Many people, including myself, automatically think of "the client is always right" when talking capitalism, but that's not correct. In fact, capitalism is defined as "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state"; profit is the only goal or driver of the system, even for different systems, which might be controlled by the state, for example. Every social or legislative characteristic of a particular political system is just a patch that tries to fix from outside what is obviously a ridiculously simplistic concept.

  Even so, we still cling to the idea that we are "served" by companies, like we are some sort of aristocrats being catered for by legions of servants. There is a logic to that, as when a company stops catering to their clientele, they are supposed to lose it. But that's just an illusion. In fact, this only happens if some very specific conditions are met:

1. the client is aware of the bad service, meaning:
   • they know what they're supposed to get
   • they know what they are getting
2. there is an alternative to the service, meaning:
   • there is at least another company able to meet the requirements
   • the company is accessible to the client
     • the cost of access is reasonable
     • the client is allowed to access the competitor
   • the client knows the competitor exists
3. the client wants to get better service, meaning:
   • there isn't too small of a difference between various services (subjective perception that all companies are the same)
   • the effort of changing the service is not too large (subjective perception of effort)
   • the emotions of the client do not bind them to the company (subjective perception of the company)

  Now, all of the points above require not only effort, but persistent effort. One needs to get the necessary knowledge and then keeping up to date, avoiding misdirection and obfuscation, then make decisions and then take action. But even so...

  A company is usually a client of other companies. In my job I am usually hired by companies who do management of people for other companies that need software, with any number of intermediaries and internal chains of command inside each. One might think that because the end client is paying for the entire chain, we should all care about what they want. But we do not! And here are a few of the reasons:

1. the client does NOT know what they want, therefore they will never be aware of what they're supposed to get
2. the client has spent considerable effort in creating a relationship between them and the company that provides them with the software, therefore the effort of changing to another provider is quite forbidding
3. the client has spent considerable effort in creating a relationship with just one company, because they don't want to handle ANY of the responsibilities that company is supposed to handle, therefore they are not in contact with competitors
4. the chain of command inside the client is made up of people who have personal connections with the company in question, so changing to another provider would be in their detriment, therefore the client is not allowed to change to another provider
5. the company itself is not providing a better service because it doesn't have to, for the same profit; their competitors think alike, so there is absolutely no reason to change
6. there is an intermediary system to measure productivity: instead of getting paid for value, the company gets paid for hours worked, for example
7. a smaller nimbler company might rise to provide the same service for less money or a better service for the same amount, but there is point 4. as well as the perception that smaller companies are riskier
8. a company might want to change, but be unable to because it depends on other companies or it lacks the necessary competency
9. one might be competent inside of a company, but if the company is big enough, they get promoted to other posts until they reach a position were they are not competent enough to be promoted
10. clients themselves prefer to cut costs than get better service

  This happens at every level from the top - where you feel you might be, to the bottom - where you actually are. And guess what? When you realize the same effort and care that you expect from others should be coming from you, you quickly find reasons not to provide any of them:

1. my job is boring, why should I do better?
2. my boss is an ass, why should I do better?
3. my clients are idiots, why should I do better?
4. I never meet my clients, that someone else's job, why should I do better?
5. whenever I tried to change something, someone shut me down because they are better positioned than me, why should I do better?
6. I am getting paid by the hour, so working faster means less money, why should I do better?
7. most of the money from the client remains with the entire chain of people over me and I get the scraps, why should I do better?
8. my job is not important for me, it's just a means to support my actual life, why should I do better?

  This may appear as a pyramid of interests where you are just a cog in the machine or whatever, but it is not, it's a full circle. You get what you give. The client and the company and the least competent employee is always you. There are no other species of creatures that fill any of these positions. Your boss is human, your employee is human, your client is human. In Romania there is the saying that you're stealing your own hat.

  But it's OK. You can't do any better, so why should you do better? You are only human, so why be more human? You are a tiny cog in the machine so why grow larger? Do whatever you want, I don't care.

  When I was a high school kid it was fashionable among the street thugs of Bucharest to use the insult "slave". I don't believe this was related to the history of slavery of the gipsy people in Romania's past, which was the ancestry of many influential such thugs, as it was something borrowed from the Americans, where that issue is much more aggravating. If I am correct, then the very use of the term denotes the way Romanians relate to other people, especially those who they perceive superior. Of course, if I am wrong, then I am guilty of the same thing, so QED, I guess?

  After the Romanian Revolution against Communism (note the big R we use for that event, being the only real change we ever affected as a people) people from different countries came to assess the opportunities presented by a newly opened territory. One report that I saw with my own eyes was from a Jewish lawyer who said just that: Romania is filled with highly educated people who distrust their own government, laws and look poorly on local products and people. Instead, they revere national brands they never actually had any real recent contact with like the U.S. and West Germany, preferring ideas and things imported from there to things they could get or make locally. He concluded that it was a good place to invest in, since the quality of the local human resource was high and their expectations were low.

  The Revolution was in 1989, 32 years ago, but the mentality is still mostly there, as even the people who teach the children of today are still of the generation that lived through that era. It is funny to discuss education with a Romanian, they all complain about how bad it is related to how it was, because children aren't fed the same amount of unprocessed information that was the mainstay of the Communist education. They are rarely complaining about the lack of technological advancement in schools or of skills that are useful in real life or about how children are not taught how to be passionate and happy. Even so, they don't do anything at all to change anything. The only measure of control that parents have is to which school to pay people for their kids to get into and, more recently, to which expensive private school to send their kids in order to give them what they see as the proper education.

  The heroes of the Romanians are not the successful entrepreneurs. The media rarely mentions them and then it is mostly because they were paid for by those people. In case an average Romanian hears about a successful Romanian businessman, it is assumed they had connections with the people who ruled the country during the Communist era. Since they started with money and/or influence, their success is surely undeserved. Funny enough, people like doctors are not heroes either, because in Romania people usually have to bribe medical personnel to get any of the treatments that are theoretically free. Even when they go to private clinics the instinct is to pay extra to appease the doctors who, in their natural state, would try to kill them. This is, of course, caused by a systemic underfunding of medicine and by the endemic corruption which sees any funds misused or embezzled. Because of this, a medic who saves lives - even when they refuse to accept any extra money, is not a hero, but just incompetent or parasitic. Heroes are not the people who left the country to get abused as cheap labor abroad either. People who went to Spain to pick strawberries or to Greece to pick olives are just poor uneducated people who are clearly poor stock, perhaps even gipsy people. They deserve no respect. Same for prostitutes, who are universally despised as shaming the country and at the same time praised for being amongst the most beautiful of prostitutes.

