Month: April 2024

A Quiet Mind.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

Since leaving Facebook I have had a much more quiet mind. I haven’t wanted to see what was going on there because it had hit a high enough crescendo of noise to signal. There was an immediate relief from not having to sort through the gobbly gook of AI Generated crap to find things of value.

I gave myself a few days of a quiet mind. It was rewarding in many ways, particularly in thought that writing makes ethereally tangible.

Today I started up on Mastodon (link is in the main menu) and I actually did something I haven’t done on a social network for some time: I had fun. Sure, I posted a few posts from KnowProSE.com, throwing my hat in the ring, but more importantly I spent very little time on it but quality time interacting with a few people. I have all of 1 follower right now and am in no hurry to get more.

These days it seems we don’t value the quiet mind. Everyone has something they want to get from you, be it time or money (usually both) and you don’t get that time for a quiet mind.

What I wish for everyone is a quiet mind. A thoughtful mind. A playful mind. Check on yourself, make sure you have that time for quiet, for thought, and for play, and if you don’t – stop what you’re doing. You shouldn’t exist for someone else’s productivity or revenue stream.

In an age of constant agitation, rebel by giving yourself the time to think things through and to play.

Kill The Social Networks.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

There was a time when blogs were a big deal. We had our own network of blogs, we had a website called Technorati that ranked them and where we could see who was writing about stuff we were interested in.

The early blogs I found really great. We had people discussing all manner of things, with ‘pingbacks’ between blogs allowing for the crosslinking so even though you didn’t comment on their website, there was a link to the author referred to. WordPress.com does that, and to an extent it still happens in open source blogs, though a few things happened that changed the way things worked.

For example, at the same time, to make their sites more popular, crosslinking was done, and sometimes it was done to such an extent by people who had more marketing than thought that the search engines smacked it down in their search engine results. Search Engine results were important, so that was done more carefully. It was all very cliquish, and in some ways very elitist. Though I knew and even worked with some of the more famous bloggers, they weren’t interested in the content created. They were interested in their own audience, as well they should have been.

For all of the flaws, it wasn’t a bad system. It was decentralized, and the only real limit on content you could find was your ability to find it. Search engines cashed in a bit more because search engines were used a lot more. Nowadays, people are fed pulped fictions with some interesting stuff every now and then.

Social networks showed up and threw everything out the window. When you have centralized networks, you have the centralized ability to shadow ban people on the network, and once it hits critical mass, it becomes arbitrary, with the owner of the network enforcing their own version of what is right or wrong without even a conversation. Facebook does it, Twitter does it, Instagram does it… so the only path to not being shadow banned for something real or imagined is to simply leave the network.

But it doesn’t really end there. Now everyone is training an AI on user data, and no one has control over what user data they train on and how it is used. Chandra Steele writes a bit about how it feels like it’s the end of the shared Internet:

“…This is why the Tumblr and WordPress news [about selling information to AI companies] seems like a heavy blow to a shared internet. It’s taken away the possibility to return to the purer place we came from. PCMag Security Analyst Kim Key reached out to Automattic, which owns both platforms, and the company did not confirm or deny the rumors, though it did direct her to a statement that seems to indicate that if the deal goes through, users will be able to opt out from having their work included in AI training…”

“WordPress Wants to Turn My Old Blog Into an AI Zombie, and It Breaks My Heart“, Chandra Steele, PCMag.com, February 29th, 2024

It’s not the end of the shared Internet at all. Some of us don’t write on PCMag.com, and there are plenty of other options that exist. WordPress.com was just a later website built with open source technology, but before that we had GreyMatter, etc. She mentions 2009 for her blog – I was blogging since 1999. A lot happened in those 10 years.

These technologies still exist. If we want control of our content, we should move off of platforms where we cannot. I’m considering this myself in the context of WordPress.com. I only got here because I was tired of the trouble of maintaining my own sites, but during the time I have used WordPress.com, website hosting has improved to include managed open source content management systems, the open source content management systems themselves have become more easy to maintain and more powerful…

If you feel boxed in, get out of the box. I’m considering options myself since I feel my own trust was betrayed by WordPress.com, and they haven’t really discussed with us what is going on since that bombshell was dropped.

What we need to remember is that we always have options. The only way to effect change is to actually change ourselves. Don’t like a network? Get off it. No one will die.

If you write good content, they’ll find you.

