Weeknotes for 7/15/2024

People really showed out for my birthday. I appreciate y'all a lot. I now have enough to get me going until the end of August. I'm feeling more confident that I'll find a role by then. If you know of any software engineering opportunities (full-time or contract), hit me up. I got two new comic volumes!

Reading

I got Bitter Root v3 and Black Science v5. I haven't started either yet as I was focused on my current reading stack. Ideally, I'll do that this week.

The Victorian Internet was continued last week. Last week, I mentioned the role that Asiatic resources played into the development of the underwater cable. By now, I've gotten to the point where it was successfully built. It came very expensively. A person who resembles a white South African man that managed to tank the value of a social network managed to do nearly the same to the early crafting of the first Trans-Atlantic cable. The initial release was so bad and so frayed that "the official opening of the cable to public traffic was delayed again and again, and commercial messages started to pile up at both ends, while the true state of affairs was kept under wraps. The reliability of the cable steadily deteriorated, and it eventually stopped working altogether on September 1, less than a month after its completion" in 1858. I wish I had the level of disregard for society that Edward Whitehouse had - dude went to court and "as he attempted to defend himself and his flawed theories, Whitehouse blamed everyone around him. Portraying himself as a man of science struggling against the forces of ignorance and incompetence, he blamed the manufacturers of the cable, the crew of the ship that laid it and most of all, Cyrus Field and the other officials of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, who he claimed had refused to let him carry out all the tests he recommended. Built different, I say 🤣!

I've mentioned this in passing but I'm reading Manufacturing Consent. It's been taking me some time to read this, I do find it harder to parse books like this - a semi-narrative retelling and journalistic expansion of events. While reading this, I definitely made the connection this author is also the same computer linguistics guy. Talk about using your time productively, I guess? I'm a bit over halfway through the digital copy I'm reading. To be honest, I'm glad I read this digitally because searching for the references mentioned has prevented me from getting too distracted. It's also no surprise to me that the Heritage Foundation, the same one behind the policy book, Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise are also the same ones who pushed for Congress to "buy the top academic reputations in the country to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on the campuses", quoted from the book. Chomsky notes this as formulaic of right-wing groups since the 1970s, potentially a response to the rise of revolutionary academics and rising student protests during the time. He writes, "the corporate funding and clear ideological purpose in the overall effort had no discernible effect on the credibility of the intellectuals so mobilized; on the contrary, the funding and pushing of their ideas catapulted them into the press". We see this with large media outlets like the New York Times^[1]. I'm eager to finish this book but I'm taking my time.

I don't think I'll ever stop talking about The Source of Self Regard. Morrison is a true American writer. That'll ruffle the imagination of those who fixate on Twain and the like but I make this point because she writes about America in a way that few can touch and still manages to be clear and direct. She writes, "there is a clear flight from Blackness in a great deal of Afro-American literature", which is clear from the many media portrayals of Black people and the narrative of representation in spaces where it devolves slowly into how much capital (social, fiscal or otherwise) one has managed to accrue. It's rarely been about uplifting tangible community and is conventionally about transforming people into subscribers or assets. Spill is a great example of this. They have the explicit goal of selling people's content to advertisers who can optimize on knowing it's a platform of Black folks. Companies can visit this platform, as demanded by venture capitalists, to optimize their traffic, at the behest of two Black folks running the helm. I don't fault anyone for making money in a capitalist society but we can't be doing it at the cost of the privacy of our own people. Let Zuckerberg do that. Morrison doesn't make any explicit demands - at least not to the reader. The book begins with essays she's given to many organizations and graduating classes. I can't recommend it enough and I'm only halfway through the book.

Addendum

I also managed to get my copies of Cultish returned to me. I'll be looking forward to extracting my notes from my machine to add to the book^[2]. There's books I'd like to start like The Utopia of Rules, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, Antiblackness and maybe The Rational Optimist. I have at least a dozen other books to start before I can actually open any of those but we don't follow rules here.

Coding

So I mentioned, after a few days of messing around, that I'm working on something a bit silly. I wrote about parts of it with a small intro but I'd like to expand a bit here. The goal of livtet^[3] is to make something I can use to actually host next to this website, link things I've read and serve as a personal archive for my notes. Chris Ferdinandi's newsletter about ADHD is something that makes me think about needing this a lot, namely the need to dump everything^[4]. This is one way for me to do that. It's going to be written in Rust using Tauri as I've been using that for a lot for things like Shock and other toy applications^[5]. Feel free to drop any issues at https://todo.sr.ht/~jacky/livtet or send an e-mail to ~jacky/livtet@todo.sr.ht, no account required.

I've slowed down a bit on my work with Shock. The guts of it is feature-complete for me. I need to figure out how to handle sharing data between two clients. I've been wrestling with Veilid with no progress and I decided to examine using librecast with a custom RPC layer to handle sync. We'll see how far I get with that.

Seeing

Although I was outside quite a bit, I didn't bring my camera with me (and I've stopped taking photos of my personal phone; going as far as to disable the camera app itself). I'll try to do so this week! Instead, here's a photo of a book I pre-ordered some time ago for my birthday.