  There was once a news report about people going to pick strawberries on TV and the mother of a girl going to Spain explained how she taught her daughter to conform to whatever they say there, to not antagonize the boss. Just work hard and make money and do whatever he says. This was her mother!

  Police people are not heroic, either. They don't protect the citizens, they enforce unreasonable rules. Politicians are not heroes, they are either the absolute evil or the person who is opposing the absolute evil, which makes them slightly less evil. The few situations where political fervor is so high that someone becomes close to being considered heroic, their efforts pale in comparison with the expectations put on them, which of course proves they were evil all along.

  No, the heroes of the Romanians are the hard working people who work for other people. Great theoreticians, the army of Romanian software developers that left the country to work for multinational corporations, any doctor who would be despised in the country is a hero when working abroad, engineers of all kinds, any white collar job, even people working in construction - which is somehow seen as a clean job. With the caveat that they must not be gipsy or poor stock, they surely left the country to thieve and steal and they are shameful to us all. If people "from the developed countries" (this is a phrase still very much in use in relation to the Western countries) praise a hard working Romanian, the entire country breaths a collective awwh of pride, like dogs petted on their heads for being good boys. "You see?", they say, "Now they see what we are made of!".

  One obvious exception is any managerial job. If you are a manager, you actually do little to nothing, you are an oppressor, not a hard working individual. Even if you got there through your own efforts (and didn't rely on the people you knew or money you had) you have a dirty job that deserves no respect. Unless you are related to the person who judges the situation, in which case you are the pride of the family. 

  The biggest heroes are of course great athletes, especially if they are part of an international team. If a Romanian is part of a of German football team, the entire country believes he would be the reason why Germans are good at football. Of course, people doing great things in Romanian sports are usually seen as part of the endemic corruption in Romanian sports. They still get the status of heroes, but they are always on trial and any mistake will be fatal to their reputation. An interesting exception is Simona Halep, which is the greatest Romanian hero of all, because she goes to international Tennis competitions and wins some of them against the best international tennis players in the world! The fact that she is reasonably good looking doesn't hurt either. She is of the people for the people.

  There are great Romanian writers, for example, but we only value the dead ones. We learn in school about great Eminescu, or Rebreanu, or Blaga. The more poetic, the better. The more obtuse the better. And in order to verify if children really read these big greats, we ask them to write commentaries. And kids just read existing commentaries and summarize them. With the advent of Google and AI, it's impossible to not automate this, since it requires the lowest level of human inventivity. Current writers are poor unknown quantities, always shorted when negotiating with local publishers. And no one reads books anymore anyway, what are they doing? There are great Romanian actors and filmmakers, but few people actually bother to watch Romanian productions. We occasionally see films winning some international prize somewhere and it's usually some drab and depressing drama about people being treated as slaves and behaving like one.

  All these point to a mentality that can only be called "slave mentality". Anything Romanian is poor quality, therefore we export raw material and import the very things made from it. As an example, we export a lot of apples and import a lot of apple juice. The opportunities for Romanians are to either find a good job in Romania or - much better - a good job abroad. To have a company, make your own money, employ other people, is still seen as something dirty. Romanians are not educated on how to make, keep or invest money, instead they are instructed on which jobs are better paid. When I was a child, I knew that I should go for being a medic or a lawyer. Now kids are probably taught to try to go into software. No parent would ever tell a kid to think freely, pursue their dreams and try to make something of themselves through their own strength unless it first starts with being employed somewhere. Surely, dreams can wait, they say, all sad and depressed.

  Funny enough, people who somehow get to be business owners, employers or managers many times behave like slave owners. This is also slave mentality: slaves don't dream of being free, but of becoming masters themselves. This sadly also encourages Romanian employees to feel that anything Romanian sucks. In my career the most unprofessional, choleric, petty and unethical employers were Romanians. With small exceptions that I will attribute to mental illness and not national culture.

  Even when we go on holidays, the biggest complaint we have is "it was nice, but there were too many Romanians there". When we were most complaining about how poor our country was, right after the big R, we were the country importing most expensive cars and high end smartphones.

  This is a sad sad cycle, Romania is and will continue to be a nation of employees. Nothing in our culture impresses the importance of self actualization, of generating and defending our own values, of pushing to get ahead and then actually pulling people with you. Nothing teaches us to band together under those values and fight for them. From all of the cultures we've had contact with, which mostly invaded our country and enslaved us for most of our history, we only learned to slave or enslave others.

  We had and we still have a lot of potential, smart people, hard working people, but is that relevant without a set of values? I personally feel that the Romanians abroad impress their employers, but also their employees or their subordinates and their friends, not by being hard working, but by being open and by not being complete assholes, by being kind and ethical. It hurts me to see how American we have become, partially because of the malevolent influence of Russia, but instead of going for the American ideal declarations of freedom and equality, we emulate the American actions of selfish individuality and status driven inequality. They also pushed this idea that somehow you are either a Capitalist or a Communist, master or slave. This just in case you are not a Fascist or a Terrorist, which makes you gipsy or poor stock.

  Let's abandon this obsolete thinking of masters and slaves and instead think of the others as simply people. Your employer is your partner not your owner, people from other nations are still just people, dreaming is still OK and when you reach the top, give yourself a pat on the back and help others up. Find something you care about and do it. There is nothing on the other end. Every moment is not the first day of your life, but the very last. Make it worthwhile.

In 1859, Charles Darwin was publishing "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life", a book that was proposing a theory that was logical, but against every cultural idea that people adhered to at the time. It said that people were animals and that the only force that pushes for change and therefore speciation, is evolution. People went mad with anger: we are not monkeys! Evolution is really easy to understand though, especially if you are not thinking of people or even of live things. Bear with me, while I make this point, before we move to the real theme of this post.

