Intro

  This is going to be a very long rant. And by the end it's going to get a bit depressing and overdramatic. But also revelatory, I hope. If you think I am going off the rails here, let me know. I would love to hear your arguments.

I have a job now

  I have been trying to get a job for a while now and I just got one. Why did it take so long? Because in just a few years, the market for software developers - and I have to assume almost everything that doesn't require physical presence - has changed dramatically.

  First of all, everything is artificial intelligence now. The various platforms that boast finding either jobs or valuable candidates are all run on machine learning algorithms. You create a profile, they match it with a company profile - like Tinder. If there is something that doesn't fit, you're not getting selected. There are consequences for this: you start using AI to improve (or simply generate them from scratch) your applications. Now an AI screener will filter your AI application.

  And it gets ridiculous really fast. I've heard - so take it as a rumor - that you may get a negative score from an AI algorithm if you used another type of AI to compose your resumé. It's so easy to interpret this as Grok hating ChatGPT or something, but it's probably just a mismatch in alignment.

  This also affects employers. Small companies that don't have the resources to hire HR departments and pay exorbitant prices to AI hiring platforms are left in the dark, even when they actually NEED people. And you are looking for a job and can't see them and they can't find you. And if they scrounge up the funds to pay for a job ad, they get so many applicants that they can't handle it without an HR firm.

  So let's say you get past the machine gatekeepers and you reach actual recruiters. They have changed. Just like the Tommyknockers, they approximate the human resources people I was familiar with, but they are different in essential ways. I've had interviews on the phone, for example. They were screening me via audio, using a piece of paper with questions and noting down the answers. I could have typed all of the questions in the computer and answered perfectly. OK, that's the exception. The rule is that you talk to them via some sort of remote video application like Zoom or Teams or something like that. I'll get back to this..

  If you get past them, you get to some technical folks, also via remote video link. The interviews are using web applications to share your coding abilities - or whatever abilities you are being hired for. Enter artificial intelligence again. There are tools that listen to the audio, look at the screen and overlay the answers while you are innocently looking into the screen and doing your exercises or talking to the people there. It's insane! The people interviewing you, not only do they have to stop doing whatever they are trained and willing to do, but now they have to contend with hiring interviews and tools like these!

  It's worse, because this part of technical interviews has NOT changed. They still don't have a clue on how to test for technical skills or intelligence or resilience. And I am not saying it with malice, I've been on the other side, too. It's impossible to discern if a candidate is any good. You can, occasionally, determine they are really bad, but even that is murky, because they could be stressed or they might not ever have thought about the simple question you are asking them and suddenly they are in a panic. I was in a panic A LOT. You know, questions like what are the value types and what are the reference ones in .NET? I do know them, it's just that when I was asked my mind went blank! Wait, are strings reference? I know they are, but underneath they have an array of characters ending with a zero and they are immutable. Why IS that a reference type? Why is an object a reference type, but then a value type is inheriting the object?! Needless to say, it's not a good idea to have philosophical dilemmas about the basics of your coding language when you claim 20 years of experience in it. But that's what happens! And the interview that I did pass, I would not have hired myself if I were them, but somehow it happened.

  And don't get me started on the question I despise the most: "Tell me about a project you were proud of". Like you get hired to make your own projects, design them, change them as you want, and they are also so technically and conceptually interesting that they could be used to prove your prowess as a software developer and generate pride. "Oh, yes, let me tell you about the high performance massively distributed microservice application I designed, wrote and published while I was changing the color of the Submit button I was asked to". Fuck that question!

  OK, let's say that you get through all of this stuff: you survived the AI gauntlet and you were among the ones out of more than 100 applicants that were passed to a recruiter, the recruiter liked you and arranged a technical interview or two. You passed that with flying colors or with luck or by shamelessly cheating. You perfectly described the project you are proud of, or maybe a non existent perfect project for a company that in reality asked you to fix bugs in a VB.Net application they bought for the customer base it had in India.

  You then get to some sort of thought police interview, trying to test if you are a fit with "the company values". This basically means if they like you or not - and in the sad cases, if you say the right things in the right way. And how does this happen? Yes, via a remote video thing. If the camera does not like you, you're screwed. Right after you have proven you are actually good at what you do! Of course, the reverse is also possible and even probable. You finally get to meet the person you will be working under and if you feel it will not work, it's best you don't go through it.

  A question remains... why did you go through grueling technical interviews and why did the technical people have to go through them to interview you, only to then get to the manager or local HR overlord and get the stink eye? Because in the before times, when you were looking for a job, you sat across someone, you actually shook hands, communicated via verbal and non verbal language and in the end you felt connected to another human being. You understood more of who that person was and cared less of what that person was.

  But you're cool under pressure, you say exactly the right things, nicely translated to corporatese, and you get the job!!!!! Congratulations! You finally get to shake on it. But wait, you can't shake on it, because you do the entire contract negotiation, signing, etc. via... a remove video thing. That's what gave me the Tommyknockers vibe: there is an entire generation of human resources people (because they are young and have had a career of a few years which they started after Covid) who have almost NEVER met the people they are interviewing. Can you imagine that? You literally hire a ghost in the machine.

  For this job I got now, I am yet to meet a living being. I asked where the office was and they were like "well, set up your machine, then come to the office". That's backwards! It's absolutely normal to go to the office, try to set up your machine, fail, bother some colleague about it who will resent it terribly, but then you take them out for beers and it's all water under the bridge and you gained a friend. That's how humans are supposed to work.

  But there is more. Apparently, this method of "plug'n'play employees" has become a national security issue. Malicious agents are a lot more motivated, trained and have a lot better resources to get hired than the regular guy. You hire someone and you just game a way in to a hacker collective. Even when things are not going to that extreme, you get the employee who works remotely at multiple companies. I mean, why not? That's the dream, no? Compress all the work as efficiently as possible in the time you have got. But that leads to people who don't act like people. They don't collaborate, they do the minimum required and then clock off, they don't work inside a team because there is no team, just a "harness". And who can blame them? They have been treated like interchangeable components of the machine, why shouldn't they be acting like machine components?

Becoming Tommyknockers

  And finally, when the improbable happened and both employee and company are happy with the arrangement and it all works fine, you get the AI meddling again. Because you don't just work now, you are assisted by artificially intelligent agents that do the menial dirty work and let you enjoy the privilege of... managing AI agents. You don't write code anymore, you write complicated collections of rules written in English so that your agents do not royally fuck anything up when they write .NET code, don't accidentally delete production databases or just hallucinate solutions that don't actually work. Not only do you not interact with human beings, but you are forcefully integrating with machine agents that work "for you". This actually translates to "learn from you so you can be replaced".

  Oh, no, I am not paranoid and I am not talking about myself here. I have already been partially replaced when the agents are writing code, unit test, run tasks on my machine, create PRs, comment on existing PRs, write emails and so on. No. I am talking about the company, your employer. They buy these expensive models that record everything you do, the way you do it, your needs, your expectations, your desires, then they do it themselves and put you out of business. Even medium to large companies can get stomped upon like that, see the Figma and Stitch situation.

  The bottom line is that all of this is done in the name of efficiency and productivity and empowering creators and even when it comes to that, there are larger consequences. It's not just the 1984 bland sameness of people being turned into cogs in a heartless machine. Human resources people don't meet any humans. Software engineers don't write any code. Managers manage via dashboards and fire people via company chat.

  And it's everywhere. Social unrest is vented in social media. You buy food via an app, brought by a guy who is just cheaper than any automation today, but never gets treated like anything other than an automaton. Presidents preside via information they get from the TV. Reporters are not investigating anything, they are just rehashing the information they get online from somewhere else, usually a corporate garbage shoot to which access is conditioned by compliance. Kids play on their phones and are best friends with AI. Parents are happy for that because they want to doom scroll AI generated content.

  You probably are rolling your eyes at the last paragraph, but it's not the raving of an old man in a new machine world, it's just a reflection of a simple question: where are all the people?! The machines are not replacing us, they are changing us! We become the Tommyknockers and don't even realize it. We are so afraid of being outdone by machines that we declare anything they do is not human and we let them do it, but we get the leftovers! "Of course AIs are not conscious or even intelligent, because they don't feel the existential dread of waking up in the morning, scratch your balls and try very hard to find some combination of food items that would bring any sort of instant gratification. I don't want to write code, I want to be free to be creative to think of solutions to real problems!". If that were even close to true, you wouldn't have been a developer in the first place. I wonder, when machines will inevitably start to exhibit emotions, will we shun emotions altogether and declare we don't need to feel, because machines can do that for us, and better?

  I have been trying to overcome this general feeling of malaise, this sensation that the world is hollow and fake, by meeting with friends, drinking beers, having genuine human interaction and experiences. And when it works, it works! But it's working less and less. The friends I meet are changed as well, we are a little bit more hollow and fake inside, too. Remember the good ole' times when a get together became stale and you knew it because people started telling off topic jokes to pass the time? We don't even get to tell jokes anymore, because they have been replaced by Internet memes. We replaced the awkward joke section with opinion pieces about movies or maybe a book, while we try our best to look like those AI generated images of diverse smiling friends having all the fun in the world.

