∨∃, Laocoön of the Info Realm @vortex_egg@hackers.town

Brooke Binkowski of fact checking site truthorfiction.com has a great thread on birdsite about how big tech platforms are never going to deal with the festering nazi and fascist communication on their sites, and that we have to deal with it ourselves through direct action.

She provides links to several write-ups about how to do just that.

Thread: https://twitter.com/brooklynmarie/status/1385257979188895745

Links:
- https://www.truthorfiction.com/how-to-fight-disinformation-introduction-and-overview/
- https://www.truthorfiction.com/how-to-fight-disinformation-part-i-firehosing/
- https://www.truthorfiction.com/how-to-fight-disinformation-part-ii-gaslighting/
- https://www.engadget.com/anti-vaccine-misinformation-report-12-accounts-212245856.html
- https://www.stratcomcoe.org/decoding-crimea-pinpointing-influence-strategies-modern-information-warfare
- https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/antifa-proud-boys-militia-trump-insurrection-1121933/

Looks like Moxie has converted to being a full time NFT platform creator. Seems to be the direction that many of the tech builders are going.

I think I finally figured how to keep my log notes in Obsidian for all my different life areas in a way that actually sticks as a practice.

Each area gets its own "homepage". Every day I start a daily note and add all the tasks, tasks, log notes, thoughts, etc for every thing I do that day, grouped by area.

Then sometime later I will go back through the last N days worth of daily notes and use the Note Refactor plugin to extract each section of notes into a separate note with the days date, and then cross-link that to a running log of notes on the homepage for that area.

The end result is that each hub area of my life has an ongoing log of what I worked on, what I need to do, and any writings I produced, that I can go back through as a history. At the same time, my sequence of daily notes also has a similar cross-domain view of what I worked on each day.

I got a monitor arm for my standing desk and now I feel compelled to actually use it as a standing desk because I'm not hunching down to look down at my monitor. ​

But seriously, I’m reading a paper right now called “Data organization in spreadsheets” ​

They should have brined it first.

This data curation class is way more dry than I expected.

I went for a long walk in the snow to do an errand and I think my eyebrows are still frozen.

The author's further comments say:

"Every node/entity is one markdown file. The top of the file has something like:

Tags: #person

You can fill the file with info on that particular subject, including a photo or anything. Internal links are made with [[Watson]] where 'http://watson.md' is a file Slightly smiling face"

"Graphs are created fully automatically. And when I was editing a markdown file in VSCodium, I saw that the graph was updated in real time. I also installed the 'dataview' plugin, sonI could create lists where a person/location etc was mentioned in stories"

"For the tagging: I used RegEx to go over pieces of text with Mr/Mrs, one capital and a second word with a capital, block of strings with street/road/lane etc, and so forth. I did it the hard and geeky way"

cc: @pixouls @feonixrift

(Apologies for the twitter screen shot but...)

This would be an amazing research data collection methodology using Obsidian.md. I have to figure out how they did this.

@pixouls check this out!

I think one of the reasons why many people in the United States context don't take cryptocurrencies seriously as having any potential to be a liberatory technology (as they are sometimes seen in other countries) is because this is typical of who is driving cryptocurrency adoption in the US: mega corporations like Walmart (or celebrities and billionaires like Kim Kardashian and Elon Musk).

"Walmart is preparing to create its own crypto and collection of NFTs, filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-16/walmart-plans-to-create-cryptocurrency-and-nfts-cnbc-reports

(non pay-wall link: https://archive.md/oDzoO)

You know the XKCD joke about needing a new standard to unify the 12 existing standards and now you have 13 standards? We have read about So. Many. Standards of metadata invented by the Library of Congress for sharing bibliographic data, each one in turn meant to be the one that fixes the previous standard while all maintaining backward compatibility to their standard that was originally used for transporting card catalog cards between libraries. And which are all now currently in use, including the original one.

This is informational violence.

Jokerfied by metadata documentation.

I could probably write an essay critically eviscerating all of the techno-utopian things these metadata textbooks have to say about metadata and the particular popular metadata schemas just by looking at what those schemas are used for in practice.

I think this is the first time I’ve really struggled with my grad school work. It’s not hard — I just know how this reading is both factually and normatively incorrect, and to make matters worse it’s not even exciting about it. A real slog to get through.

I hate this class reading on metadata so much. It’s incredibly ahistorical about the tech industry and its past (and present).

This textbook is really underselling things.