Imagine a chair maker. He buys the wood, carves the various components used to make chairs, then puts them together and sells them. He makes normal chairs: four legs supporting a platform and then a backrest. Whenever people need chairs, they come to him. Now, another chair maker comes into town. He figures that a chair is almost as stable with three legs as it would be with four. So he starts making three legged chairs, which cost less to make, so he sells them cheaper. Most of the people who need chairs start buying from him. In this case the force that applies pressure on the chairs is the public wanting sturdy, comfortable and cheap chairs and the cause of change is the design of the chair maker. The four leg chair maker will either switch to three legs, make more beautiful chairs or find a different production method if he wants to stay in business.

And before you tell me that I am explaining evolution through intelligent design, I will agree with that point. Because evolution is not something that denies intelligent design, it works with or without it just as well. It's a logical outcome of existing conditions and the rules that govern the environment. It has nothing to do with gods and nothing against them. If you have a population of things that can multiply in a way that allows for change, be it random or designed, and there is a pressure that limits the growth of the number of things, whether random or designed, then evolution takes place, favoring some variants (species or races) and disfavoring others. It happens every time men prefer blue eyes to brown ones in women, whenever women prefer tall men over bulky ones, whenever people make chairs or when there is pressure applied to the growth of a virus.

Yes, we reached the real point of the post: the characteristics of a virus in the human population will depend on the amount and direction of pressure we apply on its growth. Let's take some examples, shall we?

When we open schools because the Covid virus doesn't affect young children, but we limit or forbid adults gathering or going places, we put pressure on the virus to grow inside children. It's not complicated at all. Just like the chair maker, if the virus survives it only does it where it can spread. Because you can't stand your own children being children in your house with you and/or because you somehow believe that the linear and continuous application of regimented education without any breaks is more important than your children's health, you get a variant of virus that spreads through children. If you're lucky, it will come home with them and make just you sick. If you're unlucky, it will kill your children, too.

When we let political and economic pressure dictate the response to a viral outbreak, thus letting the virus spread unchecked through the population, you exponentially increase the chance of mutation (remember the multiplication which allows for change? That's called mutation in biology) thus getting more virus variants. Some of them will be more lethal, some of them will not. It's a throw of a dice that you should never have thrown. If after this horrid year of 2020 we start getting vaccinated and there is a variant out there that can infect vaccinated people, then it will spread through the entire population like we did absolutely nothing. And this happens whether your country implements a full lockdown or not, because other countries don't. Viruses care nothing about borders. So you're not losing money or political clout in the short term, but medium and long term you are losing big time.

This brings us to the last example and you won't like it. It goes like this: if you vaccinate people starting with the sick and elderly, and without even testing them first, you will have more chances of vaccinating already infected people. That means that while the vaccine will make your body reject a specific type of virus, that virus is already multiplying inside you and - yes, you guessed it - if any of them mutate into something that the vaccine did not prepare for, then it will be selected faster for evolution and survival, thus increasing the chances for a virus variant that the vaccine is ineffective for. A vaccine is the true long term solution for any viral outbreak: it uniformly limits the spread of the virus at scale with minimal cost. But only if applied uniformly!

This is not medical science that I am explaining here, it's simple logical progression from a given point applying a set of rules. When people address the issue of a viral epidemic by discussing their legal or moral rights, the existence or nonexistence of various deities, by considering the economy or advantages for various political parties or even some crackpot conspiracy or their personal comfort, they are missing the point. All you can do, as a person, group or government, is to alter your behavior so that the pressure you apply or do not apply leads to the best result for you and your people. The application of logic does not invalidate your beliefs, unless your believe that logic is wrong, which just makes you stupid.

The virus doesn't care what you believe or what you think. It will just move forward on the path of least resistance. It's your job to carve that path so that it leads where you want it to lead.

Whatever you read on Facebook also obeys the rules of evolution. So do media reports and politics. If they can't spread, they will die, so they will mutate into something that spreads and infects more readily. Your job is again, to act according to your own interest, to decide where you want to take things. Where will you apply the pressure and where will you go soft?

As I was saying in a post from a year ago, a virus (or a meme) tends to become more infections, but less damaging in time. Again, it's pure logic. It needs to spread better and therefore not kill its host too quickly or limit its mobility and thus its ability to infect others. But that only applies on a virus that is left unchecked. Once you apply pressure, you change the rules, it changes direction. All I am saying here is push it towards where you want it to go!

So I wanted to use the button on my Android headset to control the audio of the application I was currently using: a book reader or a music player or something similar like that. And instead an annoying assistant was blinging annoyingly and impotently in my headphones, while my music was still on. It is not at all obvious what does that and how to stop it. And there are two assistants on my phone: Google Assistant and Bixby. Turns out you only need to care about one.

Here is what I tried and didn't work:

• disable assistants
  • Bixby can't even be disabled
  • Google Assistant can be disabled, but by that it means it doesn't listen to your voice commands anymore, buttons are fair game
• apps to change the action for the headset button
  • they either don't work right or can't work when the screen is locked
  • the "many apps" recommended by some articles are not even in the store anymore
  • they need full control permissions on your phone

So, here is what you need to do:

1. have your headphones connected to your phone
2. open Google application
   
3. tap the three dot More button
   
4. go to Settings
   
5. select Google Assistant
   
6. go to Devices (it's a section in blue on my phone)
   
7. you should see Wired headphones (or maybe something else depending on your headset type) - tap it
   
8. uncheck the option Get help from Google
   
   
   

That's it! You don't have to disable the assistant on your headphones, but your headphones in your assistant. And this is regardless of whether the assistant is "off" or "on". Now you can listen to your music and books in peace.

"But, what about Bixby?" you will ask. As far as I can see, Bixby is something that comes over Google Assistant. I did disable some stuff in it, but I doubt it was a problem to begin with.

Update Aug 28 2023: the book has finally been uploaded to the Internet Archive in both PDF and epub formats!

  I have been working on this adventure computer game that is a tribute to the history of adventure stories. One important part of that history is what we call a gamebook, a printed work that allows the reader to choose one of several paths to complete the story. Because of very aggressive marketing and copyright tactics, this is now almost absorbed by the Choose Your Own Adventure brand and for sure Bantam Books (now Random House) would like us to think that they invented the concept. In fact, the man who sold the idea to them, Edward Packard, was not even born when two American women collaborated on what is now credited as the first book in the genre: Consider the Consequences! from 1930.