  Remember music? When was the last time you selected your own music or discovered a brand new artist that made you feel anything? When have you talked to anyone else about new music? I go to bars and I hear the same music from screens where AI generated animations are running. The music may be AI for all I know. It says nothing, it makes me feel nothing, it's just there to fill a sensory void that we have been conditioned to ignore. For decades our lives have had a soundtrack. Go somewhere where it's quiet and you start feeling that something is missing. It's not that you want to listen to some specific music, it's not that you miss your favorite artist. It's just... too quiet.

Conclusion

  The zombie apocalypse is not coming, it has come and gone. We are what's left, the zombies. I sometimes meet people that still live a full life, they hike, they play, they raise children, they are part of passionate communities and so on. I envy the hell out of them. And when I want to join them, I feel like I am failing the interview. "Yes, you can join, but... what are you bringing to the table?" "Hey, I can talk all day about the negative effects of optimizing human society!" "Yeah, no, thanks. Have you watched any good films lately?"

  Where are all the people? I am alone in the room, writing on a keyboard ranting to a text screen. There is no one here.

  So you read a book, and it's not great. It's something that you imagine you could spin up in a few months after a writing course. The ideas are derivative, the characters are cardboard cutouts and the writing is merely decent. It does push some emotional buttons, so you enjoy it as much as one can and then reach its end. And the acknowledgements come.

  Are these things designed to feel small and powerless? The author starts with the family and close friends and then goes on with the editor, the proofreader, the publisher, the marketers, the people who "battle tested" their ideas, the other authors who lied the book was amazing, planet Earth for supporting their weight and growing ego... It just goes on and on and on, like movie end credits. A special thanks to the government of Canada for not taxing me out of existence. Thank you Amazon for allowing me to self publish. Thank God that I didn't get early onset dementia while writing the book. Thank my family and friends for allowing me to write the book in peace while they did all the work and felt left out for it.

  Somehow, after reading that part, I started feeling I could never write a book. Worse, that most people would have a terrible time trying and failing. I have no friends in publishing, I am not a native English speaker, my wife would support me up to a point then demand attention and whoever I know that likes books would endlessly make fun of me for writing that badly. Do we really need an army of supporting people to manage to publish a shitty book? Oh, I couldn't have done this without the garbage man who regularly cleared out the mountain of takeout boxes!

  Yes, I get it, you're grateful, but maybe somewhere there should be some pumping yourself up. I am so glad I stuck to the writing classes that allowed me to write this up! I love that I knew it was a mediocre idea to start with, but I finished the thing, as opposed to angry jealous bloggers who haven't even had the guts to start. Yes, people helped me, but if they didn't, someone else would have or I would have just cut ties with them, because who needs friends who can't support one's passion? That kind of thing. And there is almost never a blurb for the learning process that helped them get there. It's always the last leg people who get the credit. I am sure there are writing teachers that cry themselves to sleep at night.

  I get that writing has become an industry, but even the tiniest of self published authors in dark corners of the Internet just feel the need to drop pages of acknowledgements at the end. How about: hey, I did it, so you can too! People have written books while working two jobs and taking care of their children, surely you can at least try! You don't need an army to find something to love and do it by yourself.

  Don't even know why I started to write this anymore. Book end credits? Come on! It's pissing me off! I want to thank my mother for spawning me with hands that are coordinate enough so I can type. It feels like a self eating snake, an industry that generates its own blurb about the industry, like a little boys club with stupid rules for joining in. Maybe these awful things are forced upon them when they get the series deal. Oh, you have more ideas in this universe? Well, I am sure you will. Meanwhile write me a nice thank you, why don't you? AARRRGGHHRGR!

  When I was a child I was playing with my friends and solemnly declaring that being 40 is terrible and that we would never ever want to reach that age. Now I am 49 and... well, yes, I was a bit right... but now I am considering my next moves in my life. Things like "I've worked so hard so far, now I should enjoy the fruits of that labor" and "Maybe I should switch my career to something completely different" and "People have started a new life at 50 before".

  And it would be easy to dismiss the fanciful exuberance of youth and shrug it off as something from the past if it weren't happening it continuously. The universe, with its wonderful sense of humor, makes me revisit a lot of my past edicts, whether they were positive or negative, and forces me to consider the opposite as true. All the damn time!

  Am I smug about something like having hair on my head, perfect vision, being a good software developer and so on? Hah! God laughs and makes me bald, needing glasses and destroys software as a business in just a few years. I guess with all of those jokes about software developers being gods we had it coming, like poor Nietzsche. Do I dismiss command line tools and npm and Vim and the Linux way of life as masochistic when you have smart tools like Visual Studio that work perfectly with a wonderfully designed .NET ecosystem? Everybody goes Node.js and Python and color terminals. Do I feel pride in my mental sanity? Then... oh, wait, that hasn't happened yet. Or has it?

  In a way, this is something people have praised in stories: the opportunity to rethink your certainty and revisit your beliefs, to learn from life and turn intelligence into wisdom. But it's also such a waste... you get to understand things when you are out of time and energy to do anything with it. Should I become a teacher? It never works. Youngsters don't listen, they need to experience. I've been there, I know, and I was a nerd, not a bad boy. And it's not even the end of the road. Past wisdom routinely gets revealed as hubris, delusion or wishful thinking. Also stupidity.

  I did mentor people and it felt good. Some have even been grateful for it and felt that it helped them on their path in life. Yet every time someone asks me if I am prepared to mentor at a new job I am a bit reluctant. Am I smart enough to teach anyone anything? Will I make or break those people? I am perfectly happy to peer-to-peer knowledge, but a position of authority such as "mentor" feels wrong.

  Do you know I now want to find a job with an office? When everybody was going to the office, I was praising the wonders of working from home and lamenting the lack of such opportunities and how much time one wasted on the commute. Now that so many people do that, and I myself did it for six years, I want back in the office. And not even for the usual reasons people want that (i.e. getting away from their families) but for the sheer pleasure of socializing and being amongst people. If you know me even a little, you should find that extremely amusing.

  I believe people crave a stable identity that is also successful. Yet that almost never happens, especially now, when the world is being pulled from under our collective feet. If you build and cement your principles, you are labeled as stubborn, inflexible, maybe even pigheaded, and that even if those principles do fit reality and bring an advantage. A person who changes their world view as it suits them is "a leaf in the wind", untrustworthy, hypocrite. And in these times of intense polarization, people who have lived enough and were smart enough to gather some wisdom, see both sides, weigh them for pros and cons and think for themselves, those people have become the enemy, the dreaded centrists who can't choose a side and give their lives for the cause.

  Some folk have the great fortune to be born in power and wealth, surrounded by people telling them how wonderful they are and how they are never wrong. They are never forced to grow in any significant way. It's stable, it's successful, but it doesn't work either. The human brain finds a way to feel shitty about life anyway, find drama and conflict, something to complain about or brag for no discernable reason other than to make other people feel worse.

  What good even is wisdom, if all it shows you is that nothing is permanent, very few things if any are even real, that there is no purpose in life but the one you create, that everything has at least two sides that contradict each other without any of them being false and that our efforts are ultimately pointless, even if within our lifetimes they can be heroic and awesome and inspiring as well? It's a complication no one seems to need!

  Is growth supposed to lead to happiness? It doesn't feel fun when one is forced to grow, yet it does feel pleasant when the growing is done. Like sport. I always hated sport. Probably I will have to start doing that.

  As I write this I am looking at my dog. I don't know if he is generally happy, but I've seen him extatic and joyful and sad and determined and lazy and comfortable and anxious and scared. Can he explain why he felt all of those things? Certainly not. Can he think about it later on and decide on better responses? Doesn't seem like it most of the times. He does look regretful when doing some stupid thing, but then that is how people interpret it and he could just fake it. Right now he is sleeping next to me. That's important to him, to be next to me. If I leave for another room he will wake up and follow me, ask to be put on the sofa or whatever, then resume sleeping. My dog doesn't feel karma is a bitch, he doesn't strive to become better or understand the world, he just follows his instincts and emotions and enjoys the hell out of them. He seems content to love and be loved. Is love all we need?

  I know I am not saying anything revolutionary here, it's not even structured thought, it's more of an emotional journaling thing. A lot of other people have examined this better and to no definitive end either. I always thought that we humans are just smart enough to realize how stupid we are. Maybe that's the ultimate cosmic joke, to be pushed to think of problems that we have no ability to solve, feeling dumb while doing it.

  My instincts are telling me I should either wait and do absolutely nothing, or push through and reinvent myself. In other words, wait for the world to make sense again or push to make sense of the world as is. It's hard, because I've had half a century of training for a different life. Also because I am lazy, as a developer should be. In a sense, we've reached the pinnacle of software engineering by designing something that will do all our work for us. We overlazed ourselves. Maybe that's the answer! I should just lazily enjoy the rest of my life... ah, damn it, I am married! 

