It’s the end of this feed after a decade.
I started Scratchpad as a blog for my lesser writings. I wanted to publish rough essays on it, and later turn the best of them into polished articles for my main blog.
I had a decent rate of publishing over the past decade: 221 posts; 40,888 words; and 282,533 characters. Unfortunately I have not turned a single post into a quality long form article. I am happy with how the experiment turned out, and I am glad that I sustained a semi-regular pace of production over a decade.
When I write something, even if it’s a rough draft with half-baked ideas, I try to publish it. It makes sense to put most of your work out there for the world to see, even mediocre and flawed artifacts. We are bad at judging and assesing our own creations, we have blind spots, we need others to help us, guide us, and steer us towards our most promising musings. Exposing the fruit of the creator’s labor to the audience is the only way to evaluate it.
Write, get your thoughts checked by the world, and see if somebody cares. Maybe some of your readers will post feedback, critic or compliment to your inbox.
It doesn’t matter who you are and where you live: publishing with your personal identity publicly is always risky. When I publish here with my real name, I expose myself to small perils: my writing may be subpar, my thinking may be faulty; this may reflect poorly on me in the future. My opinions may go against the grain of public opinion or the authorities’ interests. Now, or in 10, 20, 40 years…
Nobody knows if the author has sinned until the work has been published for long enough for the public mood to become hostile.
If they can’t find you, they can’t get you. Anonymity can be liberating if you live in an environment hostile to deviant work and ideas.
The major downside of anonymity is: total obscurity at the beginning.
Starting an anonymous blog means I have to start from absolute zero. I have to build my audience from scratch. I can’t rely on any of my existing connections and assets.
I still think it’s worth it. My hypothesis is that publishing with a pseudonym can set my creativity free. It would give me the freedom to step into topics I would normally avoid, the freedom to explore areas considered off limit.
I want to see what happens.
I will split my presence on the web in two:
Anonymity is the Internet’s best feature. Anonymous Internet is a parallel universe with less friction than real life, we can play in this space. The anonymous netizen can explore and experiment further.
I am going back to the old Internet: On Internet nobody knows you are a dog. That’s the way I like it. Meanwhile the real me will still publish at henry.precheur.org, subscribe to the Feed to keep yourself updated.
]]>I fell in love with Thinkpads since I got my first one in 2005: it was the T42 model. It worked well under Linux, a rare feat for a laptop at the time. Its keyboard was superb, with a satisfying tactile feedback, and a crisp quiet click. It was the best keyboard I ever used back then. I unfortunately had to give this Thinkpad back when I quit my job to move to Canada in 2007.
A few years later I got a used X61, I replaced its internal HDD with a must faster SSD drive, this gave the laptop a new lease of life. I used it for a few years before giving to one of my brother attending university.
In 2013 I bought the then brand new Thinkpad X1 Carbon 1st generation. I loved it when I first saw it, it was like a MacBook Air, but in black with a somewhat open hardware, and a decent keyboard. Initially a full battery lasted 6 hours.
Nine years later, the battery has aged. It held about 60% of its original capacity, but I would get at most a couple of hours out of a single charge. The laptop felt sluggish and ran hot under load. I assumed this was because the software running on it was more expensive to execute than what it ran back when it was new. My X1 Carbon was sparsely used in the past few years, because it was unpleasant to use: slow, toasty, and dead in two hours.
A few weeks ago I decided to get a new Thinkpad as my work laptop. I settled on a used X270, that I’ll talk about in a later post. I got a new battery for the X270, and I saw that the store also sold batteries for my X1 carbon, so I ordered one for 55 CAD plus shipping to try to revive my aging device.
Before I got the battery in the mail I cleaned the outside of the Thinkpad and vacuum-cleaned it to suck much dust out before opening it. To my surprise the laptop performed better after this quick clean: the machine felt snappier, cooler, and the battery lasted a bit longer. I believe the accumulated dust impeded the cooling system, and cleaning it made the laptop work better overall. The cooling was more efficient, saving some energy, and the processor had more headroom to clock up when needed. Less fans spinning, less laps roasted, and less energy wasted. \o/
Once I got the package with the batteries in the mail, switching the old battery with the new one was relatively easy. I followed the instructions from Ifixit, and 15 minutes later the new battery was installed.
After a couple of days of use to let the battery calibrate, the laptop is back to full health. I get between 4 and 6 hours of battery time, and the computer feels responsive and cool. I did the upgrade a week ago and I’m still delighted to use this old friend of mine again.
