- I finished the Navigating Digital Information crash course a while ago. Due to the early education I received, this small course surprisingly helped a lot. The simple act to check where a piece of information came from can go a long way.
- When I first started grad school, it was very painful, as when I read papers, I believed all of them were “correct”, yet they said things differently. There were different schools, and each of them had their own strengths and inevitably their own biases.
- When I read the book AI Superpower, I was also struggling. Why everything is so promising in the book and all the issues (demographics, inequality, upcoming regulation, etc. etc.) simply don’t exist? Well, as reputable as the author is, he IS a capital investor in that market.
- I bought Best Buy Total Tech Support about 2 years ago. Sure they do seem to cover every “tech” issue. But after you find out they won’t cover some repair and then look closely enough, it doesn’t give much: you still need to pay for the addition protection (and you have the manufacture warranty anyway), I don’t really need computer/car services, and I can just buy a security software myself. The lesson? Don’t get marketed.
- Richard Stallman often still seems “radical”, even if I believe most of his free software perspectives. There’s one particular critic, about Netflix, that I feel related, but never to his extent (“A friend once asked me to watch a video with her that she was going to display on her computer using Netflix. I declined, saying that Netflix was such a threat to freedom that I felt uncomfortable with legitimizing it in this way.”).
- But for a while, I get similar feeling toward Medium. Personal blogs are supposed to be free (both as in “free beer” and as in “free speech”) express of information, I will never become a “member” to read a “blog”, they are fundamentally incompatible with each other. If someone really has something so eagerly to share with the world, they could well have set up their own blog.
- Another “disservice”: to prevent you from just clearing cookies, some sort of fingerprinting must have been used to keep track of the “used” (not the “user”).
- Another “disservice”: I don’t need another algorithm curated feed.
- Yet another “disservice”: I found articles on Medium typically lower quality.
- (Rant) Things on the Internet can be of staggeringly low quality, yet still appear on top of search results because of SEO.
- This “tutorial” for async Python, contains code that doesn’t convey anything, and doesn’t offer any conceptual explanation at all. But it still manages to be the second result on Google.
- And what’s worse, full of inaccuracies like “Coroutines are functions that schedule the execution of the events” or non-explanations like “
await to awaitthe result of the coroutine and passes the control to the event loop” (seriously?). - I’ve written a script to just hide all results from certain domains. The list can keep growing, and maybe it’s something that can become a open source project like ublock origin lists.