  Let me tell you a story. The main character is a little boy, poor, abused, low in status. Maybe it's a girl or an office worker or a prostitute or a grizzled cop maybe a princess, it doesn't really matter. At some point or another, their situation changes dramatically. Depending on the genre, they may discover wonderous new worlds, or that they are secretly heirs of some kingdom, or descend into terror and madness. Sometimes they just struggle to survive or chase some McGuffin.

  No matter what happens in the end, the thrill of the story is highest during this stage, where the outcome is uncertain, the status quo has been obliterated and our hero realizes the world is not like they thought it was. Now, you need an outcome to finish the story, but in truth people care about that part only in the interest of closure. You want to know how it ends so you can start something else, perhaps.

  You may have recognized here the classic three act structure in writing, yet this post is not about writing, but about the part of this scenario that is often overlooked. Our character lived in a stable environment that they perceived as "reality". The second act deals with destroying that stability, while the third restores it, albeit in a different state than when the story started. However, from the standpoint of the hero, the original state is no longer real, supplanted by the new one which became the new "reality".

  In order for fiction to work, that reality has to be significantly more positive or negative in order to get that emotional reaction from the consumer, but in real (?) life, these jumps are smaller and less dramatic and they happen constantly. People may get to a point where they reflect on their youth and conclude that they didn't know what was true, while now they do and kind of regret it. The world seems not as good, free, beautiful, hopeful. People may feel they understand the ugly mechanisms underlying "reality", the unchanging, uncaring, Universe 25 rat rules. It's the grumpy old man cliché.

  But if you dig even deeper, the feeling one gets when reaching this apparent stage of enlightenment is the opposite of real. It just feels fake, pointless, mindless. It's that feeling described in The Matrix: You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. When change comes, upending everything, that's when you feel the most real, while desperately clinging to the belief that it is most definitely cannot be.

  It's an amygdala response, a ripple in the fabric of patterns that brains are designed to detect and construct. It's flight or fight. Your whole animal being is poised to answer a perceived threat. That is why, without external pressure, everything tends to settle into something ritualistic and stagnant societally, resistant to change. Yet, we are also designed to avoid boredom, almost above all else. Therein lies the conflict: it doesn't feel real unless it's challenging, threatening. Rational understanding of the way cogs turn in the machine doesn't make a dent in this.

  So here's my point: what if we trust our gut, so to speak, and define reality as the thing that makes us feel real? Objective reality is all good and well when we're doing science and engineering and perhaps economics, but it makes us miserable when applied to our own lives. I am not saying to go to the extreme and reject what's right under your nose - I have the unfortunate opportunity to know people who do that and it is not pretty, but to see what's there and reject its power over us. Yes, the world is shit, but my life isn't. Objective reality is grey and drab, but I will focus on the dream instead. That kind of thing.

  Does it sound like I am selling you one of those self-help inspirational leaflets? I hope it's not that. I am just saying that Calhoun's mice might have thrived if they only imagined a world outside their universe. Totally not there, but worth it. This is not one of those YA concepts where the emotional youths rebel against the establishment, it's an yes, and... kind of idea, while we improvise our path through life. It's La vita è bella, not Sucker Punch and I hope you understand the difference.

  I am writing this while I struggle with my own feelings of unreality about real life. My intellectual brain is trying desperately to make sense of things, while my emotional side is trying to filter out the explanations that don't feel good. Needless to say, that is not working well, and it makes me get that ugly sensation that I've been living in a bubble which once burst exposed "the real world", which is mean and pointless, perhaps inescapable. But what if I choose to accept the world as it is, while at the same time reject that it deserves the crown of "real" or maybe "enough"? What if repeated exposure to events doesn't lead to learning and adaptation, but to an illusory truth efect? We need that fantastical element, that baseless hope, the dreaming, to complete our perception in generating true reality.

  In fact, I have been hearing this a lot more often - which will become ironic after I finish the phrase, but bear with me: once people are exposed to physical face to face experiences they realize the anxiety, outrage and fear they have been constantly feeling was a repeated exposure effect from media. They then conclude that those feelings were not "real". I argue that they could be more real than what could be (somehow?!) objectively determined. I believe we hold more than one reality, depending on the different contexts in our lives, and the importance we assign to each is something that belongs to us. Han Solo shot first, there are four lights, Santa brings presents on Christmas and there is such a thing as work/life balance. All of these things are real because they feel real.

  After writing all this, I see reality as the ground. You can't deny it's there - you're standing on it, but it's your choice what you imagine built on it. That may be the only true choice, the direction of your dreams.

  One of the things that I can observe nowadays as a 50 year old man is how spam has changed the world, but mostly the people. You see, when the Internet started it was just a random connection between people and sites and any part of that could be abused. It was customary to enter some site or another and be bombarded with flashing ads with shrill grotesque colors. Popup ads came later to great mis-effect. Email was just as unsafe, people having to publish their emails in strange obfuscated ways so that they are not scraped into spam lists. Spam was everywhere and people were not prepared.

  But people learn, so even lacking any real technical or legislative support against spam, the smart kids would train their own brains to detect and ignore spam. An almost The City and the City situation, if you will, where strident portions of your online experience were just automatically scrubbed from perception through training. It's the reason why I find it so hard to see big colorful buttons with icons on them, because my brain is looking for the useful link that says "Download" in text.

  Spam evolved as well, though. Today we are just as spammed as ever, but in more civilized and studied ways. The purpose, after all, is not to curb your enjoyment, but to make you spend your money or your attention. It's just that the latter are much more important for just about everybody but you than the quality of your experience. Emails send you legit subscription content that you can (maybe and with great effort) unsubscribe from. Sites pop up small joyous messages that nudge you to buy something only when you do an action like scroll the page or move to a section of the site. Legitimate looking alerts warn you about the danger you are in and how you could be helped by just spending a bit of money.

  So that leads me to today, when even the visual language of the internet has changed. Every action has to show a little reaction, a shading, a rotation, a spark, party poppers, shining stars, animated people and animals emoting to your every gesture. And it only gets worse from there.

  And I am asking myself: how do these sites survive? Surely people open them and their brain shouts SPAM!!! in panic and they close the site, right? Well, no. Apparently, people raised on this stuff got addicted to it. A "normal" site with text and images and links feels bland and uninspiring to them. They NEED the feedback and continuous stimulation. My youth spent in the wild early Internet has created imune responses that just fire up regularly today for things that younger generations feel its completely normal.

  I am not here to argue who is right and why, but just to note how this online experience - like any other experience - changes us without our conscious awareness, in directions that takes a lot of time and self reflection to even perceive. To paraphrase Trainspotting: We are colonised by spam. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy thing to be colonised by. No. What does that make us?

Laziness is priced in

  When I was a kid, playing with Windows 3.11, I quickly found out that network drive sharing was on by default. This means that anyone on your local network could read almost any file in your C: drive unless you did something about it. And also, all of your passwords - including the user and password of your Internet connection - were saved into a single file that was poorly encrypted, so that meant that anyone in your local network, with a silly little program that would crack that file in minutes, could have all of your passwords.

  But I wasn't "a hacker" knowing this anymore than a person would be a thief if they found some money on the ground. Why would the premier operating system on the planet be this dumb? Well, the answer was simple: people didn't really do local networks in the age of the modem, people didn't read the technical documentation of operating systems like I did and people weren't aware of what would be going on to complain about it even if it happened. In reality, anyone connecting to any ISP would have their user and password visible to any other person connecting there. Not only that, but any and all personal files on their computer.

  I like to call this "the price of laziness". If it apparently costs more to fix than to ignore, it will never get fixed. This particular issue was trivial to be solved by any ISP, they just chose not to.

  Remember movies like Hackers or WarGames, where kids were routinely entering secure systems to the chagrin of "the man"? It wasn't because they were smart and cool like in the movies, it was because no one was bothering to protect their clients. Did you know that for more than 20 years the nuclear safety codes for U.S. rockets was 00000000? When something awful happens to you and people knew about the cause of your problem way before you had it, it means just that not enough consequential people had that problem before you that someone would be bothered to fix it.

  And now, when I am NOT a kid, I see the same stupid stuff. The official YouTube TV application is punishing me for every video with tens of seconds of ads every time I start one and sometimes smack in its middle anyway. But if you close the video two or three times, it just goes through. This only means they calculated the price of the average person watching videos pressing Back and OK a few times is larger than the price it takes them to passively endure minutes of ads.

  One might say that in this case everybody's happy: Google reports people have watched the ads, smart people get around them, lazy people don't, money flows. But there are people who are paying for those ads to be displayed and even if I find no real sympathy for them, their service provider should!