Morning Coffee Thoughts.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

This morning I awoke to the sound of the gentle taps of rain against the window, a welcome change from the tyranny of dust that has plagued my environs for some time. It was peaceful and quiet, and the morning routine lead me out first to my gallery to see the sight of the clouds caressing the opposing hill of the valley, soothing where the brush fires had left naked ground, and hopefully putting out the last embers of them.

Of course, I expect the lights on the hill to go up further this year. Brush fires clearing land has a tendency to grow humans as well as vegetation, and concrete lasts longer than greenery.

This is normally when I would catch up on stuff on Facebook, but I’ve recently given up on that fruitless enterprise. Instead, I got some coffee, sitting and reading the New York Times digital edition on my phone. I’d hit the local news later, but the state of newsrooms in Trinidad and Tobago leaves much to be desired and even though I don’t ask for them, people send out PDF copies of newspapers on WhatsApp all the time. I’m not sure how they get those PDFs, I’m not sure why they share them. Maybe part of the problem with Trinidad and Tobago news is just that – lack of sales. I could do a critique of local news. I think it’s wiser these days not to.

“Poor Nations Are Writing a New Handbook for Getting Rich” caught my eye in the New York Times. It was well written and highlighted problems some nations have, but what I also noticed is that these sorts of articles skip over the Caribbean as if there is a blackout curtain over the islands. This article was no different. I thought for a moment to reach out to the author, Patricia Cohen, but I knew the answer already. I know most of the problems with writing such an article already. CARICOM members never seem to work for the common good because there’s not much common about CARICOM. More than the Caribbean Sea divides the member states.

I headed in with my coffee to the newly redesigned writing area, the rain having now restarted and tapping against the window like popcorn in a microwave. Cleaning the outside of that window is impossible, so dust from the dry and recent works on the hill outside have deposited enough dust on it that eventually I’ll take it out and look for diamonds.

Rain trickles down the small panes now, rinsing the looser dust off. The heat later will cake the remaining dust on. It’s a nice sort of mental camera obscura, allowing me to look up and to the right as I type, watching the sky and trees through a dirty lens, a reminder that all that we see is through a lens.

It’s time to read up a few more things, and to go outside and survey the rain occasionally as it washes the dust from the world outside, this steady and insistent rain. This is much needed rain, rinsing the world, reviving grasses and trees that have been starving for moisture.

It will be a good day for writing, I think. Where most people dream of sunshine, I dream of rain.

Billionaires Donate to SCEB

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

In a strange turn of events, billionaires have decided to donate billions of dollars to the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus through stock options of their company so that they all can avoid taxation and to re-invigorate the ever-failing philanthropic system. This was done at a Philanthropy Reveal Party on April Fool’s Day.

Of course, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus had to make some concessions for this to happen. They will both be driven by self-driving vehicles, and they will exclusively communicate through social networks. To this end, they will have the user name ‘SCEB’, for ‘Santa Claus & Easter Bunny’, while their full names will have the Easter Bunny preceding it in a personal agreement.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, after the release of their sex tape earlier today1, did a mutual press release about their social networks and interactions with SCEB, stating that children wishing to communicate with SCEB must be paying members of their networks. Bezos has also created a SCEB affiliate store so that the purchases that SCEB makes to fulfill orders allows them to mitigate pricing, while Amazon takes a minimum 30% administrative fee.

The bad news hidden in this is that all of their former employees are now competing for your jobs. Expect assorted creatures on LinkedIn. SCEB’s press release stated that they would be giving recommendations for all their former employees and would not gift the children of employers who do not hire their former employees.

An Associated Press journalist was banned for asking how a bunny can lay eggs, and Reuters was physically thrown out of the building for questioning whether the coal Santa Claus distributes was clean. The Washington Post was the only group left in the building by the end of the Philanthropy Reveal Party.

Various religious figures weighed in about the Philanthropy Reveal Party. The Pope said something in Latin, Buddhists around the world said that they had nothing to say but showed up to not say it. Muslims were busy with Ramadan, and did not show up, but Benjamin Netanyahu, democratically elected to a State that self-identifies as Jewish, applauded the endeavor and said cryptically that ‘settlers are standing by for naysayers property’.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump were in the audience and almost stole the show when Joe sniffed Donald’s hair while Donald ‘grabbed him by the…’ and shouted, “BIGLY!” A sex tape is expected to drop sometime before the Presidential Elections.

Of course this is an April Fool’s Day post, if you haven’t figured that out yet.

  1. They decided they would be lovers instead of fighters. ↩︎