FIFO

It’s day two of the Hemingway App rewrites.

One, I underestimated how tedious this process would be. I wrote some long uninteresting stuff. I’m way over my time limit.

Two, I noticed I’m doing this do-over First In First Out. So it’s not recursion in the technical sense, is it? Oh well. No going back now. This will all be over in no time.


What happened:
  • I thought I needed Microsoft Office, I logged in to office.com to check up on Excel online. Then it turned out I did not need it.
  • But because of this I found out that the account had 2FA tied to the Microsoft Authenticator app. I had long since uninstalled the app from my phone, so I had to sort that out. I used Google Auth for it instead, which I did not know was possible.
  • Since I changed the password for the account, I made sure I could still log in to Windows. I booted up Windows on Virtualbox, and the updates had piled up. Doing all the updates took a while.
  • While at it, I also booted up my Windows partition. It has been two years (!) so there were even more updates backed up.
  • I ran out of disk space, so I ran Bleachbit on temporary files. It was still not enough, so I deleted some files from my android firmware backups. While freeing up space, I learned about the Windows 10 feature called Storage Sense.
  • The computer still had files from the previous installation of Windows so I let go of those.
  • I will hunt for the deleted android ROMs some other time
  • I’m typing this on Notepad. I wish there would be not much fuss booting back to Linux after all these upgrades on Windows.

Last time, I mentioned vague thoughts about Facebook. After writing the thought, I realized it might be due to me being old.

The idea goes like this. Being normal is not standing out. If one wishes to be normal, one has to try to take part in the attention economy. So it’s hard not to stand out, because if one does not try, one does. Ex falso quod libet.

(I remember one quite famous tweet. It was about how creepy someone at a coffee shop is. The person wore no headphones, had no phones, and did nothing but sit.)

But this thought I had was wrong. It assumes that the concept of normalcy does not change. It does. It only seems to not change to those who fail to get the update.

I have a similar vague thought about ephemerality. But this entry is now too long. So I will reserve that for tomorrow unless something else comes up.

Enough for today.


That’s it. Day two.

Also, I decided the “Some things I noticed” section would be exempt from the grammar police.

Some things I noticed 01/26/2020:
  1. Twitter is making up for yesterday. This two is enough for today. I don’t know why I even got back.
  2. Triangle of Power
  3. Nobody said it was easy.
  4. Of course, it depends.
  5. GDP vis-a-vis Goodhart’s law
  6. A person who cannot see to the bottom of her own ideas becomes a vehicle for the transmission of confusion.” Ouch. Harsh much. 🙂