  Same thing with JavaScript paywalls on major news websites. You open one article or two and they slap you with "You've read the last free article for today". Or... you could just disable JavaScript for the site and read ALL of their articles. And I know there is a feeling of smugness when you do this, but again, it was right there. No one actually cared enough to prevent you to read the article! The SEO score was more important. Most people are paying.

  Piracy is the perfect example. There are today simple ways of watching any movie or series, listening to any song, reading any book, without paying a dime. And while authors are crying about it, no one actually does anything because most people find those ways more complicated than paying tens of dollars monthly for streaming services. Streaming services that will increase the price or bring back ads for the cheap tiers or cancel any show as long as they got people excited enough to subscribe to the service with the first season and so on. There was a time when streaming was considered "the solution to piracy" because piracy dropped sharply once people had a comfortable experience devoid of guilt and priced reasonably. But piracy went back up, because the price did not stay reasonable and the experience got increasingly less comfortable as corporations felt they had you locked in.

  In all the companies I worked for as a software developer, I was routinely denied when trying to fix bugs if "it wasn't planned". So when you use some software or app or web site and it fails in the most stupid ways, remember to not curse the developers, they actually wanted to solve those issues, in their free time, and were denied because there was no money in it!

And then they blame you

  This post is not about software or the Internet, it's about everything! The curse of "Good enough" is what led us to this. The laws that only work for some, the way everything seems to get more and more complicated by the day for no reason, the "security" that everyone shoves does your throat even if you don't want it, because they need your data or identity or shopping patterns, the sad predatory state of human relations. Ah, it's good enough! What could possibly go wrong?

  But it gets worse. When people inevitably start taking advantage of these blatant holes, the answer of the authorities is to heavily punish the people that do it rather than the people that leave those in. That's why when I was a kid I could find tons of documentation on how to do all kind of fun stuff in libraries maintained by groups of dedicated people, but then you just couldn't, because it had become very very illegal. That meant that yes, it was harder to find the simple ways in which you could circumvent systems, but also that it was a lot harder to train to harden systems. If you meet security experts nowadays, they are all paranoid as fuck, not only because they know how easy it is to get somewhere and cause harm, but of how random and stupid authorities treat people with such knowledge.

  It had become routine for companies that are approached by people who found security holes in their systems to sue them for hacking, rather than thank them, reward them and fix the hole. And even if it's evil, it's also partially understandable, because in the idiotic legal systems of today, rewarding someone for finding a security hole means admitting you had one, so you can be sued!

  If Hackers and WarGames were pure entertaining fantasies, something like Takedown - also heavily dramatized - is closer to the truth. There is a scene where the hacker laments that he could do any number of evil deeds, crash systems, steal millions, but he choses not to, yet all law enforcement is after him. Ironically, the movie is based on the demonstrably self-aggrandizing book written by the guy who caught Kevin Mitnick, not on Kevin Mitnick's book.

Other thoughts

  I wrote this post because I remembered the Takedown movie, perhaps Skeet Ulrich's best role ever. Mitnick was a slightly annoying personality for me, but I was sad to hear he died of pancreatic cancer three years ago.

  For a long time I thought of how to create a web site that would allow people to pay for what they stole, if that thing turned to be as good as advertised and people would afford it. For example you would download a movie off the Internet, watch it, enjoy it, then go and pay the company anything for the movie. If someone would get to sue you for pirating content, you could use proof of that payment to justify a reduced punishment. But of course it wouldn't work. Who would be stupid enough to declare they have stolen something knowing full well that some asshole would find a way to use that against them?

  But maybe it would work as a kind of donation system, a delayed Kickstarter, where you just send a tip of appreciation to authors. But it doesn't work like that, either. You would want to send the money to the author of the book you liked, not to the publishing house which essentially owns the book. They would immediately find a way to stop or leech off the money you send like that.

  And final nail in the coffin (quoting ChatGPT here) "Financial systems generally require consent and identification on the recipient side. There’s no standard “send money to this person by name only” system for privacy, fraud, and compliance reasons."

  In conclusion, you pay for "just good enough" and get worse, you are villainized for finding ways to abuse that, even if you don't actually use them and report them for fixing and trying to retroactively fix/pay for your abuse doesn't work either. Meanwhile anything better than "good enough" is altered to be more expensive until it becomes "good enough for what I am paying". Some might call it equilibrium of demand and offer, I call it paying to stay lazy.

Intro

  I felt compelled to write this post because I see this phenomenon grow and take over most of the things I watch and read. In simple terms, the author tyrannically decides what will happen in their world because they start from an idea and a stand-in for themselves. Many types of pressure are contributing to them not spending time with the world they build or the characters they write.

  I start watching a series or a movie or read a book and I absolutely love it. There is a fresh idea, an interesting protagonist and things are getting intriguing. And then... either it just goes on like it started without adding anything else or the idea is shared and the story ends, only to be continued in new seasons or installments that don't seem to go anywhere at all. What is going on?

  That is not to say that creatives cannot create great work by themselves, yet that requires a level of intensity and personal maturity that is exceptional. Instead, I present a possible solution that can be applied by many, despite outside pressure.

  In the post I will use the term "game playing" to mean any form of interactive exploration of the opportunities made available by a work of fiction, be it table top Dungeons & Dragons style stuff or any other method.

Commercial pressure

  First of all, let's get the elephant in the room done and over with. Most writing involves finding an idea that can be sold. There is no benefit in creating a 5 volume outline if you don't know if anyone is even going to buy the first one. There is no benefit in trying to determine what works and doesn't work with the idea if someone already agreed to buy it. Also, if from the beginning someone - be they a publishing house or a film studio - interfere with what you are trying to create, why even bother to make it good? And maybe you wanted to tell a good story, and you did, but the only way someone accepts a commercial deal is if you sign a contract for a continuation that you never intended to write.

  These are valid concerns which I am not going to cover in this post. Each writer finds their own motivations and resources and I am not here to judge, although it comes naturally to me :)

The ones that got away

  There are some notable examples of creations that managed to avoid the issue. The Expanse is one. The Legend of Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein are some others. The Malazan Book of the Fallen also falls into this category. Many others, I am sure. And they have something in common:

• they are collaborative
• they are game played

  All of the stuff above has been played, D&D style, between the world builders of those stories before it even came to publishing or adapting anything. That solved some issues that plague so many otherwise good stories:

The blind spot

  The writer sometimes focuses on an idea or desired outcome or they simply fall in love with their character to such an extent that they can't see plot holes that would be obvious for others. Collaboration fixes this with other pairs of eyes, let's call it a peer review process. Game playing it, though, elevates much higher because it expands the world in directions that the story did not cover. It helps find the questions unasked rather than just review the answers to the ones that are asked. The most important "what if?" that sparks creation is now enhanced with the "why then?" that anyone experienced when trying to explain something to a young child.

  History shows that audiences are starving for consistent worlds, for "canon", and are willing to make great leaps of faith to find one. A single logical flaw in the structure of a story may break its appeal to consumers and retconning is just a cop out, not a real solution. Meanwhile, a well thought out internally consistent narrative is loved by all.

The favorite child

  A protagonist is used to bring the audience into the story with a character that can proxy their point of view, feelings and actions inside the world that is being created. However, since this is also a stand in for the author, they gain the extraordinary powers of unbelievable luck, always walking on the right path to further the plot and possessing amazing physical and mental prowess just when required. How many times did we not watch a hero run across an open field while bullets missing them, only for then to turn around and shoot their enemies from the first shot? How many times did we see the evil faceless minions stumble, being dumb, obvious and cardboard while the hero dances around them, nimble and throwing funny quips while defeating them effortlessly? How many times did the character have to eliminate scores of evil goons before they get to the boss fight which suddenly has completely different rules?

  This is the Mary/Martin Sue character that no one can empathize with for long, yet the problem is not this character, it's all of the others. If the author is busy playing with the Rambo toy, they might not feel as invested playing with the Russian commander, consider their point of view or value system. Certainly the minions are not even worth considering, all masked, dressed alike and not even recognizing each other as individuals.

  Game playing destroys this issue before it even comes up. If you are suddenly playing the Russian commander, you will do what makes sense for you not the hero. If you have players assigned to the minions, they will gain instantaneous depth. And then the protagonist gains depth as well, as they have to battle fanatic idealists that not only fight for their leader, but have personal beliefs and want to live and have friends and family and feelings and back stories. Defeating any of them now carries meaning and moral implications. Mercy becomes an alternative, maybe even argumentative debate. Thus the story gets deeper with almost no effort.

The small world

  A galaxy far far away has a story to tell and everybody loves it. True heroes are born and fall, yet somehow they are always running into each other or are even related to each other. They fight on the same planets, say the same things and when they switch sides, the choice of sides is always the same. Within these setups, the hybrid trope feels new and creative. Wait what? A big Xenomorph with green phosphorescent blood because it came from a Yautia? How intriguing! A half-human vampire that can walk in the day? Amazing!

