blulaktuko.net

Hostile Anti-User Practice: Reddit's image "viewer"

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 20:22:00 +0200

Since a few months ago Reddit has decided that they want to control your actions/annoy/control your attention¹ even more. If you try to open an image hosted with them, the image itself won’t just open, but a full web page will open with styled header and footer.

That is, if you go to a Reddit photo link like https://i.redd.it/vchz7tqd61ib1.png (this is a real link, if you click it you can experience what I explain in the post, but also will be registered by Reddit²), instead of loading the photo itself, which is how browsers/internet would normally work, it redirects to another page that has the photo in the middle.

Apart from that itself is quite hostile and a bad practice, as it usually happens, this also has consequences. If you want to open the image to check on it, zoom on it to a specific level (but not full zoom) or other things, you may be hindered or it may be impossible.

If you use Firefox there’s an extension that may help. For Chrome, there’s apparently another one, although I don’t know if that works with other Chromium-based browsers.

Choose 3 of the options. ↩︎
To add to the complains in this article, in some situations the page that opens will say that the image is deleted, even if it’s not. ↩︎

1491

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 09:19:00 +0200

Book details

name:	1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
author:	Charles C. Mann
rating:	5/5
pages:	563
publisher:	Vintage (Random House)
publication date:	Originally 2006, reviewed in 2011
edition:	Paperback, second edition
links:	goodreads

I bought 1491 a few years ago and started reading it then. I stopped, for reasons unrelated to the book, but got back to it again. Then and now, the reading was a pleasure, and Charles C. Mann shows how good he is at explaining a complex topic.

The book basically is what it promises on the cover (see a photo below): it goes over what was “known” of the Americas before 1492 (the year of the “discovery” by the Europeans), and then sees how these views have changed over time, and more especially, recently. The book was originally published in 2006, and later reviewed in 2011. Now (2023 as of writing this) some views of the experts may have shifted somehow but the views of the book probably will remain valid for quite a while.

The main thesis of the book is that while there was this idea that the Americas where, plainly said, backwards (as in technologically and maybe socially less developed than Europe at the time) and mostly unpopulated, recent studies show that this need not be so and that very probably similar views are wrong. Mann not only explains how the perception has changed, in a big part he explains what has led to these changes.

The only problem with the book is one that is inevitable: it’s a lot of information. The period reviewed (human habitation before 1491) and the area (North, Central and South America) are both huge, and thus there are lots of different areas, peoples and environments to consider. Mann does manage to keep it under control and it’s not a super dense read, although sometimes I had to go back in the book to remember something he mentioned about a different group of people before. Still, the important thing in the book is not the details, and the generalities do come along quite well.

What I personally got from the book — apart from a good time and a much better idea of the (pre)history of the American continents — where developments of three different ideas.

First, that it’s easy to forget that people in the past were… well, people. They were smart and lived in complex societies, even if these societies where, or seem to us, much simpler than ours. I think it’s easy to believe that the past is just a background and that history has really started existing recently, and this is a view that indirectly permeates a lot of people’s ideas and also lots of media¹

Second, that, despite the previous paragraph, people in the past were in fact quite different. It’s not easy for us to put ourselves in their shoes and sometimes doing so leads to incorrect inferences.

More interesting to me, though, a thread that has been in my mind since reading The Mismeasure of Man [goodreads], is the close relationship between (scientific) interpretations and the context in which they are made. In the book we see examples of ideas changing due to new data being collected, but also due to looking at previous data with new eyes, and maybe less prejudices.

For anyone remotely interested in any of these topics, I can’t recommend this book enough.

Hopefully at some point I’ll develop this into a post or podcast. ↩︎

Red Rising

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 17:25:00 +0200

Book details

name:	Red Rising
author:	Pierce Brown
rating:	3½/5
pages:	382
series:	Red Rising Saga
links:	goodreads

I saw Red Rising being recommended a lot in online forums, almost always with great praise. Before starting to read it, as I sometimes do, I tried to check some of the existing reviews (hopefully without spoilers) to see if it was something I was in the mood for next. A big amount of them mentioned that this book was not at all a young adult novel, that comparisons with the Hunger Games where unmerited and other similar opinions. I’m just surprised someone can believe this honestly.

When I started reading, for about the first fifth of the book, the story seemed bland and cheap, trying too hard to elicit emotion and not really succeeding. It pretty much hit all of the tropes of young adult novels I could think of — and I certainly could see how someone would compare it with the Hunger Games —. I did consider about whether I wanted to continue reading, but I realised that it was an easy read and the world itself wasn’t uninteresting. If I had to rate it then I’d go without doubt for a 1/5.

But then things got really interesting.

The tropes where still there. Some things of the end of the book where clear — the genre requires them —, and eventually they where there. And while the impression of a thin plot trying very hard to make me feel emotions… well, sometimes it worked, and there is certainly a couple of surprises. But more importantly, I could not let the book lie down for a minute if I could help it. It’s been a long time since a book hooked me up so much. That it was with a book that from the first moments had caused, well, quite a negative impression I guess caught me by surprise.

The book is not the Hunger Games, but the comparison is a good one to see if the book can be recommended to someone else. It’s young adult science fiction in a dystopia with a young main character that accomplishes more than could be expected at first. I’d say the book itself accomplishes also more than it could be expected at first. I won’t say it’s one of the greatest novels of the XXI century, but for sure I’m happy of having read it and do want to continue reading the series.

2022-10-31 I'm leaving my current job

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 17:14:00 +0100

Contents

Current situation and plans for later

I presented my resignation in my current company. My last day will be at the end of January, the last real working day will be 26 January, the next days being vacation days. According to my contract, once I resign I work 3 months counting from the end of the current month.

