Technology

I use Syncthing^[No, there’s no iOS client. I’m OK with that.] to keep my laptop, desktop, and workshop computers in sync.^[Why don’t I just use Dropbox like everyone else? I trust peer-to-peer syncing because I’m in control. I don’t know what Dropbox is up to.] At least 99.9% of the time it works perfectly. Rarely, it seems to choke because of some edge case that I’ve never been able to sort out. But it never recovers on its own. Instead, it continues to report that a remote is 99% done syncing.

An ingenious study using the massive Weibo network revealed insights into the spread of certain emotions through social networks. Weibo is a social network platform not unlike Twitter. It is also hugely popular in China with millions of users making it an ideal platform for understanding how emotional states between socially-connected users correlate with each other.

But the highest correlation by far was among angry users. Rui and co say anger strongly influences the neighbourhood in which it appears, spreading on average by about 3 hops or degrees. “Anger has a surprisingly higher correlation than other emotions,” they say.

I’m reluctant about using Facebook. Recently I returned after a 5 year sabbatical. It seems about the same as it was when I left. But I had never really used Facebook groups before. So when a friend launched a group around a topic of interest to me, I joined enthusiastically. While watching the numbers grow quickly in the first few days, I realized what a difficult platform it is for having any kind of meaningful discussion.

“I actually called her, and she never mentioned my name. You know, I - when I sold - oh, did I get a call from one of the Environmental Protection Agency, they couldn’t find it because it comes out in big globs, right, and you say to yourself, ‘How does that help us?’”

Trump is one of the most amusing orators in the history of presidential politics in the the U.S. But I wondered what would happen I took the text of a few of his speeches and fed it into a algorithm that uses Markov chains to shake things up a bit.

Although I understand Facebook’s business model and I (basically) understand how money is made on the internet, I have no compunction about blocking ads, trackers, beacons and all manner of scripts. The current system creates layers upon layers of networks that exist to track one’s activities on the internet and market products and services more specifically. The problem is that unless I take specific action, I don’t get to choose what I reveal to companies that want to track me. Some have argued that using services like Facebook constitutes an implied contract between you - the user, and the internet application provider. It’s a ridiculous argument because I could make a similar argument that my use of their service implies a contract not to track.