Replacing the battery on your devices is one of the best ways to preserve the environment, and get more utility out of your electronics.
]]>On the public’s concern about online privacy:
And, as you hinted before, there’s the so-called Privacy Paradox, which is that, in many countries, people say that their greatest concern about their digital life is that they don’t know where the data is going and what’s done with that.
If that’s the greatest concern, then you would expect that they would be willing to pay something. That’s the economic view. […]
[…] Germany is a good case. Because in Germany, we had the East German Stasi. We had another history before that—the Nazis, who would have enjoyed such a surveillance system.
And, so Germans would be a good candidate for a people who are worried about their privacy and would be willing to pay. […]
I have done three surveys since 2018, the last one this year. With representative sample of all Germans over 18. And asked them the question: ‘How much would you be willing to pay for all social media if you could keep your data?’
We are talking about the data about whether you are depressed, whether you’re pregnant, and all those things that they really don’t need.
So: ‘How much are you willing to pay to get your privacy back?’
75% of Germans said nothing. Not a single Euro. […]
So, if you have that situation where people say, ‘My greatest worry is about my data’; at the same time, ‘No, I’m not paying anything for that,’ then that’s called the Privacy Paradox.
The public’s concern about surveillance is similar to the concern about the environment: the public understands the problem, but doesn’t really care.
I believe most people fake their concerns about surveillance and environmental decay because that’s what they are expected to do in polite company. The public shows its true color once it has to expend resources on solving the problem instead of merely virtue signaling.
Gerd Gigerenzer made another great point about surveillance; we get our citizens started early these days:
I think there’s already surveillance in a child’s life. Remember Mattel’s Barbie? The first Barbie was modeled after a German tabloid cartoon, the Bild-Zeitung, and it just gave totally unrealistic long legs and tailored figures. The result was that quite a few little girls found their body not right. In 1998, the second version of Ken could talk briefly—utter sentences like, ‘Math is hard. Let’s go shopping.’
The little girls got a second message: They’re not up to math. They are consumers. And the 2015 generation, called Hello Barbie, which got the Big Brother Award, can actually do a conversation with the little girl. But, the little girl doesn’t know that all the hopes and fears and anxieties it trusts to the Barbie doll are all recorded and sent off to third parties, analyzed by algorithms for advertisement purposes.
And also, the parents can buy the record on a daily or weekly basis to spy on their child.
Now, two things may happen, Russ. One is the obvious, that maybe when the little girl is a little bit older, then she will find out, and trust is gone in her beloved Barbie doll and also maybe in her parents.
But, what I think is the even deeper consequence is: the little girl may not lose trust. The little girl may think that being surveilled, even secretly, that’s how life is.
And so, here is another dimension that the potential of algorithms for surveillance changes our own values. We are no longer concerned so much about privacy. We still say we are concerned, but not really. And then, we’ll get a new generation of people.
There are already plenty of scary stories, like this one: Google falsely told the police that a father was a molesting his son.
Despite all this I’m still running most of my digital life on Google’s infrastructure. I must make a move.
]]>When two bullshitters meet, they usually start competing within minutes. Bullshit works best when one has a monopoly on it. As soon as there’s competition, nonsense loses some of its power. If two narcissists take part in a group conversation, they have to exaggerate more and more to grab attention. This leads to an arm’s race that quickly undermines the whole lying to get status shtick.
We can see how attention seekers ruin polite conversations on social media. Being the bullshitter-in-chief is hard work: politicians and media personalities must constantly raise their game, it is exhausting. Most bullshitters dabble in politics but aren’t really in the political arena: it’s the big league, it’s too competitive.
Bullshitters are in the game for the easy status. They usually avoid each other and hang out in small circles of normies that will just go alone with them.
]]>A few weeks ago on Hacker News, someone asked a question about a job offer they got from Amazon. An Amazon employee replied:
For me Amazon took an unprecedented toll on my mental and physical health. I did earn enough money, but I immensely regret all the time I didn’t spend with my family over the years, all the friendships that faded, and the constant reminder from leaders how I could always do better - nothing was ever good enough.
Amazons leadership fundamentally does not see their employees as human beings. As I grew the ranks over the years, I was directly coached on removing myself from certain day to day interactions, because it would simplify decision making if I didn’t have an interest in my own people, that simply forming just work bonds was a conflict of interest in terms of doing what’s “right” for the company.