  This is a problem that is very much related (pardon the pun) to The Favorite Child. It's a Favorite World, the playground that the author doesn't want or know how to get out of. It's also cheaper with move sets or setup writing. Why imagine new worlds when you have spent so much time to build one already?

  Another problem can be bundled here: you see "the team" is made out of apparently very different people and you revel in their different viewpoints of the same situation. But are they really different? Once you realize that the members of the party are never in any kind of real conflict, you realize that they are all part of the same culture. There is no shock, just slight variations on a theme. It doesn't matter if they have individual value systems if those systems are only applied within the same cultural context. Then you realize that the villain doesn't have a true divergent vision either, just a different value on the same axis. Like watching a political debate between people from a country that you don't really care about. Their arguments seem pointless and the debaters more alike than different.

  Collaboration between different people fixes that from the get go. Game playing it expands the world, sometimes in unexpected places. Instead of one "What if?" you are asking many more in smaller and smaller places, which actually makes your world bigger and well defined. Instead of a few planets, a whole galaxy of worlds.

The ego

  There is something called "rubberducking", it's when you have a problem that you just can't seem to fix, no matter how much effort you spend trying to find a solution. And then you go to a friend and colleague and you start telling them about your problem. The process of translating your situation into words clarifies it and reveals the solution. Before your friend can utter a word, you have found a way out. That's why they are calling it rubberducking, because in theory you can just talk to one of those floating rubber ducks that you put in your bath tub and get the same result.

  But in practice, it's never a rubber duck, it's always another person. You talk to them after you internally admit defeat. The first step is not articulating the problem, but admitting you can't hack it and then talk to someone about it. And that's a very difficult first step, especially for creative people. In theory, game playing a world is easy, but in practice, sharing your creation with someone else is hard, accepting other viewpoints is hard, adapting to those viewpoints is hard and especially asking for help and admitting you can't fix your own thing is really difficult.

  That is why creative collaborations often fail miserably. There has to be a middle ground, a safe place of ideas, a mechanism to move things forward in the absence of consensus. Just "yes and" doesn't work. "no fucking way" is extremely important, too.

  However, while this is usually hard to arrange, setting it up as a game is less so. You can always abandon a game, no biggie. The ego takes less of a hit if are just playing around.

  How many times did you see a movie that was written, directed and maybe even played by the same person, which resulted in a self indulgent output that no one resonated with? Unfortunately, if someone is not ready for criticism they will always become a tyrant for their worlds and characters, never letting them truly shine.

Chekhov's gun

  The metaphor of Chekhov's gun has been used so much to justify trimming unnecessary parts of a story you are writing. If you write about a gun over the mantle, somebody better get shot with it by the end of the story. Otherwise, why write about it?

  But even Chekhov himself wrote about two unfired guns in The Cherry Orchard! This is not a rule, but something to keep in mind whenever you decide what you are going to write. It's not a limiting factor, only another metric to take into consideration. And then free to be dismissed. If every element of a story has a use by its end, then there is no color, no variation, no surprize.

  Instead of expanding creativity, this principle has been used to justify butchering stories in the editing room, settling for flat storylines that start and end predictably, movie and book covers that look the same and reveal the genre and often the entire plot with a single image and so on.

  The good stories are the one that someone can summarize for you and still be incredibly fun to read or watch after. Collaboration helps with this a little. Unless previously agreed, it's unlikely that multiple people will be seeing the same ending to a story, the same actions for a character and the same consequences to those actions. But game playing gets it to another level as it's generating different endings, maybe even different starting points, other characters, other locations, other problems that require solutions, maybe unrelated to the main one.

  When writing a book or making a movie, people generate a lot of extra content that is then rearranged, edited, improved, cut to tell the story in the most efficient way possible. However, the existence and breadth of that content is what ultimately determines the resulting story. With game play, you get a lot more material, much of it fun to produce and that may not induce terminal sadness when discarded. There have been cases when major roles from already filmed movies were cut completely because it was improving the story (well, sometimes that's the reason, but again, let's not talk about butchering artistic value for economic or social motives). It just stands to reason that with more material, you have more options for the better story. That is what game playing does.

  Even if you apply Chekhov's gun in the end, you pick a gun from many possible options. And this has been proven with computer games. Normally, you get a main story and then some sidelines. You have to get from point A to Z, but the game lets you explore a little some side quests that improve the experience and give you the illusion of choice. But then you get some games with very large worlds, multiplayer interaction and a minimal mythology, like online multiplayer shooters, for example. And, if successful, something wonderful happens. Bits of that experience is then translated into extra mythology! Books are written, spin-off games and stories pop up. Fans create and expand their own content. Story follows game play instead of the other way around!

Conclusion

I could have talked about this a lot more, but I decided to end it here. I think I've made my point. Characters and stories must overthrow the author's tyranny and live. I am not advocating for committees deciding the outcome of creative process - this has been tried to disastrous results, but to collaborative creative effort, supported by a framework that allows for risk and exploring of multiple avenues, even (maybe especially!) if they don't go anywhere.

Personally, I will always appreciate a playful creative failure over a serious failure to create.

Playing and creativity go hand in hand. I will go as far as to say that they can't exist without each other. Play with your worlds, play with others, let your creation breathe. Only then sell it.

  The way Hollywood works today, and by infection all other movie productions, is to measure "box office success" and usually doing it only for the first or several weeks after release in cinemas. Even ignoring that cinema is slowly being replaced with streaming, this metric is fundamentally defective. People don't go to see the movie because the movie is good, since they haven't seen it yet, but because the movie has been marketed successfully or its brand holds some power. Therefore, by using this metric, we optimize for marketing, not profit, entertainment or art. This hurts everybody.

  Some may argue that box-office also captures audience satisfaction via repeat viewings and word-of-mouth, even in early weeks, but that's almost an afterthought. To make that signal relevant, you should ignore the first week of returns, not elevate it as the most important aspect of it. Because, while it is decisive to how much money the movie is likely to make, it does not measure the erosion of overall value that it will cause to your remaining intellectual property, through reduced trust, lower future conversion, brand fatigue and so on. 

   Let's take the example of The Force Awakens. According to reviews, it was an average movie, not truly bad, but not something that the fan base were enthusiastic about, yet it was a huge box office success. The reason, though, was the good will of the fan base. They expected, mostly because that is what had been promised, the quality of the original Star Wars storytelling with the production quality of the Prequel Trilogy. And they got none of it. Because of that, the latter movies got less and less as they went along.

   Yes, there is a correlation of box-office and quality, but that's purely incidental. Let's take the same example. You spend $0.5B on The Force Awakens (plus unknown marketing costs) and you get $2B in return. You then spend $0.3B on The Last Jedi you get $1.3B in return. You say, hey, this movie earned less because it was not that good. No, it earned less because people were already disillusioned with The Force Awakens, but some still kept up hope and tried it anyway. Meanwhile, the studios saw The Force Awakens as a great success and let the same people who made it also make the second movie. Correlation, not causation!

   Movie studios, just abolish the usage of the box-office success metric! It measures nothing but how successful marketing has been and it has been pushed on you by - who would have guessed it? - your marketing departments. Moreover, the fact that marketing budgets are often obfuscated or hidden from the general public should be a dead giveaway that there is a major issue there.

  Truth is that while successful marketing may lead to bigger profits, it cannot exist in a vacuum. It has to build on something. And I don't mean re-use and abuse of existing brands. In fact, the explosion of this phenomenon just makes my point. You are trying to fix the fundamental problem of vacuous marketing by dredging up the past for anything qualitative, but in the process destroying that value.

   In short, my assertion is that the movie industry has been hijacked by the ad people and it shows:

• the quality of the productions dropped sharply
• costs have skyrocketed while been half-concealed exactly in the marketing area
• sequels and reboots have saturated output because past quality is the only thing that can still be marketed
• the movie industry has been overtaken by the game industry - which uses units sold and actual profit as a metric for success - in both profit and artistic quality
• people are tuning off movies and tuning in YouTube videos about how bad movies are
• streaming has broken the fundamentally ad driven business model that cinema system is

  This is not a post about the fossilized power structures in major corporations or against agenda driven studio interference or any other of the many nebulous issues within the industry. I am simply focusing on the most objectively toxic issue of them all: you are using the wrong metric for success! No matter what you change and what you try, unless you measure your success correctly, you will never be able to optimize for it.

  What is the correct metric, then? I do not know. A good start is to separate viewer satisfaction from immediate returns. Box-office returns muddles the difference between the two to the point it becomes deleterious. One might say that theoretically there should be a direct connection between viewer satisfaction and profits, but that only applies in time. If you build the trust and the quality, even while losing money, the viewer good will could be translated into profit later. Yes, it's a bet, but if you truly believe in the strong correlation between satisfaction and profits, how can you not take it?

  Movie industry, I wish you well!

  I am writing this on my own blog, as most of the websites I am using are crashing and burning. It's the digital equivalent of the guy surviving the nuclear apocalypse because he was living in the woods.

