Per my recent definition, newspapers and magazines might appear to be timelines, but they are not. This is because all articles in a publication have a single source: the the individual (or typically) firm producing the publication. Everything goes through the same editorial team before it gets in. The information has been curated by humans.
The exception would be a publication with extremely lax (or no) editorial standards whatsoever, which simply publishes everything (or nearly everything) submitted to it. Those would be timelines.
This also explains why the posts of an individual social media account are not timelines, even though virtually all social media users repost content from others. Those reposts were still done by a human. The information has still been curated.
Before continuing, it is necessary to define what I mean by timeline in this article.
timeline, n. An online list of one-to-many communications from mixed sources.
So, Facebook’s infamous algorithmic timeline qualifies as a timeline, but so are its “feeds” of friends and groups. The chronological timelines of Bluesky and Mastodon are also timelines, and therefore also evil. An email account that is on one or more mailing lists is also a timeline, but an email account that is not subscribed to lists is not a timeline. If you log onto Facebook, the list of your friends is not a timeline, because that is a list of Facebook accounts, not communications from those accounts. If you click on a friend and view their posts, that is also not a timeline, because the contents come from a single source, not mixed sources. And so on.
Timelines are evil because of the time burden they impose. This is because of how computer technology makes it so easy to send information, coupled with how timelines often contain many senders of information, inevitably makes for very busy timelines.
Some very timeline-like things existed before the dawn of the Internet. Junk mail and junk phone calls turned physical mailboxes and telephones into such things. This is why so many people rightly found them objectionable.
Algorithmic timelines are more evil than strict chronological ones, because of the opaque nature of the criteria for ordering and selecting timeline contents, but even strict chronological timelines are evil.
The only thing that can make a timeline non-evil is sparse traffic, but due to information being so cheap and easy to send this can never reliably be the case. Evil is the natural state of most timelines, and even normally non-evil timelines will at times assume this state.
Timelines are the chief thing responsible for making people spend so much time online and disconnected from the real world that exists outside of cyberspace. Create a timeline for someone, and the fear of missing out on something important that might be buried in it leads them to spend unhealthy amounts of time online.
As such, timelines are probably responsible (or at least partly responsible) for much of the recent trend of politics and society getting worse, which is driven by organic and real-world interactions being replaced by time spent in cyberspace, based on opaque criteria, all the while being monitored and exploited by capitalists and politicians.
At least this is my current operating theory. I arrived at it as a result of struggling over why I spent so much time in front of computer screens, to the detriment of achieving other goals in my life. As such, I am now in the process of experimentally de-timelining my life.
I have been toying with the idea of purchasing a Kobo ebook reader for some time now. But I keep coming ’round to it being a questionable value proposition.
This is mainly due to capitalist avarice, not the base technology itself (which, while not perfect, is actually pretty good by now).
Available ebook titles (at least those in open, non-proprietary formats) seem quite limited in comparison to traditional paper book ones, so for books I would have to purchase, an ebook would not be an option in many cases. To this can be added how ebooks do not tend to sell at much of a discount off traditional paper books, which makes it even harder to recoup my investment in a reader. Note that I have a limited time window to do that (probably in the 5–10 year range, while paper books last indefinitely) due to the rapid pace of technological obsolescence in the computer and electronic fields.
That paltry discount starts looking like a non-discount once one I realize how much fewer use rights I would have with ebooks. Given all that sleazy capitalist garbage, I would expect an ebook title to be sold for half or less of what a traditional paper book is. This is seldom the case.
In particular, that discount often vanishes entirely or becomes negative once the option of used paper books enters the picture. You can’t buy a used ebook, for the same reason you can’t sell one: ebooks don’t come with that right of ownership. On the subject of selling books, for paper books I no longer need, I can recoup yet more of my acquisition cost by selling them.
Given all the above, I doubt very much that ebooks in general offer any price advantage over paper books.
Kindle ebooks offer a far greater title selection than do open formats, but I don’t trust Amazon. No, scratch that. I do trust Amazon. I trust them to act in ways which are advantageous to their own bottom line and disadvantageous to mine. I am quite certain that Kindle (and the proprietary ebooks sold for the same) are not exactly what they seem. Maybe Kindle spies on the reader. Maybe its OS is programmed for obsolescence in a few years, so Amazon can force the user to replace a device which otherwise still works perfectly. Maybe its ebooks have particularly awful end user licensing agreements. Maybe more than one of the above. Maybe something else.
