>Young musicians in Łódź play jazz. At first, they do it offstage, then semi-officially, and finally they are trying to find a place for a concert. As it is forbidden in the Stalinist Poland, they lose their jobs, places at universities and their girls. Music is the only thing that cannot be taken away from them.
>Antonina Dziwisz, a cabaret artist, travels around Poland with the cabaret group. Unexpectedly, she is arrested and involved in the Stalinist political trial. The woman does not succumb to violence, despite humiliation, threats and brutal punishments.
“Emphasize the value, if you can’t, emphasize the features, if you can’t, emphasize the environmental sustainability, if you can’t, emphasize the equity and social justice”
The problem with Twitter, and other social media where people use their real name and photo is that in fact people are NEVER going to be themselves. People want to show their best to the world. I don't want to meet 'Yes' friends or 'always positive' friends. Social media is fake. There is no way around it. LinkedIn is fake and disgusting, looking at my feed for a second when I'm responding to recruiters makes me want to vomit.
I have known people who were going through divorces, abusive relationships and major life issues, all while their social media feeds were showing how great everything is going.
The only 'REAL" people I met online were either focused niche/small subreddits or gaming communities. As you build trust you learn more and more about their real life, good and bad. Growing up I met a girl who was going through chemo treatment and could not leave her home due to all the severe side effects. This was in one of the gaming communities. I really enjoyed her company and it really opened my eyes. Internet was/is an amazing place, I was able to really connect with someone who normally would not open up to strangers. In the end, I didn't really know her IRL, maybe that is why she was able to open up and be direct about sharing her thoughts about suffering, life and death. I have not been able to connect with anyone like this IRL, is it me that doesn't seem trustworthy or approachable?
Laravel’s “Collections” library [1] solves this, and is a breath of fresh air. Easily one of the best features of the framework (though you can also use it as a separate package, outside of a Laravel app [2]).
It’s simple to use, but extremely powerful. I pretty much always use Collections over native array functions these days.
Fun fact (not fabricated BECAUSE IT'S APRIL 2ND OVER HERE):
Japanese alphabets (kana) doesn't have a concept of upper/lower cases. There are two different types of kanas (round ones and square ones) but they are kind of equal in terms of strength/stress so they can't be used to express anger.
People on 2-Channel forum (Japan's 4chan, basically) came up with a brilliant idea, which is to insert a space between each letter so that it looks a bit wider and has an extra oomph.
Example:
- normal: 今日はいい天気だね。 (it's a fine day, isn't it.)
- angry: 今 日 は い い 天 気 だ ね 。 (IT'S A F*KING NICE DAY ISN'T IT)
At the beginning of 2021 I completely move my life away from facebooks ecosystem. As a hobbies photographer I moved from Instagram to Flickr, I wish I had done it earlier!
Flickr as a tool is very focused on creators. Once you start using it you realize that the company isn't optimizing for clicks and content consumption. This results in a product and community who’s standard of quality is leagues ahead of anything else one the internet. The idea of “an influence” just doesn’t exist within Flickr. It actually reminds me a lot of the internet before the FAANG monopolies.
They’ve identified a niche in the market and they are now striving to serve that niche the best they can. IMO Flicker is a radical tech company operating complete counter to the omnipresent hyper growth “conquered the world” mindset that pervades tech. I think they would make a good case study of how to build an online community that doesn’t try to optimize for engagement.
There’s a lot of good stuff in here, things I’ve used in my personal life to great effect.
The really important thing here (that’s hinted at towards the end) is moderation.
Do some of these things. A little at a time. Find what works and what doesn’t.
Saying the truth no matter what the cost is extremely dangerous advice to follow literally.
Pick battles you can win. Know when saying the truth matters and when it doesn’t. Know when your “truth” is just another opinion no one around you at that moment agrees with.
As my dad always told me, “you can be dead right.”
Life is too short to be miserable trying to obtain someone else’s goals. It is too short to optimize everything. Remember that happiness in the moment matters. (But not at the expense of the future.)