  You see, I previously had my blog on Blogger/Blogspot and because of an automated Japanese copyright bot I just got locked out of it one day, with no possibility of appeal to a human being, because the appeals were also handled by Google bots. 12 years a user of the platform and it was suddenly gone. Now my blog is "self hosted", which is a complete lie because I just handle my own blog code, but I host it with a Romanian hosting company. They could also be gone tomorrow just like that.

  Anyway, let's get back to the crashing and burning and the apocalyptic digital landscape of the moment. Cloudflare... err... flared. Or something. Suddenly it's returning 500 errors left and right instead of serving files. So... why should people care? Well, my chess site goes through Cloudflare. So does the tool site that edits PDFs for free while Adobe still tries to get my money for simple shit like that. The torrent files - in theory illegal - are using Cloudflare. Yes, even Pirate Bay, the site run from a file archive that you can download and host in seconds, goes through Cloudflare. So many small websites that you just think of as small independent things are actually funneled through Cloudflare. Why would anyway spend time and effort to protect their website from powerful DDOS attacks or other hacking or disrupting activities when they can pay Cloudflare to do it?

  The end of the world happened and you just didn't notice. The traditional media landscape is dominated by politically and economically controlled corporations. The Internet is dominated by other corporations, just as corrupt and, at their core, pointless. You can see efforts to control every little tidbit of information that comes to you: the defunding of public stations, the attacks on honest journalism, the laws that "protect children" by imposing rules on everything from what you say to what you see and to what you jerk off to. But there was always that idea that held in your mind: Oh, but anyone can make a website and controlling all of these would be impossible.

  Well, welcome to the future: most every little to medium website out there, small enough to not have their own Internet infrastructure, goes through bottlenecks like Cloudflare. When that goes down, the long tail goes down. And not only in the United States, but globally.

  You live in the same house, but someone has switched your foundation with something they control. Enjoy!

  I am writing this during the second tour of presidential elections, and as the first one has just been annulled. Yes, you read that right, it's a ridiculous situation, but it gets much much worse. After the initial shock of seeing Calin Georgescu clearly winning the first tour of the elections while no one seemed to know who he was, the reaction of people, authorities, media, personalities in culture and science - everyone that supposedly should be steering the country in the right direction - has been a hysterical denial of reality. But in order to understand what the hell is going on, you have to start from the beginning, with the small details that got lost in the media coverage. So bear with me.

  I will be talking about elections, but in the context of this post I focus on presidential elections, not the parliamentary ones, unless specifically mentioned.

  And so it begins

  The first indication that something was amiss was when people started to receive notices and fines from the authorities for posting things on Facebook during the election period, when campaigning is prohibited. This came as a surprise to many people who don't understand how modern social media works, because they had felt their online presence was kind of anonymous, at least protected by that level of unreality that feels natural in the online. How can things happening on the Internet affect your real life? This may seem as a small off topic detail, but it becomes relevant later.

  Then the first tour of the elections came and people were shocked to see that Calin Georgescu, an independent candidate no one seemed to know anything about and who had been predicted to get at most 5% of the votes, got instead close to 25%, giving him a comfortable lead compared to the others. Worse, this guy had clear pro Russian sympathies and maybe even legionary ones (this being a political movement from 70 years ago which was pro Nazi). How can one be for both Russia and Nazism is beyond me, but I digress. And it gets worse, because there were several extremist parties with their own candidates and if you add them all together with Georgescu's votes you get close to 40%. How did this happen?

  The favorite in the presidential race was the current Prime Minister of Romania, leader of the strongest party in the country, Marcel Ciolacu. He got third place, almost tied with the liberal leaning female candidate Elena Lasconi. Another shock, because no one expected one to lose so badly and the other to win so many votes. We are talking about my country, a place that has never had a female president and any woman in power so far has been some guy's puppet. I want to believe Romanians are capable of accepting a female president, but it's unlikely.

   Reaction

  To see the reaction to these events was both entertaining and terrifying. Being politically naive, I was initially happy, because while I hold almost no common views with the extremist discourse of the winner, I wanted to see people shocked out of their complacency, forced to think and consider the implications of their action and inaction. I wanted the arrogant country authorities and people of influence to get jolted into at least pretending to do their job. I wanted the "you have to vote no matter what, even if you're not represented by any candidate" mob to eat their words. Just like the Colectiv situation ten years ago, I was hoping against hope that this will be a drive for positive change. But again, I let hope guide my thoughts, to no positive result. What was awakened was the collective mindless monster of the populace and nothing more.

  In order for a relatively unknown person to win the elections there were several institutions that had to have failed utterly in their work: election officials, security services (which were giving fines for Facebook posts just a few days before), counter candidates (one of which was Prime Minister), their campaign engines and all the government mechanisms they controlled, the media (whether controlled or not), sociologists gauging the people's choices, the statisticians creating the polls and interpreting them (both before elections AND at the exit polls). In other words: politics, authority, media and science failed completely and irrevocably.

  The general reaction to this was panic. Not "well, I messed up, let's fix this", which I had hoped, but "I couldn't have messed up this much, something else is to blame". In a matter of days everyone rallied to... save their asses. Election authorities approved recounting of votes based on a complaint raised by a less than 1% candidate, after 30 years of refusing such things with a lot more evidence of fraud. Media was flooded with exposés of the evil candidate Georgescu, somehow overly religious, misogynist, pro Russian, Nazi and legionary at the same time, financed by shadowy forces connected to Russia and maybe China, supported by priests in the backward churches outside the cities and TikTok influencers, a true Rasputin. Talking heads switched their discourse from who should have seen this coming to how defenseless Romanian people have been manipulated by the unstoppable forces of doom scrolling on social media. Authorities got into action to determine the outside influences that had caused this, against their best efforts. The highest Romanian court started deliberating based on all of this new information. People got into the street spontaneously and peacefully demonstrating for democracy and European identity. Just today police started to raid "extremists" that posted images of weaponry on social media - for the first time I've seen this.

  I call bullshit!

  Just days before the annulment of the election tour, the head of the same institution that did it said he sees no significant changes in the count of the votes. In fact, this is not even the reason of the annulment, but the "declassified" documents coming from the security services who now, suddenly, had evidence of external influence of the elections and "continuing cybernetic attacks". Well, duh! Cybernetic attacks, by their nature, never end.

  But while declaring no campaign finances and clearly having someone with a lot of money support his campaigning, while publishing ultra professional high res videos on media platforms, some mimicking the ones Putin did, but tailored towards Romanian traditional sensibilities, while showing a public presence that people just don't have without a lot of preparing and training, Georgescu did nothing provenly illegal, so all the votes coming his way were sincere, regardless of how misguided. To protect democracy, government institutions just decided, together with the media, young people in the streets chanting for democracy and European freedom and old people talking in scared high pitched voices in the park, that elections just didn't yield the correct result, so we must redo them.

  I can't imagine better results for shadowy anti-democratic forces than this! On one side, a complete failure of democratic institutions, both before and after the fact, as well as the kneejerk reaction of people who should have known better. On the other side, a large disillusioned portion of the populace just having their choice forcefully eliminated, like they don't exist. Not only they, but also the pro liberal Lasconi supporters, who will now lose any chance of winning the presidency. In the end, the worst result for most of the electorate, a terrible long lasting blow to democracy and trust in authorities in general and a higher polarization between "city people" and "countryside people".

  Ignoring 40% of the population won't make them go away, you know. And they won't just die off and leave their smarter and more educated children behind, instead just younger, even less educated by experience, copies of themselves, fighting for whatever random cause or belief they're manipulated into.

  Witch hunt

  There is a term called Witch hunt which applies to what is happening here. I urge you to read the Wikipedia article, because it's very revealing.

  Societies function on a very simple contract: a relatively common narrative must be maintained and some institutions are created to curate and enforce it. When that narrative is contradicted by reality, society unravels, so there are only two choices for stability: craft the narrative to be a balance between reality and the people's needs or eliminate the source of contradiction. It's that simple. The spirit of democracy is closely linked to this, as it attempts to provide the mechanisms to keep that delicate balance and stave off as much as possible the necessity for "eliminating contradiction". But when that fails, the only solution is blunt force, mob fear, fanatical clinging to the narrative, which most of the time leads to tyranny and/or atrocity. Why is it so hard to realize that the narrative has to change a little?

  In our case, the narrative is the naive and stupid comfort of authority functioning regardless of what we do, that so many communities tend to fall into. It's already a first step to autocracy, the same narrative applies there as well, in the beginning. But when it fails, people have to find a culprit and ritualistically sacrifice them. I don't know what will happen with poor Georgescu, but as I see it he will either become the dictator of Romania or be burned at the stake.