Being anti-social with colleagues can be a competitive advantage in vast bureaucracies like Amazon. Giant corporations want easily replaceable employees. When you don’t have emotional attachment to your co-workers, you are a better pawn to play with. You’ll get an excellent paycheck at Amazon, but the price is more than the time spent working. The price is a bit of your soul.
I got my first job in 2004, 18 years ago. Of these 18 years there are 4 that I regret: I worried too much, worked too hard, or felt entitled to something I didn’t earn. I stayed because of the money. It was never worth trading my peace of mind for that extra cash.
Work isn’t only about trading one’s time for money. It’s also about the sense of meaning it gives to life. Toil is meaningful because it connects us to the rest of humanity. We work to be with folks that make meaningful economic contribution to our community. When we retire, these connections are all we got left: the memories and the friendships that grew over the years are precious.
When my dad retired from the place he worked at for almost 40 years, it was hard on him: his old company wasn’t doing well and was being dismantled by unscrupulous executives. He found solace with his old co-workers, they meet from time to time to talk and reminisce about the good old days.
What’s the point of material comfort when one’s mind is starved of meaning?
Make friends at work, and stay in touch with them.
]]>The English title of this 200 pages book is The Need for Roots. I read it in French.
Simone Weil is acute, delightful, bold, insightful, and scandalous. Her vision is bucolic, and human.
Here are some salient ideas I got from her work.
Rome corrupted Catholicism by tying itself to the religion. God was made more like a king ruling over the world rather than the world itself.
France has a long history as a dictatorial police state ruled by a single person. Democracy hasn’t changed this.
Science replaced religion and tradition as the source of truth. While science allows us to know the world better than these old principles, it can’t tell us what is good or bad.
Christianity has become a matter of convenience.
The priesthood of science is just as corrupt and the religious priesthoods. The noble scientist is an illusion.
France has 3 classes: bourgeois, workers, and peasants. The morale flows from the bourgeoisie to the workers, and then to the peasants. Money is what matters most, because that’s what matters to the bourgeois class.
]]>Before I moved to Gmail I used mutt, a command line mail client. I downloaded and uploaded emails with offlineimap, and used mutt to view, move, and delete the downloaded emails. Offlineimap was fine, but I had a few issues with it. Most of the time it was the local state getting out of sync with the remote side. I’d hit Ctrl+C or close the terminal at the wrong moment and some local state files would get corrupted. It was usually easy to fix, occasionally I had to remove all my local emails and re-download everything.
I set-up isync to see how it does, and thus far I like it. It seems a bit more lightweight than offlineimap. I haven’t had any problem with it yet.
Back when I used mutt, it was a pain to configure the way I wanted and I never really got comfortable with it even with my custom configuration. I disliked that I had to write a lot of configuration to get it to work how I wanted. Switching to Gmail was a breath of fresh air: because shortcuts weren’t configurable I just had to learn Gmail’s defaults. Today mutt is in a better shape than it was 10 years ago. I could give it another try, but I decided to go with aerc a relatively recent Email reader. aerc is opinionated about how its workflow, it’s configurable, but not to the same extend mutt is. I am still learning how to use aerc, things are a bit difficult to figure out at time: the current documentation isn’t that great. Otherwise I like its philosophy.
]]>In July 2008 I moved my email with a custom domain to Gmail. Previously I was self-hosting it on a Linode virtual private server.
The move was seamless. I was happy to avoid maintaining my own Email infrastructure; Gmail was fast, reliable, and its user interface was nicer than the other webmails I tried. I have been a happy customer for a long time, and best of all it didn’t cost me anything. Back in 2008 this system was called Google Apps, and it was free for personal use. It was renamed to G suite, and is now called Google Workspace.
Today I received an email saying that this gravy train was about to stop, unless I switched to a paid plan. I don’t mind paying for this, Google provided an excellent service for almost 14 years.
Unfortunately, since I moved my email to Gmail, I lost faith in the company’s ethics. The days when the corporation’s motto was “don’t be evil” are gone. Since the firm’s main source of revenue is advertising I believe its values are fundamentally at odds with mine. The big G has grown enormously and expanded in various areas over the past decade. I don’t feel comfortable having my personal information stirred into its gargantuan data cauldron. Anybody paying money can get a ladle of data laced with some of my dark secrets.
So it looks like 2022 will be the year I move away from Gmail. I plan to document the journey here.
]]>Luckily the app’s updated APK are still available via Github. I was able to download it and get rid of the ads.
That is all.
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