I don’t know for sure what it is, but I do know that it almost certainly is something. It’s Amazon. There has got to be a catch or three.
Unless some of the above changes, or I encounter a use case that justifies my investment in an ebook reader with a sure-thing, short payback period, ebooks just don’t seem to make much sense to me.
The robots are back, and crawling the hell out of my Mercurial repository that really can’t take that sort of rate of access. So this site has been more down than up recently.
robots.txt has been adjusted accordingly, but the offending robots are apparently working on cached data and still making banned requests. So I have temporarily turned Web access to the repository off. The requests continue, but now they get relatively cheap 404 responses involving only Apache, instead of having to fork and exec a Python CGI script to process each request, so they are no longer doing much harm.
When the robots stop trying to access that CGI script (probably in a day or so), I will re-enable Web access.
Let me start by saying I have been nothing but satisfied with Digital Ocean, which I use to host this blog, so far. The issue here is not anything Digital Ocean has done, it is what Digital Ocean is highly likely to do in the future.
Digital Ocean is a capitalist enterprise based in a country undergoing a transition from democracy to fascism. The historical role of the capitalist class is to line up in support behind fascist regimes whenever they arise.
I do not know the politics of Digital Ocean’s top management and board of directors. It does not much matter. Even if both are dominated by political progressives, compliance with the rapidly-emerging fascist regime is highly likely.
In a capitalist corporation, management serves at the pleasure of the board, whose prime mission is to act in the interest of the corporation’s stockholders and their desire to maximize profits. Profits are not maximized by staking out adversarial positions to an authoritarian regime.
The above makes compliance the expected outcome, and the historical record of capitalism under fascism bears this theory out.
Yes, even under the Nazis there were businesses like DEF (Oskar Schindler’s firm) and Ernst Leitz GmbH (the makers of Leica cameras) that tried to do the right thing as much as they could. But even they were heavily constrained, and did a lot of complying (both manufactured materiel for the Wehrmacht). Even if Digital Ocean follows in their footsteps (and odds are against it, good guys like Leitz and Schindler are the exceptions that prove a general rule), they will still have to make a public show of being loyal Trump fascists.
Even in the optimistic case, then, this site is likely to end up as collateral damage should it remain on Digital Ocean.
Hence, it is now time for me to move this site elsewhere, which brings me to the requirements for what “elsewhere” should ideally be.
As little US connection as possible. Ideally this would be an organization that is neither owned by US capital, managed or overseen by US citizens, based in the USA, nor physically hosted in the USA.
Cloud hosting that lets me run my own installation of WordPress on my own installation of Linux. I am not interested in sharing an OS installation or a WordPress installation with others; past experience has taught me that both are insufficient to my needs.
The ability to assign a static IP address to a virtual server.
A provider that offers an S3-compatible cloud storage service, since I use such to keep this site backed up.
Any suggestions as to the above would be greatly appreciated!
Notice that it’s an old-fashioned corded one. “I wish mice didn’t have cords” is a thought that has passed through my mind exactly never. Bluetooth mice struck me as a stupid idea a dozen years ago, and they strike me as a stupid idea today.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they still made old-fashioned corded mice, given how long Bluetooth ones have been around. I guess it goes to show that I am not the only corded mouse diehard out there. Maybe I should have purchased a second one just in case the market decides to make wireless mice mandatory before this one dies, but I have enough of an issue with accumulating clutter as it is.
As for keyboards and mice, so for phone headsets, but double or treble.
Again, use Bluetooth and they become battery-dependant. They lose a convenient leash that keeps both earbuds paired with each other, and which makes the whole headset significantly larger and easier to find. I just know I’d be losing headsets, running into dead batteries, and ending up with singleton earbuds if I was stupid enough to buy into the Bluetooth hype.
Furthermore, a huge part of my reason for preferring to use a headset on the phone is to get the phone’s antenna away from my skull. No, there is no definite evidence that low-power microwaves are harmful to the brain, but given that it is so easy to drastically reduce my exposure (thank you, inverse square law), why shouldn’t I?