Currently I have no plans on what to do after my last day 🤔.

I’ll start this week talking with other companies to look for somewhere in which to continue working on something similar.
I’m also considering other options, such as certifying as a dietitian (in Spain), which would probably mean being some time without working. Let’s see, there’s still time to decide.
I’m staying in Berlin for now, I’m happy here (but as always, this may change at some point).

Why I’m leaving

I realised that I was reaching every evening really exhausted. I could barely do anything else, and I felt completely mentally drained. I could not do any other thing and even daily activities and chores started to be very difficult to do. Weekends were basically catch-up periods, and left very little space for any kind of personal life. Some of my Berlin friends started wondering whether I was still alive.

On top of this I started becoming convinced that this would not be a temporary situation, but that it would be a constant for a long time if I stayed. To be honest, this was not something I was looking towards.

Feelings in the company

My personal goal in the company was to help improve my group’s culture, and support some colleagues and processes out of the group. Although lots of the work I had planned for the group is already underway, reaching a point in which I felt satisfied would require lots of time and support. Long story short - I didn’t felt I could have that support. Although there’s lots of good intentions in the company at all levels, this doesn’t always translate into real actions, and the change process has been way too slow.

On top of this, as part of my efforts, some ways in which I have expressed myself about things not going the way I thought they should where taken in a not very positive way. Seeing this and other similar situations my impression is that my real influence is limited at most. This is a criticism I have on many organisations - good intentions abound, but the gravity of some problems is not recognised. Not being really transparent does not help when trying to push for proper measures that can bring positive change.

When my boss announced that they where leaving, two possibilities sprang to my mind: either someone else would come as a replacement (and then I could not expect any kind of support from the newcomer to the group for a long time, given the complexity of our domain), or I could replace my boss (which I don’t think could happen here). The effect is that I’d be for years in a situation that started to become unbearable for me. The only option I started seeing realistic was quitting, leaving things behind as well as possible so that other people could take the baton.

Privacy & data usage

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 03:41:00 +0200

No data is collected in this page directly (yep, no tracking, analytics or whatever).

As a hosting provider, Netlify does have access to a tiny bit of information that they do store. It’s not much and can be checked on their privacy and GDPR pages. Basically, from visitors they get the access logs (which pages a specific IP visits and when; I am, though, not a lawyer).

Contact

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 03:11:00 +0200

You can contact me through the following possible places/means:

RPG Archive

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 01:07:00 +0200

RPG archives

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 17:41:00 +0200

This is a random post where I try stuff for the blog.

This is an example

This is a quote

This sentence is marked.

Code blocks

Hy:

(defn get-digest [file-path]
  (setv hash (.sha1 hashlib))
  (setv block-size (. hash block_size))
  (with [f (open file-path "rb")]
    (reduce (fn [acc chunk]
              (.update hash chunk))
            (iter (fn [] (.read f block-size))
                  b"")
            hash))
  (.hexdigest hash))

Haskell:

1
2
3

primes = filterPrime [2..]
  where filterPrime (p:xs) =
          p : filterPrime [x | x <- xs, x `mod` p /= 0]

Continuing

Elisp:

(let ((files (directory-files-recursively "content-org/" "\\.org$")))
  (dolist (file files)
          (save-excursion
            (with-current-buffer (find-file file)
              (org-hugo-export-wim-to-md :all-subtrees nil nil :noerrors)))))

Here monospace text. C-c is a keybinding.

Tools

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 01:52:00 +0200

This site itself is hosted with Netlify, whereas the code repo is on Gitlab.

It’s written and built using Hugo, PaperMod Theme, Doom Emacs and among others ox-hugo (and org-mode of course).

OSE rule choices and home rules

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

When playing games of OSE, assume the following rules (or rule choices) in most games. Some rules may depend on the specific setting and are not shown here, on top of other variations (eg. classes used or whether Advanced optional rules are used or not).

From Core Books

Ascending AC
Reroll 1s and 2s on level 1 hp
Variable weapon damage
Subduing (dmg) is an option
Morale is used

Carcass Crawler 1

D6 Thief Skills (also check guidelines for adjudicating thief skills)

Carcass Crawler 2

Assume Town Services are available (in appropriate towns, of course)
Hiring Retainer rules can be used
Quick Equipment rules can be used
Item-Based Encumbrance is used (with STR modifier)

Carcass Crawler 3 (or 0, inaugural issue)

Expanded equipment can be assumed to be used.

S&W rule choices and home rules

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

When playing games of S&W, assume the following rules (or rule choices) in most games. Some rules may depend on the specific setting and are not shown here.

Character creation

Attributes

Roll 3d6 in order per attribute (Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha)
If there are more than 3 results under 9, or the average is less than 9, all the attributes can be rerolled (again, in order).
Choose either:
- swap if you want two attribute values you choose; add +1 to one of the attributes of your choice
- replace an attribute of your choice by 15

HP

At first level, if the rolled hit points are less than half the possible hp after Con adjustment (rounding up), use half the possible hp.

Eg., a recently created cleric (level 1) with Con 13 (+1 hps per level, so 1d6+1 HD) rolls a 2 in the die when rolling hit points. That would be 2+1 = 3 hit points.

Half the maximum value, rounding up is ⎡0.5*(6+1)⎤ = 4.

As 3 < 4, the cleric will have 4 hit points.

If a character is created directly with level higher than 1, this minimum is calculated the previously mentioned way, and then the rest of the HD can be rolled together.

AC

Use ascending AC.

Attack bonus

Only fighters get bonus to hit from Str., and they get it also for missile weapons.