjoyable read beginning to end and inspires me to try more stuff.

Exactly, early social media was tons of fun. It was like the early internet but easier since anyone could make a profile with any info.

Then it had to be monetized. They had to glue eyeballs via attention, no matter what kind. Now it’s all rent seeking, innovation is 100% about what can produce an immediate return, no care for the long term. The grift economy…

It was not social media, that was about the people. It’s what the social media companies did in search of dollars that did it in. Greed. Full stop.

I don’t know why obvious propaganda works on so many people. People I assumed had functional brains, just turn them off whenever the online. It’s fucking maddening, and I don’t see any way to combat it.

That looks like my play through of a fallout game. For some reason it amuses me to no end to make a random, huge pile of found alcohol, in game.

I’m humbled by this man doing it in real life.

I have a google voice number for that. Most things no longer accept it though.

I had delusions of trying to keep track of which address is sold by who which is why I did the hide my email addresses. But I’ve always kept separate personal and spam accounts. This was my attempt at combining to a single account.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Illogical meat brain that thinks odd numbers are more random that even I guess.

Don’t get me wrong, there are systems that work. I built up a very successful smart card based system many years ago after a failed audit. I initially hated the idea but in the end we built a crazy secure environment that was very easy to use and maintain. That project is long since obsolete but after doing that one, over a decade ago, I figured things were headed in the right direction.

I think I’m extra sensitive right now because my aging mom has made the issue acute. She’s not the same as she was a few years ago and helping her with all her online accounts has become a nightmare. It’s just too complicated for many folks.

Yeah, I’m up to 40 hide my addresses for that same reason. Figure if the password sucks, at least the email can be unique and obscure.

This shit pisses me off so bad. I had an identity theft a few years back, took ages to undo, and my credit score is still impacted by it. At the time I moved to a password manager and all my passwords are 31 characters of garbage. I’ve got several, highly sensitive accounts that my passwords don’t work for, in fact one a bank, until fairly recently, had repurposed a phone number field in the DB so passwords were limited to 10 characters numeric only (I managed to get one of their IT folks on the horn to explain why the password was so awful).

I cannot believe we live in 2025 and we still haven’t figured out passwords.

I fucking booked it from a job after about 2 months because in every fucking meeting the CTO would wax on about how great it would be once we were all replaced by robots and AI. This fucker who clawed his way into his C level position though merit, and hard work, and the same last name as the owner, and all he could do to inspire the team was tell us about how a 91 year old who lost his job to AI was saying how he would be fine. I mean, if he can find a way to be happy, we all can!

Yes, but in the end I spent all this time disabling notifications, when I bought the thing to show me them… I just realized I don’t need that alert immediately and in fact led to me ignoring them since they became just another annoyance (phone, computer and watch all told me the same thing). It became a negative productivity tool.

I was so excited about Apple Watch. Thought how great it would be to not have to take my phone out of my pocket anymore; less screen time, right?

No, it’s just this bullshit. More noise, more alerts, more digital cruft. I put the thing on the charger a couple years ago, been there since.

Feel like these days it’s “do unto others what you imagine others would to do unto you.”

America, by far, and that’s from someone living here. I’ve been to England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Czech Republic, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Iceland, Mexico, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Canada, and probably a couple others I can’t remember. I’ve been treated nothing but friendly, with genuine curiosity, even when I shouldn’t have been.

Every day in the US, someone swears at me.

Don’t forget, his own wife is a dei import, dude can’t find himself a good American woman so he’s got to outsource. Irony is dead.

I just got a job with an EU company, doing business through acquisition in the US. I don’t report to anyone in my office, or even this country. I’m building the US infrastructure based on the designs coming from the EU and integrating with their cloud.

Was an intentional move to get employed by a non-us based employer, but so far I think I really lucked out.

Very limited so far. I don’t have much near me but there has been enough sproradic connectivity that I pick up the occasional chatter in the default channel and have about 145 nodes it’s aware of.

Mostly been my son and I playing around. He wants to get his neighborhood friends involved :).