  And a lot of other things are going to fall with him: online privacy, as little as it is nowadays, honest public discourse, as little as it is allowed now - even in countries which are paragons of democracy, opportunity to choose anything unexpected. We may see even more fanatical adherence to the mythical concept of a united Europe, regardless of its state, while becoming even more afraid of technology. And this just because we obstinately refuse any opportunity to open our eyes and think for ourselves. We have people to do that for us! If he somehow wins, which I find unlikely, things would be even worse.

  Can't wait for mandatory identity checks everywhere online and a global ban on social media for under 16 and of TikTok in general, as a means to protect democracy and free speech. What a joke!

  My thoughts

  Well, obviously all of these are my thoughts, but as a conclusion, I am terrified. Not by Russia, Europe, China or the United States, but by the people of my own country. We have lived in fear for so much time that it has become part of our DNA. We are controlled by it. Make Romanians afraid and you can make them do anything, say anything, think anything. Maybe that's true for everybody.

  I was disgusted to see how the Russian boogie man was resurrected once more to justify unilateral reactions by clueless authorities. What are you going to do? Fight Russia? Send security to arrest the priests who campaigned in churches before and during the election in the countryside, probably for heavy fees? How ironic is that Romanians are crying to the skies for security forces to validate and protect democracy. I guess in 30 years one forgets everything.

  I was happy to think the veil of illusion will be lifted from the eyes of Romanians, but what happened instead is that some of my own illusions have been blown away. Of course, I don't like it and I feel fear. That's natural. What we do with it is what counts. I wrote a blog post. Yay, me!

  To people who think leaving Romania will somehow solve the problem, it does not. But when freezing and fighting seems to not do anything, what is left but to flee? I get it.

  Personally, I want my country to get through this and become stronger for it, but the idea of Romania is just as much an illusion as anything else. And we've already proven that we can ignore every reality and forget any past, unless it suits us otherwise. This is not the country of my childhood or of my youth and it will continue to change in the future. But the attachment is still there and I wish it well.

Note: This article is about Chromium based browsers.

Remember the days when computers were configured to present the filesystem to the network by default in read/write mode? Those were the days. Today, though, everything is configured for security and browsers are no exceptions. One thing that annoyed me yesterday was CSP (Content Security Policy) which disallowed me to fetch from a web site information from another web site which was happy to provide it. The culprit was a meta tag that looks like this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy" content="...">

The content was configuring default-src, connect-src, style-src, frame-src, worker-src, img-src, script-src, font-src! Everything. But I wasn't looking for a hack to disable CSP (well I was, but that's another story), I just wanted to test that, given a friendly CSP, I could connect to a specific web site and get the data that I wanted and do something with it. Surely in the developer tools of the browser I would find something that would allow me to temporarily disable CSP. No such luck!

Then I looked on the Internet to see what people were saying. All were complaining about "Refused to connect to [url] because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive..." and how it annoyed them, but there was no real solution. Here is what I found:

• browser extensions to remove the CSP header
  • I assume this works, but it wasn't my case
• browser extensions to remove content from the page from the Developer Tools
  • I tried one, but when it changed the content now the browser was crashing with an ugly Aw, snap! page with a Status_Access_Violation status
• I tried ticking the web site's settings for Insecure content
  • How naïve to think that it would allow loading of insecure content
• I tried browser command line flags and experimental flags
  • nothing worked

I was contemplating hacking the browser somehow when I stumbled upon this gem: Override files and HTTP response headers locally.

It is almost exactly what I was looking for, only it doesn't replace content with regular expressions but saves the entire content of a URL on the local drive and serves it from there, modified in whatever way you want. So if you want to alter a server rendered page you're out of luck.

How did I use it to remove the CSP? I went to sources, I configured the local overrides and I then edited the page (in the Sources panel) and simply deleted the annoying meta tag. Now it worked.

Hope it helps!

  I was thinking today about our (meaning "the Western Coalition" of countries with a common anti-Putin position) handling of the conflict in Ukraine. I was imagining a reporter trying to ascertain whether people support Ukraine or Russia, Zelensky or Putin, going on the street with a microphone and asking randomly for opinion. And I realized that would be impossible, because any positive support for Putin's aggression will immediately lead to negative personal consequences, so why would anyone be honest about that?

  Somehow, people saw there was a war in Ukraine and they thought it's like a Twitter war. "Russia attacked Ukraine. We're cancelling Russia!". Fine, people were trained to respond to conflict with some kind of mob action, do it your way! But how can you expect that the result of the same action will be different in the case of Russia? On Twitter people mob on someone until their life is ruined, they mob back stronger or they just don't care and leave Twitter. What exactly do people expect Putin is going to do? An insincere apology on Oprah? No. Either Russia will be ruined, with all of its people, they will mob back, and you don't want that from a nuclear power, or they will just not care and carry on, which will ruin both Russia and Ukraine, with all of their people.

  We are in a situation where our entire society punishes dialogue, even compassion. How can you resolve a conflict if you are unwilling to even consider the point of view of the other side? What do you expect? Putin to one day wake up and think "All these people say I am evil. Perhaps I am. Shame on me! Ok, guys, stop the war! Do no evil"? As long as open discussion of all of the view points - regardless of their validity or moral value - is impossible so is the end of the conflict outside the complete destruction of one or both sides.

  How exactly did societies that took pride in their democratic ideals reach a point where dissent is censored, dissenters punished, their lives destroyed and discussion stifled?

  How daft to believe that skirting the responsibilities of principle will ensure the victory of that principle. How idiotic to assume that a position of strength validates your moral stance. Putin does that! People from behind the Iron Curtain had that during the Communist era, where everything anyone would say is how wonderful our magnificent leader is and how the Communist ideals are all we think about. North Korea uses the same system. And now "the free world". "Oh, another tyrant! Let's tyrannize them!". 

  Taking a side in this is as debatable as in any other conflict because both sides would act righteously. What I am saying is that resolution of conflict lies in the ability to debate it, not in coercing people to sing your tune.

  There is a common task in Excel that seems should have a very simple solution. Alas, when googling for it you get all these inexplainable crappy "tutorial" sites that either show you something completely different or something that you cannot actually do because you don't have the latest version of Office. Well, enough of this!

  The task I am talking about is just selecting a range of values and concatenating them using a specified separator, what in a programming language like C# is string.Join or in JavaScript you get the array join function. I find it very useful when, for example, I copy a result from SQL and I want to generate an INSERT or UPDATE query. And the only out of the box solution is available for Office 365 alone: TEXTJOIN.

  You use it like =TEXTJOIN(", ", FALSE, A2:A8) or =TEXTJOIN(", ", FALSE, "The", "Lazy", "Fox"), where the parameters are:

• a delimiter
• a boolean to determine if empty cells are ignored
• a series or text values or a range of cells

  But, you can have this working in whatever version of Excel you want by just using a User Defined Function (UDF), one specified in this lovely and totally underrated Stack Overflow answer: MS Excel - Concat with a delimiter.

  Long story short:

• open the Excel sheet that you want to work on 
• press Alt-F11 which will open the VBA interface
• insert a new module
  
• paste the code from the SO answer (also copy pasted here, for good measure)
• press Alt-Q to leave
• if you want to save the Excel with the function in it, you need to save it as a format that supports macros, like .xlsm

And look at the code. I mean, it's ugly, but it's easy to understand. What other things could you implement that would just simplify your work and allow Excel files to be smarter, without having to code an entire Excel add-in? I mean, I could just create my own GenerateSqlInsert function that would handle column names, NULL values, etc. 

Here is the TEXTJOIN mimicking UDF to insert in a module:

Function TEXTJOIN(delim As String, skipblank As Boolean, arr)
    Dim d As Long
    Dim c As Long
    Dim arr2()
    Dim t As Long, y As Long
    t = -1
    y = -1
    If TypeName(arr) = "Range" Then
        arr2 = arr.Value
    Else
        arr2 = arr
    End If
    On Error Resume Next
    t = UBound(arr2, 2)
    y = UBound(arr2, 1)
    On Error GoTo 0

    If t >= 0 And y >= 0 Then
        For c = LBound(arr2, 1) To UBound(arr2, 1)
            For d = LBound(arr2, 1) To UBound(arr2, 2)
                If arr2(c, d) <> "" Or Not skipblank Then
                    TEXTJOIN = TEXTJOIN & arr2(c, d) & delim
                End If
            Next d
        Next c
    Else
        For c = LBound(arr2) To UBound(arr2)
            If arr2(c) <> "" Or Not skipblank Then
                TEXTJOIN = TEXTJOIN & arr2(c) & delim
            End If
        Next c
    End If
    TEXTJOIN = Left(TEXTJOIN, Len(TEXTJOIN) - Len(delim))
End Function

Hope it helps!

  I was watching a silly movie today about an evil queen bent on world domination. And for the entire film all she did was posture and be evil. Whenever she needed something, she told her people to do it. And I asked myself: why do whatever the queen demands and not kill her on the spot? I mean, she sprawls in her throne while you are an armored and heavily armed soldier sitting right next to her. And the answer I found was: stories. The warrior believes that the queen has the right and the power to command him, so she does. There is nothing intrinsically powerful in the woman herself, just the stories people believe about her.