  Now, imagine that you would know what is the first book in a literary genre, like the first horror book, or the first romance. You would expect to find pages and pages written about it, you would think others have mentioned it in their works in the field and you would certainly trust to be able to find it somewhere to read. Well, Consider the Consequences! has almost disappeared. A book that probably has a dozen copies left in the world and is carefully (yet greedily) hoarded by a few libraries and collectors.

  Go on, search for it on the web, the place where everybody talks about everything. You will probably find it on Amazon, where it is unavailable, and on Goodreads, where you have one rating and one review. Perhaps you would find mentions of it on a site called Gamebooks, which only seems fair, on a blog called Renga in Blue and a long tweet from a James Ryan. Then there are some context mentions and that is it! The first ever instance of a book in an entire genre is about to go extinct!

  Now, I don't know if it was any good or not. That's kind of the point, I can't judge this work because I can't find it anywhere. If I had lived in the US or the UK maybe I could have read it in the library of some university, although that is just a possibility and not something that I would expect to be able to do. I don't even know if it is in the public domain or not. The U.S. legislation says conflicting things and something written in 1930 may perhaps become free of copyright in 2026.

  And the authors were the real deal: activists, suffragettes and all that. Perhaps I should complain that the patriarchy is trying to stifle the roots of feminine literature and then something would happen. It's astounding, really.

  Update, September 3 2021: Andy Mabbett left a comment about a new Wikipedia entry for the book. Thanks, Andy!

  From the link, a partial play in a radio show, where you can get a feel of what the book was like. Revolutionary for the genre, to say the least! Here it is:

  [youtube:SWCu6PnK5ls]

  I've read today this CNN article: 'Star Trek: Discovery' to introduce history-making non-binary and transgender characters. And it got me thinking on what this means for the Star Trek universe. It means absolutely nothing. Star Trek has had people turned into other species, duplicated, merged, their genetic code altered and fixed, made young and old. It has had species with no gender, multiple genders and various philosophies. It has interspecies relationships, including sexual.

  Star Trek has tackled intolerance many times, usually by showing the Federation crew having contact with an alien species that does the same things we do today, in caricature. It tackled race intolerance, from Kirk's kiss with Uhura to the episode with the species with black on one side and white on the other discriminating the people who had their colors the other way around. It tackled gender discrimination in multiple situations. It tackled sex change and identity change with the Trill. It featured multi sex civilisations. The happy tolerance train seems to stop with anything related to using inorganic technology with the human body, but no one is perfect and Janeway was awful with everybody.

  A person who is biologically a man yet desires to be treated as a woman would be normal for Star Trek. It would be inconsequential. If they go the way of the oppressed member of another culture that they meet, they will not solve anything, they will just have another weird alien around, which defeats the purpose. If they go with a non-binary crewmember they should not acknowledge the fact except in passing. Yes, habituate the public with the concept, let them see it in a series and get used to it, but the people in Star Trek should already have passed that point. Hell, they could go with a person who changes their sex every one in a while, to spice things up.

  What I would do is have a character who is clearly of a different sex than the gender they identify with and someone badgering them to have a proper sex change while they refuse. Now that would be a Star Trek worthy dilemma. You want to make it spicy? Have them go to the doctor and change their race instead, behave like a black person while wearing the high tech equivalent of blackface. What? Are you refusing someone the ownership of their identity?

  I really doubt they will go that way, though. Instead they will find some way of bringing the subject up again and again and again and throw it in our faces like a conflict that has to be resolved. In the bright and hopeful future, there should be no conflict about it! This CBS announcement should not have existed. You want to put some transgender people in, OK, put them in. It's not a boasting point, is it? The announcement basically does the opposite of what they claim to do: "Oh, look, we put non binary people in our series! How quaint! Hurrah! Only we do it, come watch the freak show!".

  Please, writers, please please please, don't just write stories then change the gender or race of characters because it's en vogue. Stop it with the gender swapping, which is the creative equivalent of copy and paste. Write with the story in mind, with the context, with the characters as they would normally behave. Don't add characters after you've thought of the story just to make them diverse either. Just write stories with characters that make sense! You don't know people from that demographic? Find one, spend time with them, then adjust your characters accordingly. I am so tired of tiny female action heroes, flamboyant and loud gays and the wise old lesbian. How come no one finds those offensive? It's like someone said "OK, we will have shitty black and female and non-cis characters for now. When people get used to them, we will actually have them do something and be realistic and perhaps in 2245 we'll even have them be sympathetic".

  They tried the woke way from the very beginning in Discovery, with the Stamets/Culber gay couple. They kept showing them kissing and washing their teeth together and other stuff like that, when it made little difference to the story. Most people on Star Trek are written as single, for some weird reason that makes no sense, unless their relationship furthers the story. Riker and Troi could be the exception, though, yet even they were not kissy kissy on the bridge all the time. I never understood that couple. Dax and Worf made more sense, for crying out loud! And remember Starfleet is a military organization. You may put women and men and trans and aliens and robots together in a crew, but their role is to do their job. Their sex, their gender even less, makes no difference.

  Gene Roddenberry was a dreamer of better futures, where all of our idiotic problems have been left behind and reason prevailed, but even he imagined a third World War leading to humanity changing its ways as a start. Star Trek has always analysed the present from the viewpoint of an idyllic future, a way of looking back that is inherently rational: "Imagine the future you want, then wonder what would people from that time think of you". It's brilliant! Don't break that to bring stupid into the future. To tackle present social issues you have to first be a Trekkie, already there in the exalted future, before you consider the dark ages of the 21st century with a fresh perspective.

Why this article should never have been written

  It's a bit too early to do this. I am sure no one in their right mind would want to display any non-positive words about George Floyd at this moment for fear of reprisals. But I feel like that is exactly what must be done. If Floyd was an innocent victim, a hero that overcame his background only to be brought down, literally, by the heavy boot of law enforcement, then what chance do normal people have?