A long time ago, I worked in the nuclear industry, and they have a policy called ALARA which means as low as reasonably achievable. A canonical example, on posters throughout my workplace, showed a worker tasked with moving a low-level radioactive item from one place to another. A cart was available, and using it meant one could put the item on the far end of the cart and wheel it to its destination, instead of carrying it against one’s body. Moral of the story: use the cart. Always do everything you can to minimize your exposure.
Well, Bluetooth uses radio waves to do its thing, which makes Bluetooth headsets a whole lot less useful for reducing RF exposure, since each earbud has a tiny radio transmitter in it.
And then we have bluetooth pairing, needed to prevent unauthorized devices from connecting to one’s computer. Sometimes this ends up being a tremendous pain. For example, I have never had much luck pairing a smart phone with my desktop computer. I tried it, I thought it would be nifty to download images without using a USB cable. Spent most of an hour getting it to work, it worked for a while, then it stopped working. Blew another hour trying to get things working again, then gave up and used a USB cable (which, of course, worked perfectly). Ever since it’s been USB cable all the way.
Aside for some niche cases (such as keyboards for tablets, which have limited battery power and one or no USB ports), Bluetooth just doesn’t make sense, and comes across as the answer to the question: “How do we take perfectly fine wired connections and make them dramatically worse?”
Back in 2021, I evaluated different kinds of wire strippers and chose to upgrade my toolchest to contain some better ones. It was in retrospect a good decision that I do not regret.
But I had wondered about automatic strippers, and how well they work. Recently, I had a project that involved stripping a lot of wire, so I bought a set of Irwin No. 2078300 automatic self-adjusting wire strippers. I chose these because they were mid-range: I do not trust cheap Chinese knockoff tools and I do not strip enough wire to justify purchasing expensive German-made ones. Plus, I had heard that the design of the Irwins lent itself well to stripping the jacket off multi-conductor cables, and the latter is a fiddly task that would be nice to automate. (Klein makes a very similar set, but the Irwins were available locally and tend to have a slightly higher user rating.)
My verdict: I have tried them on a number of wires and cables, and their primary best use is to strip the outer jacket off multi-conductor cables.
For wires, it was a crapshoot how well they worked (or if they worked at all). In particularly, they do nothing but fail on Teflon or THHN insulation (but I knew that going in). On other wire types, sometimes they worked quite well, sometimes erratically. There is a tension adjustment one can fiddle with to tailor them for a particular wire type, but why bother? If I use my non-automatic Klein Kurve strippers, they always work precisely as intended, no fiddling with any adjustment necessary. Maybe if I needed to strip a lot of a given kind of wire at once it would be worth the time investment of getting the adjustment just right, but otherwise old-school strippers are a win.
Note: Most Romex these days tends to have THHN-insulated wire inside, so if residential wiring is your thing, these automatic strippers are likely to be a huge disappointment if you are expecting them to strip individual conductors.
For multi-conductor cables, it took the outer jacket off quite nicely, and it did so perfectly the first time, every time I tried it, on every type of cable I tried (Cat 5 cable, audio cable, low-voltage alarm and thermostat cable, round power cord cable, and Romex). No more fiddling with a knife and either not scoring the jacket deeply enough on the first try, scoring it too deeply and damaging the conductors inside, slipping up and cutting myself, etc. That justified their place in my toolbox, but if I had bought them expecting a general-purpose wire-stripping solution, I would have been disappointed.
So if you have wished for a tool to automatically de-jacket multi-conductor cable, buy these, but don’t expect them to be a general-purpose wire stripping solution.
This is but one example of why. And it is also a disaster for: accuracy (it can’t even admit when it doesn’t know an answer); intellectual property rights (it is based off unauthorized use of content created by others, which the AI engines then charge for access to; and even from a purely business standpoint (it is merely the latest tech bubble, as most AI ventures are running a loss and burning through VC funding).
The first time I took apart a thermostat, as a teen, I noticed this mysterious “anticipator” adjustment inside the thing. It was calibrated in these weird decimal fractions from roughly
0.15 to 1.2.
How could an inanimate object anticipate the future? It seemed like magic! Moreover, when I tinkered with the control, the heater’s cycles got longer and shorter. It was almost as if the thermostat did really know what was going to happen as it turned the heat on! And just what was the significance of those strange numbers, anyhow?
