Notes from the Library

Thu, 16 May 2013

If you're university-educated in an abstract subject (like me) then it's very easy to think that you are successfully seeing through the foolishness of the rest of society; everyone's lives are meaningless, based on foolish pretences etc. We all know this is bad, because it's usually untrue: casual analysis is almost always wrong.

Nor do you want to go to the opposite extreme, as I tend to do at the moment, thinking that philosophical discussions had with friends aren't worthwhile because we're not being careful enough and anyway if a tutor came along they'd show us all up. You can still get insight casually.

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entitled: Intellectualism | posted: 20:57Z
filed: /writing/thoughts | 0 comment(s)

I have spent some time over the past few days getting very paranoid about my online privacy. It seems that what you "like" on Facebook can be used to predict your demographic; since humans are as similar to each other as we are, this amounts to revealing an awful lot. Fortunately I never ever like anything on Facebook, but I do use the site enough that my usage patterns probably reveal a lot about me to Facebook. Not quite as bad as any corporation being capable of reading the information off a public list of likes, but still uncomfortable. Everytime I take an action on Facebook I think of the information this leaves behind.

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entitled: What should motivate concern for privacy in 2013? | posted: 20:42Z
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Google Talk was cool in that it federated with the rest of XMPP and (claimed) to let you turn off its automatic logging. Neither of these are true anymore.

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entitled: Disappointing changes to Google Talk | posted: 10:47Z
filed: /tech/net | 0 comment(s)