what word could NEVER be used to describe you?

[jfz9580m]

97. That describes the old web

Before it became this adbot/social media and influencer (a truly bizarre profession) filled thingie.

I mostly used the web when I was slacking off at work circa 2001-2011 ;-/..my worst nightmare would have been one of my mentors seeing the amount of time I spent browsing DU or diet blogs along with regulation, dutiful forays into pubmed/hyperphysics/wikipedia etc.

The web is a bloody trap from the pov of the typical, yesteryear, white-collar lameo like moi.

For aesthetic reasons I have a strict policy separating my private life (politics, disease, personal stuff) from my work life, where I try to strictly stick to work, unless I am in the middle of a breakdown.

That was something I appreciated about that Rick RudeCalves guy who started that Vance couch joke. At a time when it feels as if every rando with an opinion is trying to go viral unless they work in classified work, it’s comforting that there are still people who like to stay anonymous for reasons other than terror over asshole employers or the police etc

I disapprove of this casual slide into a make-believe world where simply for basic typing skills you can now command attention.

A small, quiet community like DU is one thing, but most of the web is pretty ghastly.

I thought about this when I was comparing say Physics Stack Exchange with its polar opposites-Twitter, Facebook, Substack.

You work in cybersecurity right Skittles? I would guess Stack Overflow is the same.

You can’t just go on PSE and start gassing away. And DU or the old blogs were places where people who are not professional journalists/researchers/writers etc. discuss stuff with laxer rules.

I can’t help feeling that pitching this fugly mess of interconnected computers spewing drivel as democratization is not unconnected with the world we now live in..

I have been going through a slight existential crisis as a scientist - my dispassionate evaluation of myself as a scientist (if the grades were A,B,C,D) is low-C aspiring to be mid-B. I really hope it isn’t low-D aspiring to be low-C. At that point I should probably find another profession.

My innate instincts favor minimalism. The web/communication technologies broadly however, increasingly favor maximal Idiocracy on steroids. But it was always a dicey tech.

I generally like Nicholas Carr’s analyses and agree with his take that tech is making us stupider. That along with this piece I saw in Psychology Today on looped linear thinking (which sadly fits my unfortunate working style) is what I partially attribute my low-C grade to.

I have been pondering this as I restore some stuff that had gotten out of whack a bit. My brain’s “prediction system” or perhaps default mode had gotten a slight thwack over a decade ago and been knocked off its typical moorings. Nothing very serious, but it’s good to figure out how to re-orient. Direction finding in a metaphoric sense perhaps? For all that I generally do poorly on tests of spatial intelligence, this degree of confusion was unprecedented.

It’s why I often think of this AI scientist Yan LeCun when trying to make sense of the tech environment we navigate these days. His focus on common sense in machines really struck a chord with me.