Web browsing
I left you in the last Weekly Notes with suggestions for two websites to go and visit. I don’t mind repeating the suggestion here:
I kept following that thread the rest of the week. I started selecting to View Source again. When listening to Craig Mod on The Tim Ferriss Show, I went to his website. I loved some of his in-line comments in the source code.
I guess this is what Code is Poetry meant which used to be written in the top of WordPress admin page.
This was what browsing the web was about, in my opinion. That is how I want to browse the web again.
The World of Wikipedia Userpages
There is also a hidden world of Wikipedia user pages that is not widely known. Other than to Wikipedia editors or contributors. I used to consistently contribute to Wikipedia a decade and a half back and I used to love visiting these user pages.
I used to love reading L Shyamal’s ornithological investigations on his blog, Catching Flies. I have still subscribed to his blog on RSS feeds. When I got some of his recent updates, I visited his Wikipedia userpage. I loved reading this, there, about the reason for his contributions to Wikipedia:
The Western Ghats of Karnataka. Blink and this area may have already been destroyed, with ever-widening roads, street-lighting, power-lines, dams, and habitations following well-established and misguided notions of development that are entrenched in the minds of most people. These are the wild spaces that inspire much of my contribution to Wikipedia, a land that supports life and hosts enough wonders to engage everyone, physically and mentally, now and in the future. Incidentally, within this view live floral and faunal elements that represent more than a million potential Wikipedia entries. Converted (or “developed”) into a boring human settlement, it would not produce a single notable person.
Personal Updates
My post-surgery recovery is coming along well. The guy who dresses my wounds thinks it would take another 2 weeks for the wound to heal completely. That would put it at a date around the Malayalam New Year of Vishu, around 14 April.
Many of my family members’ doctors visits were on hold because of my recovery. Those were covered in the last few days.
Reading
- Your Content is No Good Anymore, vadakkus.com
How AI has changed the way children do homework. Even ones supported by their parents. It is getting to a place where we first get the answer from AI. There is no effort to search. But, as the blog post says, the reward is for the output and not the effort.
2. Book review of Jonathan Warner’s book More Than Words: How to think about writing in the age of AI, Tom Johnson
Tom Johnson is a technical writer. He reflects on the roles of humans in writing generally and technical writing in particular, in the age of AI.
3. When profit trumps principles, Tracy Durnell
This is what we have come to call a link blog post. It has a set of good quotes that bear repetition here.
To me, enshittification means that a person who lacks taste was put in a position of power.
Enshittification as a matter of taste, Dave Rupert
She writes:
Scale above all else is the philosophy that both buries us in endless genAI slop and locks customers in to enshittified platforms… and taste is in tension with scale.
This is something that Craig Mod talks about in his twin interviews with Tim Ferriss.
It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.
AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality, Jason Koebler
Writing
Work related writing proceeded at a good pace this week.
I continued the effort of writing on LinkedIn every Tuesday about technical writing. I wrote about DITA.
I wrote about my incomplete thinking on note making on this blog.
I am trying to write using Emacs over the next month or so. I am not that into programming – that’s the reason I use WordPress and Blot and not hosting it on a static website (like I tried to with Hugo).
Parallel Spirals 
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