  I didn't want to be writing about this. I think that the entire thing has become grotesque and the only thing that could now bring these Whites and Blacks together, corrupt police and gangstas, racists and anti-racists... is me! I am sure that if I were to enter the argument, all these people angrily hating each other would come together in trying to murder me. Because while I understand both sides, I can't fully endorse any of them. Racists are just dumb. What the hell does race matter in anything? But I do understand anti-anti-racists, the ones that hate being put together with assholes because of the color of their skin. Anti-racism protesters are dumb. Well, maybe. I am sure all of this protesting is finally going to have an impact, and this is good, but have you seen some of these people? Manicaly jumping on toppled down statues and roaring in megaphones about how great they are because they oppose evil. In this whole discussion, again, normal people are left out. They are boring, they don't clump together, they don't stand out, each one has their own slightly different opinion. Well, this is mine.

The gentle giant saint versus the black monster

  Something happened today that pushed me to write this post. I saw a Facebook post that detailed the criminal record of George Floyd. Cocaine dealing, two armed robberies, one which held him back four years, addiction and, when he was arrested, metamfetamine and fentanyl in his blood and the incriminating fake twenty dollar bill. Was it true? It is a very important question to ask, because many of these things are complete bullshit. So I googled it. And the result was actually worse: almost nothing!

  There are just two websites that actually advertise Floyd's criminal record: Great Game India - self titled "Journal on Geopolitics and International Relations" and sporting articles like "Coronavirus Bioweapon - How China Stole Coronavirus From Canada and Weaponized It" and "How A Pornstar & Sci-Fi Writer Influenced WHO Policies On Hydroxychloroquine With Fake Data" - and The Courier Daily, which seems legit. Funny though, when you search for "George Floyd criminal record" you get Game India first and not The Daily Mail, which is linked in their article and who actually did the research and published the court documents attesting to that. They are fifth on the search page. More, during the writing of this blog post, the Courier Daily link disappeared from my Google search and Game India was demoted to second place, with a "gentle giant" story on top instead.

  Either way, other than Game India, no other news outlet even phrases the title as to indicate George had been a criminal. The few who tackle the subject: The Star, The Daily Mail itself and even The Courier Daily, just portray the man as a flawed individual who nevertheless was set to change, found religion and even moved to Minneapolis to escape his past. And I agree with this viewpoint, because as far as I can see, the armed robbery had been many years before and the man had changed, in both behavior and intent. But hiding this doesn't really help. The Daily Mail article was published on the 26th of May, one day after Floyd's death, and the information therein is either not discussed or spun into a "gentle giant" narrative. He was a bouncer before the Coronavirus hit and he lost his job. George the gentle bouncer?

  One thing is certain, when you search for George's criminal record, it's more likely you get to articles about the criminal records of the arresting officers or Mark Wahlberg's hate crimes than what you actually searched for.

How did George die and why it doesn't matter

  But there is more. How did George die? You would say that having a knee on their throat while they gasp for air saying "I can't breathe" would be enough. But it's not. Several different reports say different things. The first one preliminarily portrays Floyd as a very sick man: coronary artery disease, hypertensive heart disease, even Covid-19. There were "no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation", but instead they diagnosed it as a heart failure under stress and multiple intoxicants. Finally, two days later, the report admits "a cardiopulmonary arrest while being restrained" by officers who had subjected Floyd to "neck compression". But Floyd's family would not have that, so they commissioned their own autopsy. The result? Floyd died from "asphyxia due to compression of the neck", affecting "blood flow and oxygen going into the brain", and also from "compression of the back, which interferes with breathing". The medical examiner said Floyd had no underlying medical problem that caused or contributed to his death.

  So which was it? It doesn't really matter. He died with a knee on his neck, which should never happen to anyone, and both reports admit it was a homicide. But ignoring all of these other data points doesn't help. People just vilify the policeman and raise George to saintly status. You want to solve something? Start with the truth. All of it. Now both sides have the ammunition required to never change their minds.

  I have not found any article that makes a definitive claim on which report is the good one, if any. They all lean on believing the second, because it fits, but if the first one was a complete fabrication, why wasn't anyone charged with it?

Wikipedia v. Facebook

  So of course I would find about Floyd's criminal past from Facebook. It makes so much sense. It is a pool of hateful bile and rank outrage that brings ugly right up to the surface. But this time it pointed me towards an interesting (albeit short) investigation. Without it, I would have swallowed up the entire completely innocent victim narrative that is pushed on every media outlet. So, once in a blue moon, even Facebook is good for something.

  As you may have noticed above, I took some information from Wikipedia, which has an entire article dedicated to George Floyd's death. It is there where the information about his two medical autopsies is also published. On George Floyd's page, his early life consists of: basketball, football, his family calling him a gentle giant. Then he customized cars, did some rap and was an informal community leader. Only then did he get arrested a few times then put in jail for five years. He was charged in 2007, went to jail in 2009 and was released on 2013. It's just six years and it does not define a man, but try to say that to a police officer who has just read the fact sheet on his cruiser's terminal and has to arrest a 1.93m tall intoxicated man.

  And you may want to read the entire chain of events. The police didn't just put him on the ground, they talked to him, they put him in their car, they fought, they pulled him out, all while being filmed and surrounded by a crowd.

You will never gonna get it

  How much of this is truth and how much of it is spin? You will never know. There are so many people that have to justify their own shit using carefully chosen bits and pieces from this that there will never be a truthful image of who George Floyd was and what happened to him. He is now more than a man and also much less: he is a symbol, rallying people to cry out against injustice, as they see it. The greatest thing George Floyd ever did was die and after that he stopped being human. How sad is that?

  In truth, he was a flawed man. He was not perfect. He was your everyman. A policeman casually killing him while getting filmed doing it hurts on so many levels because that could be you. That was you or your friend or your relative somewhere. But no, they had to make it about being black and being the gentle giant and being killed by the bad psycho cop and his cronies. It sounds like a Hollywood movie because it is scripted as one. You can be certain that at this point several documentaries and movies are in the works about this. And when you'll see it, a big time celebrity will be interpreting Floyd and the cop will be played by that actor who plays psychos in every other movie because he has that face. Once you go black, you can never go back.

  I am not defending anyone here. As I said in the beginning, I am on nobody's side in this. I just hope no one will knee me or my friends to death while everybody films it down.

