The majority of people who are infected with the virus SARS-CoV-2 do not develop severe cases of COVID-19. However, some people develop a cytokine storm, and their own immune system may start to work against them. The response of many world governments to COVID-19 has been to restrict travel, close non-essential businesses, restrict gatherings, close parks and inform their citizens to distance themselves from one another when possible. Leaders want to slow down the spread of the virus, in order to not overload hospital systems. Yet, these policies are also slowing this massive machine; this infrastructure that has evolved to support several billion human beings. Our society, though composed of people and not cells, also has an immune response. Our societal immune system can bring us together to survive the darkest of times against untenable odds, but it also has the power to overreact, give itself to mass hysteria, and ultimately rip our people apart in an attempt to save it.
In 2013, Google discontinued their Reader web application. It had become a dominant application for RSS feeds, in a time when many felt RSS was dying. After Google discontinued their terrible product, people seeking alternatives found other web applications and quickly discovered tools that weren’t pieces of garbage. Readers like Feedly, Newsblur, and others, would report bad feeds and errors. Google Reader would instead silently fail, often leading people to believe their favorite bloggers had simply stopped publishing. Today, few people use RSS Readers, relying instead on liking Facebook pages, subscribing to YouTube channels or following people on Twitter. However, all of these methods are totally inadequate in relaying all potential updates between content providers and their audience. The best way to keep track of the people and content you care about is to subscribe to their RSS feeds using a good reader app, many of which work both on the web and on mobile.
I have owned way too many cellphones. I’d like to break free of Android without switching to iOS, but one of the applications I’m required to have for work is Okta Verify. Moving from Okta Verify to an open source solution was easier than I expected, but the path to discovering how to do so was not a simple one. The following explains how to get the secret used for Okta’s multi-factor auth codes, and use it in open source alternatives to Okta Verify, as well as in Python scripts.
I’m old enough to remember the era before cellphones. Back in high school, a group of us once planned a caving trip. We all met at the parking lot beside the tennis courts at 8am. “Where is Nick?” someone asked; Nick being the person we were waiting on. Someone took 35 cents, walked over to a payphone, and came back to us saying, “His mom said he left 30 minutes ago.” Today, we don’t have to blindly wait on our friends. We can send them a text, or organize outings using group chat software. Phones have drastically changed the way we plan gatherings and interact with one another, for better or for worse. Here is my personal history of cellphones, from my first black and white prepaid device, all the way up to the modern era of the Google/Apple spy devices we all carry around in our pockets.
Comedians have taken on a very interesting role in the past couple of years. Many of us have grown up with comedians that write a lot of jokes about politics, such as Bill Hicks or George Carlin. Yet today, we have comedians that are dedicated almost entirely to politics, such as Lewis Black, or political satire such as John Oliver and Samantha Bee. Somehow, even comedians who don’t constrain themselves to such narrow topics are now looked to, and looked down upon, for their opinions about the broader political and social climates of our society. Although I do agree that comedy and art can be a helpful mirror, as a tool for introspection on our current culture, I think we do a disservice to entertainers when we look to them to replace the roles previously given to intellectuals, academics and philosophers.
In 2010, several researchers at Yale attempted to look at biological systems versus computer software design. As would be expected, biological systems, which evolved over millions of years, are much more complex, have a considerable amount of redundancy and lack a direct top-down control architecture as found in software like the Linux kernel. While these comparisons aren’t entirely fair, considering the complexity of biology, they are a fun thought experiment. Microservices are a new-emergent phenomenon in the software engineering world, and in many ways, microservice architectures evolve in environments that are much closer to a biological model than that of carefully architected, top-down approaches to monolithic software.
Recently, I was listening to a Sam Harris podcast episode where he interviewed Richard Dawkins. At one point in the podcast, he attempted to lead Dawkins through a mindful meditation session, to which Dawkins responded, “I couldn’t stand it … I was listening to your words and I was keeping my eyes shut and doing everything you said. I couldn’t see the point of it … Five minutes would be about my limit I think.” I do enjoy Harris’s interviews, but his avocation for meditation borders on evangelism. Although I do meditate myself, I also have several friends who say they do not benefit from meditation, or it leads them to anxiety. Although mindfulness and meditation can be powerful tools, it’s important to remember that humans are complex, and what works for one person, may not work for everyone.
In high school, I had a band director who would rarely say anything to his students which wasn’t related to music, marching or directing us. When he did talk to us, typically before a big competition, all two-hundred students in our marching band would be silent and attentive. He retired my sophomore year and was replaced by another band director who loved giving us pep talks all the time, so much so that most people constantly tuned him out and ignored what he had to say.
The filmmaker Kevin Smith plays a reoccurring character, named Silent Bob, in many of his movies. Silent Bob rarely ever talks. When he does, his lines are intended to be profound or at least memorable, even if they’re very simple. I rarely post on social media, unless it’s to direct friends to content on my website, which I host independently. In normal social interactions, when a person doesn’t talk much, more weight is often given to their words when they do. However, social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, use custom algorithms for sorting posts. Although these systems are closely guarded secrets, they seem to reward people who interact with their platforms more. People like myself, who rarely post content, often get less exposure than those who frequently interact with other users.
Nihilism often gets a bad rap. Unlike other philosophical doctrines, nihilism is usually not a fully encompassing belief system. Although we tend to group people like Nietzsche and Camus into the nihilist camp, few philosophers or authors actively identify as purely nihilistic. Philosophers who tend to use bleak views of the world might do so in order to emphasize the reasons for holding a more positive outlook. As Camus says in The Myth of Sisyphus, “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.” The absurdity of the universe, rather than being disparaging, can instead be an acknowledgment that we are responsible for our own purpose. It is that self determination that, while acknowledging we may live in a world void of meaning, allows us the freedom to form our own happiness.
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