Tag: reality

Categories
The Internet

The eerie coincidences of the Internet

Liked The Internet Thinks We Don’t Know Its Secret. But I Do. by Merritt Tierce (Slate)

What do I mean when I say the internet is reading my mind? I don’t mean simply that it collects my data and observes patterns and interacts with me by reconfiguring that data in ways designed to engage me… I’m also not talking about my awareness that Instagram is listening, that even when my microphone is “off” or my Instagram account disabled, I know other apps are listening, or my phone itself is listening, or such now-standard input-output cross-platform fence-jumping. I’m not even talking about how my phone is “looking” at things I see in the world… At all times, I understand that the internet is using data I somehow gave it, and that those processes and technologies are now too complex for me to track. But it feels aggressive to me, in the way it would feel aggressive if suddenly every kind of advertisement everywhere you went in the world was designed only for you.

On Friday, after my husband got assaulted, we spent hours searching how to wash off pepper spray (and then cleaning up). Finally after he’d taken like five showers we lay down to decompress and watch some TV. I’m bad at working the smart TV so it just randomly turns on on some Samsung channel despite my attempts to leave it on something inoffensive; a billiards tournament came on (something we’ve never watched). He left it going while I got ready, and two ads repeated: for laundry detergent and personal injury lawyers. Logically, we know it was a coincidence, but humans are so good at seeing patterns and causality — and that instinct is reinforced when sometimes it *is* true that the Internet is spying on you.

Continue reading “The eerie coincidences of the Internet”
Categories
Getting Shit Done Lifestyle

Who do you give power over your time?

Bookmarked The Imperfectionist: Because the bell rings by Oliver Burkeman (ckarchive.com)

And so the risk is that a period with the potential to be absorbingly delightful…becomes something to “get through” instead – an obstacle one must get past before “real life” can resume, simply because it can’t be made to conform to how you think your days ought to go.

The more general… point here is that there’s often a deep tension between the desire many of us feel to exert control over our time – because we believe, if perhaps only subconsciously, that something will go very wrong if we don’t do so – and the possibility of actually being fully absorbed in that time. So it’s not really that the Christmas holiday gets in the way of real life. That would be absurd: Christmas is part of my real life, and a part I cherish. It’s my desire to control things that causes the real trouble.

Your family?

Your boss?

Your friends?

Your community?

Wanting to absolutely control our time conflicts with wanting to be part of community, and sharing experiences with others.

Burkeman discusses the conflict between community, efficiency and convenience in Four Thousand Weeks as well. Individualism puts our focus on ourselves and our personal productivity, but can lose us the experience of being part of a whole. When our own goals take precedence, it’s easy to distance ourselves through resentment of loss of control or treat activities as items on a checklist that must be done before we can get back to the real stuff.

(I say this also as someone who believes in setting boundaries with family and not doing things merely to placate others’ demands. So when you do agree to do something, it’s important to commit to the experience with intentionality.)

Categories
Art and Design House Technology

Neutralizing reality to sell

Liked this house may or may not be real (Tumblr)

In my travels as McMansion Hell, I’ve increasingly been confronted with houses full of furniture that isn’t real. This is known as virtual staging and it is to house staging as ChatGPT is to press release writing or DALL-E is to illustration.

The better this rendering technology gets, the more it will rely on these totally neutral spaces because everything matches and nothing is difficult. You are picking from a catalog of greige furniture to decorate greige rooms.

This is where things are heading: artifice on top of artifice on top of artifice. It’s cheap, it’s easy. But something about it feels like a violation.

If neutrality makes a house sell, then personality – at all – can only be seen as a detriment.

So who’s doing this? The answer is real estate itself aided by their allies in mass media who in turn are aided by the home renovation industry. In other words, it’s the people who sell home as a commodity. That desire to sell has for some time overpowered all other elements that make up a home or an apartment’s interiority to the point where we’ve ended up in a colorless slurry of real and unreal.