The world has spoken

  I find it amazing that the protests in Minneapolis have spread to the entire world. It makes me hope that they will slowly turn into protests about things that matter even more than the color of one's skin, like our responsibility as a community to carefully choose our guardians, like having to think for ourselves if something is right or wrong and maybe doing something about it. George Floyd was killed slowly, over nine minutes, while people stood around and filmed it. Not just the other officers, but civilian bystanders, too.

  There were people who did something. At one point a witness said: "You got him down. Let him breathe." Another pointed out that Floyd was bleeding from the nose. Another told the officers that Floyd was "not even resisting arrest right now". Yet another said "Get him off the ground ... You could have put him in the car by now. He's not resisting arrest or nothing. You're enjoying it. Look at you. Your body language explains it." But that's all they did. Wikipedia calls them "witnesses", but you have to wonder: what skin color were they? Were they afraid they would be next and that's why all they could was beg for George's life as he slowly died? Or did they believe the story that American TV has fed them for decades, that cops are ultimately good people who break the rules in order to protect the innocent? Or maybe a more recent belief had taken hold: that filming injustice makes you a hero and it's more than enough.

  The world has spoken. Racism must go, police brutality must go. Let's not replace them by carefully crafted fantasies, though. Let's see the truth as it is so we can make it better.

2020 is great so far

  I am not being sarcastic. After a virus that punched presidents of the free world and dictators alike in the nose, that made people question their fake feelings of safety and forced them to act, here comes this age of protesting how things are. We have been shaken awake. Will we fall asleep again? I am sure we will, but some things will have changed by then. And the year is not yet over.

I know I am shooting myself in the foot here, but, to paraphrase some people, staying quiet doesn't help anyone. I've come to love Dev.to, a knowledge sharing platform aimed at software developers, because it actually promotes blogging and dissemination of information. It doesn't do enough against clickbait, but it's great so far. So, hungry for some new dev stuff, I opened up the website only to find it spammed with big colorful posters and posts supporting female devs. It was annoying, but it got me thinking.

  I like women in software! I too can honestly say I support them. I've always done so. I worked with them, mentored them, learned from them, worked for them, hired them. I want them to get paid what they are due, just like any other person: quiet, happiness, money, respect, understanding. I support their right to tell me when they hate (or love) something I do or say and I am totally against assholes who would pray on them or belittle them. Not because they are women, but because they are human, and no one should stand for stupid little people who only think of themselves and have a chip on their shoulder.

  And yes, women need more support than men, because they traditionally did not have it before. For them it is an uphill battle to fit into communities that contain few females. They have to butt in, they have to push and struggle and we need to understand their underdog status and protect them through that. But not because they are some fantasy creature, or perpetual victims or some other thing, but because they are people. This applies to them, to minorities, to majorities, to every single person around you. I would feel the same about some guy not getting hired because he is too muscular as for some woman who won't get a job because she's bland looking.

  So ask yourself, are you really supporting women, or are you just playing a game? Are you the one shouting loudly in the night "Night time! Everybody go to sleep!"? Are you protecting women or singling them out as something different that must be treated differently? Are you actually thinking of people or just doing politics? Because if you decide to annoy devs on behalf of women, you'd better do a good job supporting them for real.

  I guess I don't have to tell you about ad blockers and browser extensions that improve YouTube. They are a dime a dozen and bring many features to the habitual YouTube watcher. However there is one particular new YouTube annoyance that you don't really need an extension to get rid of: the dreaded Video paused dialog.

  To get rid of it is easy: on an interval, check if there is a visible element of a certain type containing a certain text and click its button. While this can be done in simple Javascript, I am lazy, so the script that I am using will first load jQuery, then run a one line function periodically. This code is to be copied and pasted in the Console tab of the browser's development tools, then press Enter.

const scr = document.createElement('script');
scr.setAttribute('src','https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.4.1.min.js');
document.querySelector('head').appendChild(scr);
setInterval(()=> { 
  $('#button:contains(Yes)','yt-confirm-dialog-renderer:visible:contains(Video paused)').click();
},500);

It's easy to understand:

• create a script element
• set its source to jQuery
• append it to the page
• execute every 500 milliseconds a code that:
  • finds the element with id button containing the text "Yes"
  • inside an element of type yt-confirm-dialog-renderer which is visible and contains the text "Video paused"
  • click the element

There is an even more comfortable solution, though, that I recommend. You will need a Chrome extension called cjs that loads whatever script you tell it in whatever page you want. It gives you the option to inject jQuery, so all you have to do is write 

setInterval(()=> { $('#button:contains(Yes)','yt-confirm-dialog-renderer:visible:contains(Video paused)').click(); },500);

 as the script to be executed on YouTube.

That's it. You're all done.

  I see a lot of pages about how to write blog posts. I read them, because I am both curious and sincere in my desire to make my blog popular and spread the knowledge I've amassed here. They are always crap. Take one that says the best tool to get a blog popular is to use Google Trends or Google autocomplete to see what people are searching for. And the results are always incredibly stupid. Like "how to add one to one to get two". I am paraphrasing a bit here, but you get the gist. Go "worldwide" and the first trend is always some Chinese spam. Another post is saying that a blog post should be written as four drafts: one for what you want to say, one for how you want to say it, one for peer reviewed content and the final one that actually is what you want to publish. It sounds great, but it implies a level of work that sometimes is prohibitive related to the subject of your post. Sometimes you just want to share something as a stream of consciousness and be done with it. Is that better? No. But it sure beats NOT writing anything. There is always time to improve your work and get peer review AFTER publishing it.

  There are two big types of people blogging. The first category is akin to reporters and media people. They want to get their message across for reasons that are rather independent of the message itself. They want to earn money or influence or some other kind of benefit. I don't have any advice for people like that. Not because I disconsider their goals, but because I have never blogged for an ulterior reason. The second category of bloggers is akin to writers: they want to get their message across because they feel there is some value in the message itself. I consider myself such a person, although I probably suck as a writer. This post is for people like that.