  And this applies to you as well. Your boss, your wife, your country, your people, your family, your goals and how you choose to go for them are all stories that you tell yourself. It applies to the stock market as well, where stocks have no value unless someone believes in them. And just like there, the stories told to large audiences have large effects as even a small percentage of people get to believe them. Perhaps nothing has any value unless somebody believes it has.

  Generals have known this for a long long time and they apply it today. Just try to find any news source that isn't biased one way or another. The war "in Ukraine" has already become a world war, it's just not fought with conventional weapons. The censorship is there, applied over the entire western area of influence, just as it does in Russia and in China and everywhere to where we used to scoff with superior moral conviction and accuse them of not being free. Conviction is a funny word, as it implies unshakeable belief, the worst kind there is. Convict has the same etymology.

  I think I am lucky for being born when I was. I was raised in a Communist dystopia that was already crumbling at the time, with people telling me stories (that word again) about the wonderful world outside our borders, where people were rich, content and free. I was raised reading and watching science fiction that depicted a near future filled with technology and wonder, fantastical or new planetary worlds, but most importantly, hope. I remember calculating that in the year 2000 I would be 23, a rather wonderful age to be going to the Moon and exploring the Solar System.

  Well, now it's 2022 and everywhere I look I see directed stories, weaponized to nudge me in a direction or another. And like any instrument wielded by blunt people, these stories are always negative, lacking inspiration - both in their creation and their effect, attempting to make me feel scared, insecure, overwhelmed, outraged, offended, angry. Because when you have those feelings you accept authority and the orders you get, no matter how dumb, violent or deleterious. The attack on the Capitol was caused by that kind of storytelling, the war in Ukraine keeps going because of these type of stories, both on the Russian and the anti-Russian side. 

  We are doing it to ourselves, pushing these narratives that in the end hurt us just as much. Gone is the hopeful post-scarcity future of Star Trek, where people understand living to eat and eating to live is not the way to live. Gone are the rebel fighters of Star Wars and the noble principles they were guided by. Gone are the Russian teams exploring the cosmos and solving problems using science. Everything is now anger, hate, suffering, explosions, political scheming, social agendas, special effects. We are darkening our stories and dimming ourselves.

  And I do believe that hope is the antidote. Not because reasons to hope, but despite their absence. A hopeful story is inspiring, protective and kind. In the fourth season of Stranger Things people use a verse from the Bible: "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." Of course, those people then proceed to arm themselves and try to kill a bunch of kids for playing D&D, another example on how easily hope can be corrupted into fear and anger. The good stories are of people who better themselves and think of others, not of defeating evil. There is no hope in seeing the evil queen stabbed and thrown into the lava, the real story is how the heroes overcome the evil in themselves.

  I am an atheist. I believe (heh!) that we don't need gods to be decent and that thinking things over will always yield the best solution. But I understand religion, how it tries to inspire, to raise hope, even if in the end it is misused by shallow people to control and usurp. I don't have an answer for everyone, but I have hope, I must have it. The alternative is to remove myself from the world, or join it in its perceived evil. I am sure there are a lot of people like me, though. Even if we feel alone, trapped in an eternal WTF moment, we are many. The number shouldn't matter, though, except as a reason to not abandon the world, to still hold hope for it, for each of us can hold. Hold hope, hold ourselves or simply hold against.

  Star Trek and old Russian sci-fi will not happen while I live. The world will not wake. As a pessimist at heart, I don't expect good things to happen, especially this first half of a century. But I will continue to watch and hope for a good ending.

  There is something really cool about Twitter, but it's not what you probably think. Elon Musk wants to buy it to promote free speech, but also criticizes the way it started at the same time as Facebook yet it made no money. That's what's cool about Twitter: it made no money!

  Having the freedom to express oneself with the only limitation of constraining length to 140 or 280 characters per message is the core of Twitter. I agree with Musk that political censorship of content is evil and that it is slowly strangling what Twitter was supposed to be, but I disagree with the idea that it should be monetized more. That's what Facebook does and for better or worse, it covers that niche. I have to say that if there is someone who can make Twitter both make money and keep its core values intact, that's probably Elon Musk, but I dread the possibility of failure in the attempt.

  Now, don't get me wrong: I almost never tweet. I have an automated system to announce new blog posts on Twitter and lately I've started writing short (Twitter core!!) reviews on the TV series I've watched. In my mind, TV series - should I still call them TV? - don't deserve the attention that I give movies in my IMDb reviews or separate blog posts like books and that is why I write there. Nor do I regularly read Twitter posts. I have a system that translates Twitter accounts into RSS feeds and I sometimes read the content on my feed reader - thank you, Nitter!

  The reason why I am writing this post is ideological, not technical or self interested. If Twitter disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't really feel the loss. But I do believe its values are important for humanity as a whole. In fact, I don't fully agree with Musk that bots are a problem, because Twitter was designed with automation in mind. A public square, he calls it. I don't like public squares, or anything public, to be honest. What I value is personal and my belief is that this is what we should try to preserve.

  Strangely enough, the trigger for this post was a Netflix documentary about Richard Burton. Now, there is a man! He came from a poor, hard mining town from Wales. He started with a strong regional accent and trained every day to have an English one. From a family of 13 (or 11, if you discount infant mortality, as he did) he choose a drama teacher as a parent - and took his last name, with his family's blessing. Can you imagine being part of a family that is glad to give you for adoption, because that's what's best for you? He was beautiful, hard, passionate and articulate, charming, violent, ruthless, living life to the fullest and hating himself for it. He became a Hollywood icon, yet admitted he had no idea why. That's what men were like half a century ago. I am old enough to have seen some of his movies and to appreciate him as an actor. And while I was watching the documentary, I imagined what Twitter would say about Burton now and what the people behind those tweets would be. The petty, ugly, pathetic crowd that can't stand someone so vastly different, so as not to say superior.

  But it's not Twitter that would be at fault. In fact, when Richard Burton chose to leave his faithful wife for many years for Elizabeth Taylor he was sued by a "subcommittee" for indecent behavior. They didn't have Twitter, but they reveled in outrage just as well. And it's not like he was any kind of saint. He was rigid and cruel and judgmental and lacking any shyness at saying what he though or felt was wrong with you. The issue is not what you do, but why you do it for.

  That's what I believe is where the line should be drawn. It's not about the words you use, but why you said them in the first place. It's not about preserving some social contract that everybody should be forced to obey, but about one's position about particular events. It's not even about "do no harm", because one's harm is another's pleasure. It is about intention.

  Coming back to Twitter and its most famous side effect, cancel culture: I think cancel culture is despicable, but I also partially agree with its defenders or the people who deny its existence. Because the reason why cancelling someone is toxic is not because of people disagreeing, but because people fear being on the wrong side. Once there is enough momentum and energy poured into destroying the life of one person, it becomes a snowball of fear, with people refusing to be "associated" with cancelled people. It's that fear that is the problem, the weak cowardly fear that prevents one from staying the course or ignoring the drama or even supporting someone for mostly economic reasons. Yes, that's what cancel culture is: people afraid to lose their money or some other currency because of other people hating each other. Cancel culture is not new, it just become globalized. If people in Richard Burton's time disliked a person so much they couldn't stand their existence, all that person had to do is leave and start living in some other place. Nowadays, it's all public (heh!) and global. You can't escape being hated.

  Yet the problem is not globalization, is people who somehow care what people they don't care about care about. Yes, you got a bad rep somewhere in the world, from people I don't know. I will be circumspect, but I will use my own judgement about you. Not doing that is lazy and stupid and, again, petty. As George Carlin once said "I never fucked a ten! But I once fucked five twos!". A crowd of stupid, petty, lazy people does not a great person make.

  Bottom line: congrats for making it this far into my rant. People are bound to be different and disagree with each other. Fearing to associate with someone because they are shunned by another group of people is just a feeling. Your choice is what matters. Twitter is a platform, a tool, and what matters is the ability to express oneself and to filter out people you don't want to hear from. That's what a person does and that's what the Internet should preserve. Not the mobs, not the fake outrage to get social points, but the personal: freedom of expression and freedom to ignore whatever you want.

  If Elon Musk would ask my opinion (why would he?!) I would tell him that people need more filters. Enable people to ignore what they choose to ignore and they will be less hateful. That also applies to ads, by the way. Every time I see an angry person obliquely or directly attacking a group that I am even remotely part of I feel attacked and I get angry, too. I didn't want to read that person's opinion and I don't care for it, but it got shoved in my face. If I could just ignore them, I would be less angry and more positive, as would my tweets. And believe me, I used Twitter's word filtering already. It filters out stuff like -isms, politics, U.S. presidents and so on. You see? That's a personal choice, to move away from hatred and judgement. Do it, too, and life will feel so much better. Becoming an outraged activist for something is not an inevitability, it's a choice.