frandroid

READER. I thought I had lost all of my Firefox tabs. All 918 of them. While trying to recover them, I mistakenly shut down my browser again, preventing the "restore last session" type of dialogue from happening easily. And my Time Machine backup is not running on my work computer, which has remained my main web browsing machine. I had LOOOTS of podcast episodes banked on there. Plus different windows with extensive bibliographies for special research topics. ("frandroid, why don't you just bookmark the pages?" "Shut up Pinky!"). I was fairly despondent. I have a back up going to last September which has the bulk of my special topics, but the podcasts seemed to be lost. Finally today while I was looking at something different, I realized that there was a different "restore session" button than the about:sessionstorage dialogue in the 'fox. I clicked on that and it restored a month-old session I had tested with, so I was overjoyed. Finally I searched the trash bin, found a session backup dating to just before I lost my tabs, and restored that. Magic!! I am so relieved.

Alright, on with our regularly scheduled program. The first item is pretty nice "me" stuff but the second one was fun.

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Chasing Leviathan - Understanding Modern Kurdish History with Dr. Djene Bajalan

In this episode, Dr. Bajalan describes how Ottoman, Turkish and Kurdish modernity were intertwined and how the idea of their respective nation-states developed in relation to each other, esp. In the crucial decades of 1910-1930.

(The PKK held a symbolic "weapons surrender" ceremony today, where they put 50 automatic rifles in a big container and set the whole thing on fire. Empty symbolism, clearly, which matches the Turkish' state own emptiness in this "diplomatic process". To demonstrate the point, an hour after this symbolic demonstrating of good will by the PKK, the Turkish air force bombarded a PKK position in Northern Iraq. What a clusterfuck. I've promised a follow-up post about this... It should come up soon.)


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Better Offline - Silicon Valley Fashion With The Menswear Guy

So it’s been a bit of a trend this year, if you have a successful podcast (probably one which pays appearance fees), to have dieworkwear come on to talk about whatever? So Ed Zitron didn’t miss his chance and had him on to talk about the style a variety of tech executives, from Zuck to Jensen Huang (nVidia). At the end of the episode he discusses buying the best leather jacket for your taste. The thing that I love about him is that he’s all about “figure out your style, then rock it” kind of fashion guy, rather than the old school “this is the style now, forget everything you knew yesterday” thing.

...

I love Ed Zitron to bits, but other than in this episode and a few other interviews, his ranting about AI is getting pretty repetitive. I think I'll focus on listening to Tech Won't Save Us more than him.

If you have been living under a rock, let me tell you: Tech Won't Save Us is one of the better podcasts out there. Now we're kind of living in the golden age of tech-critical podcasts (Better Offline, This Machine Kills, etc) but hey, the more the better. But this makes Podcast Friday even more important to really surface the best episodes to the surface, since we can't listen to them all. ;)

So I was browsing TWSU' archive and the golden words hit me in the face: Time for a Butlerian Jihad?: A ‘Dune’ Chat w/ Ed Ongweso Jr & Brian Merchant. As a committed Dune fan, I could not skip this episode. Basically discussing the necessity of a Butlerian Jihad in the age of AI, while geeking out on the release of Dune part deux. No great insights but a lot of fun all around. Apparently there's even a hammer ready for the jihad:

The hammer is ready and waiting to smash. pic.twitter.com/6xrF4VjkMi

— Paris Marx (@parismarx) October 12, 2023

So, I have about 3000 emails in my inbox. I do a clean-up every few days but there's tons of just I keep because "I'll get to it later". So after doing my regular partial clean-up, I just turned the tables on my inbox: I've started from the end.

I had some 2009 and 2010 emails, but I went through those quickly. (I'm still keeping a few, but now they're not buried in as much crap. I still want to read the Monthly Review article on the implosion of ex-yugoslavia, for example.) Now I'm in late 2011. I load an index page with 100 emails, select obvious mailing list crap, delete. Then I do a second pass on the personal emails I kept. It's pretty fast. 200 emails gone already. I now get less than 20 emails a day so I should be able to catch up fast by cleaning from both ends. I am pleased.

Le Directeur Général des Élections dépose un rapport accablant sur le vote électronique.

Hopefully, the current moratorium on electronic voting in Québec will be maintained for perpetuity. Sadly, I think people's obsession with the idea that technology is always better will ensure that we will eventually have full electronic voting, everywhere. But what's wrong with people counting paper ballots?