  The most important part of writing a post is motivation. And I don't mean just the reason for writing it, but the reason for wanting to share it. For me, most of the posts I write are either content that I consume, such as books, or stuff that I think is worth considering or technical stuff that I've stumbled upon and I believe people would want to find if googling for it instead of wasting the time I wasted to solve it. Now, the books and the personal idea posts I totally agree are ego boosting shit: I feel like it's important enough to "share", but I don't really expect people to read it or that there is any inherent value in them other than getting to know me better. And everyone wants to understand other people better on the Internet, right? In the end they are just a personal log of random thoughts I have. My blog is something that represents me and so I feel that I need to share things that are personal to me, including thoughts that are not politically correct or even correct in any possible way. One can use Facebook for this, so I won't write about those posts. They still reach some people and inform their choices, which is something I love.

  What is left is the posts that I work for. You have no idea how much I work on some of these posts. It may take me hours or even days for content that you read in a few minutes. That is because I am testing my ideas in code and creating experiments to validate my beliefs and doing research on how other people did it. A lot of the times I learn a lot from writing these posts. I start with the expectation that I know what I am talking about only to find out that I was wrong. The important part is that I do correct myself and some of the blog posts here are exclusively about discovering how wrong I was. There is nothing more rewarding than writing something that you feel others might benefit from. Perhaps other than getting feedback about how your post benefited others. Publishing your failures is just as important as publishing your successes.

  Yes, I know, if I learn something new by doing what I need to be doing, then sharing the results is like writing for myself, too. It's ego boosting, for sure. However, it would be even more obnoxious to believe no one is like me and so no one would benefit from the same work. There was a time when people came to my blog and asked me about all kinds of technical problems and I worked with them to solve them. There were usually incredibly simple problems that posed difficulties only to the laziest people, but it felt good! Then StackOverflow came along and no one actually interacts with me. But I have solved stupid problems that I still keep getting thanks for, even (maybe especially because) if the technology is really old and obsolete. Many other blogs published cool things about subjects that are not fashionable anymore and then just disappeared. The value of your content is that it may help people in your situation, even if they don't share your sense of now and even if all they take away is how NOT to do things.

  Sometimes you are looking for the solution for a problem and after hours of work you realize the problem was invalid or the solution was deceptively simple. It's the "Oh, I am so stupid!" moment that makes a lot of people shy away from writing about it. I find that these moments are especially important, because other people will surely make the same mistake and be hungry about finding the answer. OK, you admit to the world you were stupid, but you also help so many other people that would waste time and effort and feel as stupid as you if not for writing the post.

  My take on writing a blog post is that you just have to care about what you are writing. You may not be the best writer out there, you might not even be explaining the thing right, but if you care about what you are writing, then you will make the effort of getting it right eventually. Write what you think and, if you are lucky, people will give you reasons to doubt your results or improve them. Most likely people will NOT care as much about the subject as you, but you are not writing because of them, you are writing for them. Some of your thoughts and toils will reach and help someone and that is what blogging is all about.

  The last thing I want to mention is maintenance. Your work is valid when you write it, but may become obsolete later on. You need to make the effort to update the content, not by removing the posts or deleting their content, but by making clear things have changed, how they did and what can be done about it. It is amazing how many recent posts are reached only because I mentioned them in an "obsolete" post. People search for obsolete content, find out it's too old, then follow the link to your latest solution for that problem. It makes for good reading and even better understanding of how things got to the current point.

  So, bottom line: publish only what you care about and care about your readers, keep the posts up to date, publish both successes and failures.

As I was saying in a previous post, I came back from vacation to about 5 DMCA notices about posts that had no infringing content that I could see. I've tried changing the URLs of links, the images, then reposted the posts. DO NOT DO THAT ON BLOGGER! Apparently, even if their rule says to not publish the post unchanged, they consider any republication of a post automatically put in Draft because of a DMCA notice to be infringing. And what happens after trying to republish five posts a few times? Your blog gets deleted and any attempt to contact the assholes at Blogger is ignored or, worse, a complete farce.

Example: A DMCA requests comes for a blog post containing only my text, a link to IMDb and a YouTube embed. The post gets sent to Draft. I send a counter notice to Blogger, then republish the blog. This might be considered "infringing" of their policy, but it only happened once, so I don't think this is the reason why they deleted the blog. Then they delete the blog (all the blogs on that user, I had some private ones that I hadn't backed up at all and now they are completely gone) and send me an email containing, I kid you not, this text: "we have removed the blog. Thank you for your understanding."

I've tried contacting them about my user being blocked from Blogger and the blogs deleted, but they have replied only with an automated message saying it usually takes two days to get back to me. Two weeks later, no reply from them... except the ones for the DMCA counter-notices. Guess what they said? I kid you not: "Thanks for reaching out to us. We have no record of the following URLs having been removed by Google due to a legal complaint". I replied with a quote of their previous email. No reply.

So the only solution, until I find my own hosting and I set up my own blog, is to rename the blog and move it on another user.

This is a cautionary tale, too. Always backup your blog and any content you post on another platform, no matter how "no evil" it is. Also, make sure you backup everything, even the little details, checking the result, because backup and restore tools don't bring money to the platforms, so they usually suck big time. For example for Blogger there is no way to import a post with a JavaScript script in it that contains comments, because the newlines have been stripped and the comment affects the next line of code. And most of all, when your post gets DMCA'd, leave it in draft, file a counter-notice and pray that they actually mean something.

On the administrative side, because of the domain change and the backup SNAFU, the blog might not work completely as expected. Please let me know if anything goes wrong so I can fix it. For example, the links to the blog are automatically converted by JavaScript, because I can't export, replace and import the posts again without losing the JavaScript in some pages and posts. Plus, I have no idea if this blog is going to last.

Wish me luck, folks!

You will quickly understand why I felt the need to say I was unbiased, but let me first demonstrate how much unbiased I was: I went into this raw fruits store, with an errand from the wife, and wanted to get something from me. Usually I like the caju and macadamia nuts, but I didn't want to have the conversation about why did I spent so much on something I eat out of boredom, so I looked around to get something else. And here they were, packaged and sold just like any other dried fruits or nuts: bitter apricot kernels. So I bought a 200 g bag.

Back in the office, I opened the bag up and I started eating. They were bitter as hell, but I didn't mind it much. I was eating some of them, then switching to candied ginger (which I'd absolutely love if it weren't so sweet), then back again. After a while, though, I'd had enough. About half of the bag in, I couldn't really find a reason to keep eating them. My colleagues had all refused to eat (and spit) more than half of one. But I was curious what they were actually for. People who love bitter tastes, maybe?