It took embarrassingly long (years!) for me to figure it out. See illustration below:
That’s right, the “anticipator” is nothing more than a tiny electric heater in series with the switch contacts on the thermostat.
How Does the Anticipator Work?
When the switch closes, the tiny heater is placed in series with the current flowing through the main heater’s relay coil. This causes current to flow through the tiny heater, and it heats up. This helps counter the thermal mass of the thermostat itself by heating it up, too, hopefully approximately in tandem with the air inside the building. The thermostat therefore reacts faster to what the heater is doing, as if it is anticipating future heating.
What Are the Strange Numbers on an Anticipator Scale?
They mark the recommended starting set point for a given current draw for a standard 24-volt system, as measured across the thermostat when it is open (i.e. not calling for heat).
Because anticipators must run on a traditional two-wire thermostat circuit, they must be placed in series with the thermostat switch point and the load the thermostat switches. Because this is a series circuit, more anticipator resistance means more total series resistance. This means that the overall circuit uses less power, and that the thermostat’s anticipator consumes a greater fraction of that power.
Somewhere between the minimum and maximum settings, anticipator heating is maximized, and somewhere between no anticipation and maximum anticipation is the proper value for a given situation. There are so many site-specific particulars that it is not possible with certainty to say in advance what the optimum setting is; all one can do is arrive at a good first guess. Sometimes that guess will be correct, sometimes it will take further refinements to arrive at the correct value.
For a high current system, only a small amount of resistance suffices. At 1.2 amps, even a small amount of resistance heating is excessive. In fact, there will probably be enough heating from the switch points’ resistance to act as a sufficient anticipator. So the 1.2 setting is for no (extra) anticipation, i.e. no extra series resistance. The anticipator is bypassed at this setting.
For a millivolt system, there is both limited power and limited voltage available. Voltage drop already can be a problem with millivolt systems, even without an anticipator. So dedicated millivolt thermostats do not have an anticipator, and millivolt-capable thermostats have instructions saying to use a setting of 1.2 on a millivolt system.
For a low current system, significant resistance is needed to extract enough power to get significant heating in the anticipator. So the lowest numbers select the maximum extra resistance.
What about the instructions that say to set the anticipator to 0.3 for electric, 0.4 for gas or oil heat, and so on?
Those are the recommended starting set points if you don’t have an ammeter reading or an existing thermostat setting to use.
What is the meaning of “longer?”
It denotes an arrow pointing to the direction to move the setting to make heating cycles longer. Note that the word “longer” is, perversely, often at the end of the scale that offers the shortest cycles (i.e. the most anticipation). It is the arrow pointing to the direction with which to move the setting to get longer cycles that counts.
Which setting is correct?
Whichever one works best! Start with one of the set points recommended by the thermostat manufacturer, but remember that they are only recommended ones. What is best depends on the particulars of your system (different ones draw different currents), your thermostat, your house, and where in your house the thermostat is mounted. There are so many particulars that it is impossible to say in general.
If you have an existing thermostat with an anticipator, copy its setting. If you have an ammeter, use that to determine a setting. If you have neither, use the instructions that came with your thermostat and set it according to your heat type. Failing all that, use whatever the thermostat happens to be set at as you got it.
What happens? Is temperature regulated properly? Congratulations, you’re at the correct setting! Don’t touch that anticipator adjustment! Does the heat run too long and cause temperature overshoot? Move it to a lower number. On a cold day or morning, does the heat tend to turn off too soon, forcing you to turn the thermostat above a set point in order to reach it? Move it to a higher number.
If you find it necessary to experiment with settings, take notes. It often takes several days of experimenting to arrive at the optimal setting.
After a recent update, my iPhone started letting me control my headphone volume from threshold of pain loud to insane instant deafness loud. I guess some aging hipster who ruined his hearing going to too many rock concerts without hearing protection got appointed to a QC position at Apple.
Based on what I had read about human sound perception, I guessed I needed about 6 dB of attenuation to tame the thing. A simple matter of adding four resistors to the picture (two for each channel, one in series to cut the voltage in half, and another in parallel to restore the impedance the audio amplifier sees to what used to be pre-attenuator).
The worst part about it was all the fiddly soldering (those connectors have some tiny terminals). But it works, and 6 dB was indeed the correct amount of attenuation needed to restore sanity to the device.