Emphasis mine.

Categories
Culture The Internet

Complementary: what is real?

TikTok by Seema R (@artlust)

–> critique and “critical thought” being viewed as negative is anti-intellectual

–> enjoyment and critique are not mutually exclusive

–> important to consider why something was shared online

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Choose reality while you still can by David Cain

–> some people can’t seem to tell which online videos are staged

The Media Insider did a pretty good video illustrating a phenomenon Jean Baudrillard pointed out in the late 20th century: art and culture starts out focused on depicting the real world around us — nature, people, and the cosmos — but ends up focused on depicting art and culture itself.

Not only are people losing the ability to discern between reality and fabrication, but they’re losing the sense that there is anything better, or more important, about reality.

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Comment by Amy Letter on the article Did the internet ruin culture? by Max Read

The “culture” this creates is one in which everyone is raised to believe they want to be famous. The desire for attention comes first, the “how can I GET that attention?” question comes after.

This is the flattening. Earlier un-flattened nodes (people!) had an idea of who they were and what they believed and what they wanted to create and if they created it they might step back and say, Yes, I want to Share This. But the new rules reversed that. Now it’s “I share therefore I am; holy crap I haven’t shared anything, I feel myself disappearing…

See also: On Tyranny — truth is important

A connection between rejecting criticism with complaining about cancel culture, and the recent moves to block moderation, which will destroy social media platforms as a means of communication and information sharing if implemented.

Categories
Mental Health Personal Growth

Too many pets

Liked How many pets do you have? by Derek Sivers (sive.rs)

I used to have too many pets.

Each time I adopted one, I was fully in love. I was enamored with the potential. Each new pet was meant to be my constant companion. So I would take it home, and love it. But eventually I would discover a new pet, and the process would repeat.

One at a time, reluctantly, I’d set one free, or find it a new home with someone who was really going to give this pet 100% of their love. I mourned the loss of possibility with each one as I said goodbye…

Before, I’d glance at each pet and feel love but guilt for not giving it more time. Now, I picture what could have been, and just enjoy the daydream.

In keeping with the crux of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: getting more productive won’t let us do everything we want. We have to choose – and the missing out is what gives the things we do do more meaning for being chosen (hopefully).

Categories
Cool Science

Watched the Science of the Butterfly Effect

Watched The Science Behind the Butterfly Effect by Veritasium from youtu.be

Chaos theory means deterministic systems can be unpredictable. Thanks to LastPass for sponsoring this video. Click here to start using LastPass: https://lastpass.onelink.me/HzaM/2019Q4DecemberVeritasiumIncremental
Animations by Prof. Robert Ghrist: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5N5pRddyicAX1QJyJjIIdg

Want to know more about chaos theory and non-linear dynamical systems? Check out: https://www.chaos-math.org/en.html

Butterfly footage courtesy of Phil Torres and The Jungle Diaries: https://youtu.be/u7SSt0hqu6Y
Solar system, 3-body and printout animations by Jonny Hyman
Some animations made with Universe Sandbox: https://universesandbox.com/
Special thanks to Prof. Mason Porter at UCLA who I interviewed for this video.

I have long wanted to make a video about chaos, ever since reading James Gleick’s fantastic book, Chaos. I hope this video gives an idea of phase space – a picture of dynamical systems in which each point completely represents the state of the system. For a pendulum, phase space is only 2-dimensional and you can get orbits (in the case of an undamped pendulum) or an inward spiral (in the case of a pendulum with friction). For the Lorenz equations we need three dimensions to show the phase space. The attractor you find for these equations is said to be strange and chaotic because there is no loop, only infinite curves that never intersect. This explains why the motion is so unpredictable – two different initial conditions that are very close together can end up arbitrarily far apart.

Music from https://www.epidemicsound.com/ “The Longest Rest” “A Sound Foundation” “Seaweed”

Cool visualizations.