So went on the Internet and KABOOOM! mind blown. Just for scale, try to look for yourself at the dimensions of the can of worms I'd just opened: apricot kernels.

Turns out that the "active ingredient" in the apricot kernels is amygdalin, a substance that turns to cyanide in the gut. Yes, you've heard that right: I had just bitten the tooth, dying for the motherland before I could spill the beans. Google had already failed miserably, by serving first a page that explained how Big Pharma and governments conspired to keep this wonder drug from the public. The second page was Wikipedia, then every single conspiracy nut site, sprinkled with the occasional very dry scientific study that bottom lined at "we don't really know".

But I am getting ahead of myself. At this point I was already severely biased and I first need to describe my earnest experience to you. Short story: accelerated heartbeat, fever, terrible headache and nausea that lasted for half a day. Also, didn't die, which was good.

Back to my rant. So, some guy looked at the chemical structure of amygdalin and thought it looked like a B complex vitamin, so he named it vitamin B17. It was quickly marketed as a cure for cancer, despite numerous trials to show that it wasn't. And no, it's not a vitamin for humans either. It is not made in the human body, but it's not needed, either. The bag was not labeled anything dangerous, because it came from the outside of the European Union, which has a law regarding this. Here is some advice for both the EU and the US. Turkey was OK, though, so it only said "great for cancer, eat 5 to 8 seeds daily, not all at once".

So how fucked was I after eating about one hundred of them? A European Food Safety Authority article said that eating three kernels exceeds the safe level for adults. A toddler could do that from just eating one. An article from Cancer Council Australia detailed the child fatalities due to ingesting apricot seeds. Another article was telling me of an adult who got poisoning, but he was both stupid and extreme (he was taking a concentrated extract) and didn't die anyway. A thousand other sites were telling me how amazing my health will be after I had just eaten ten times the daily dosage they suggested.

Drowned in the sea of controversy regarding apricot kernels I've decided to look for the chemical and medicinal treatment for cyanide poisoning. Step 1: decontamination. It was kind of too late to go to the toilet and do the anorexia thing. Step 2: take some amyl nitrite (and then some intravenous things). Wait, that's a party drug. I could maybe get one in a sex shop. There was no home remedy and most of all, even if the amyl nitrite seems to work, no one seems to know exactly why other than the vasodilating effect it obviously has. Another possible antidote is (ironically) hydroxocobalamin, also called vitamin B12a. In the end some vitamin C and a headache pill did wonders, just in case you eat a bunch of apricot kernels and feel awful. Obviously, if it were a serious condition I would have died at the keyboard, trying to wade through the marketing posts and the uselessly dry official reports. Also, not enough easily available party drugs, I dare say.

So, days later the bout of shaky hands, fever and the horrible headache that only blood oxygen deprivation can bring, I decided to write this post. I doubt people will find it with Google, but maybe just my immediate friends will know not to eat this crap.

New Scientist is a science oriented news site that has existed in my periodic reading list for years. They had great content, seemingly unbiased and a good web site structure. But they went greedy. Instead of one in ten articles being "premium" now almost all articles I want to read are behind a pay wall. While I appreciate their content, I will never pay for it, especially when similar (and recently, event better) content can be found on phys.org or arstechnica.com completely free. So, I feel sad, but I need to remove New Scientist from my reading list. I understand there is an effort in what they do and that quality requires investment and cost, but brutally switching from an almost free format to a spammy pay wall is unacceptable for me.

I have invented a new way to write software when people who hold decision power are not available. It's called Flag Assisted Programming and it goes like this: whenever you have a question on how to proceed with your development, instead of bothering decision makers, add a flag to the configuration that determines which way to go. Then estimate for all the possible answers to your question and implement them all. This way, management not only has more time to do real work, but also the ability to go back and forth on their decisions as they see fit. Bonus points, FAPing allows middle management to say you have A/B testing at least partially implemented, and that you work in a very agile environment.

Finally, finally there is a TV series about an asteroid coming towards Earth and what we are going to do about it. It is called Salvation and it fails in every single respect.

The first alarm bell was Jennifer Finnigan, the female costar from Tyrant. She was terribly annoying in that show where she posed as the voice of reason and common sense, while being a nagging and demanding wife to the ruler of a foreign country. I thought "shame on you, Siderite! Just because she was like that in that show it's no reason to hold it against the actress". In Salvation, she plays the annoying nagging and demanding voice of reason and common sense as girlfriend to the secretary of the DOD.

But that's the least of the problems of the show. The idea is that a brilliant MIT student figures out there is an asteroid coming towards Earth. He tells his professor, who then calls someone and then promptly disappears, with goons watching his house. Desperate, he finds a way to reach to an Elon Musk wannabe and tell him the story. Backed by this powerful billionaire, he then contacts the government, which, surprise!, knew all about it and already had a plan. Which fails. Time to bring in the brilliant solution of the people who care: the EM drive! For which there is a need of exactly two billion dollars and one hundred kilograms of refined uranium. And that's just episode 2.

The only moment we actually see the asteroid is in a 3D holographic video projection, coming from most likely a text data file output of a tool an MIT student would build. Somehow that turns into a 3D rendering on the laptop of the billionaire. Not only does it crash into Earth, but it shows the devastation on the planet as a fire front. Really?

Bottom line: imagine something like Madam Secretary which somehow mated with the pilot episode of the X-Files reboot. Only low budget and boring as hell. There is no science, no real plot, no sympathetic characters, nothing but artificial drama which one would imagine to be pointless in a show about the end of the world, and ridiculously beautiful people acting with the skill of underwear models (Mark Wahlberg excluded, of course). Avoid it at all costs.

Update: oh, in episode 3, the last one I will watch, they send a probe to impact the asteroid and they do it like: "OK, we have a go from the president!" And in the next minute they watch (in real time from Io and from a front camera on the probe) how it is heading towards the asteroid. I mean... why write a story and not make it use anything real? What's the point in that? Even superhero movies are more realistic than this disaster. I know the creators of the show did other masterpieces such as Extant and Scream: The TV Series and Hawaii Five-O, they don't know any better, but at least they could have tried to improve just a tiny sliver. Instead they shat on our TV screens.