You’ll never find me reading a book I don’t like or skipping using GPS, because things cause more stress than benefit.
Having a car break down and having a magical moment because of it? Do the opposite. Actively seek those moments by finding people to help instead of waiting for the moment to happen.
If I have any advice to add, it is be honest and be kind. Fight when you need to fight, make peace when you don’t. You don’t need to fix everything, just make the world better by being in it.
There's some history of "organic" or at least "natural" ingredients in photography. See, for example, the early "autochrome" color process. It uses dyed potato starch as color filters. Lampblack (granted a petro-byproduct) separated the potato bits. The plate is coated with shellac (secreted by the female lac bug).[1][2]
Other big photo ingredients, past and present, include egg whites (for albumen prints)[3], gum arabic (sap of acacia tree, for emulsions), and cow/pig hooves (gelatin, for the emulsion)[4]. And, of course, the alchemist's favorites: gold, silver, platinum, palladium...
What I'd take from this is that we're used to technologies involving highly refined/synthesized substances with fancy names. But so many 19th century processes were done with more day-to-day substances, and we're still partaking of those technologies.
My take from experience and from what I've seen with friends:
- Consulting is great for people with good people skills, but it can turn into hell if you haven't them.
- It's very easy for experienced workers in some shops to take advantage of the "new meat", and basically shove you their work. Be on the look for that situation. If it happens run as fast as you can.
- Find out who are the top performers, get as close as you can. Some of them will just be political hacks, but others are fountains of experience, and learning from them will provide you with invaluable insight into their fields.
- Be ready to ship crappy products. Consultancy is about doing things fast and keeping costs down. Nobody expects perfection, although you'll hear business speak like "excellence" repeated constantly. Your bosses know it, your clients know it. If you are the kind of person that has trouble living with that (i.e. perfectionist), you'll be way happier in product orgs.
- Insist on meeting the client. Engineering consultancy is 20% about making the thing, 80% about understanding the clients needs and managing their expectations. All the big failures I've seen in consulting come from having middleman between the guy building and the guy talking to the client. You don't need to be there all the time, but enough to not be playing telephone with others about what the client wants.
This is probably one of my favorite developments coming from the quarantine. Maciej Ceglowski is a keeper of the torch reminding us of what the web used to be: a weird place filled with weird people who were guided by curious intellects and a belief that the internet can and would liberate us in some strange and amazing way.
Before social media amplified celebrity worship and extreme positions, everyone's voice on the web was only given weight by the merit or personality of what was said. No matter how popular you were on the old internet your voice was never loud enough to silence another. People were mostly anonymous (in practice because governments were caught off guard) and anyone could start a quirky website that was suddenly the talk of the town.
I miss the old internet that inspired a lot of brilliant and all too idealistic people to code into the night and bring us these amazing innovations. In some ways Mark Zuckerberg was cut from the old cloth. The original Facebook was in many ways amazing, quickly evolving, and so open. Everything took a turn for the worse with advertising.
Thank you Maciej for the trip down memory lane. Some of us may cling to the past but I hope there's another version of you and the old guard of the internet waiting for us or our future generations when we are gone.
I have intimate personal experience with the FCRA. Sadly I don't have an hour to talk about it at the moment, but ping me any time. Short version: it's one of the most absurdly customer-friendly pieces of legislation in the US, assuming you know how to work it. There exist Internet communities where they basically do nothing but assist each other with using the FCRA to get legitimate debts removed from their credit report, which, when combined with the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, means you can essentially unilaterally absolve yourself of many debts if the party currently owning it is not on the ball for compliance.
The brief version, with the exact search queries you'll want bracketed: you send a [debt validation letter] under the FCRA to the CRAs. This starts a 30 day clock, during which time they have to get to the reporter and receive evidence from the reporter that you actually own the debt. If that clock expires, the CRAs must remove that tradeline from your report and never reinstate it. Roughly simultaneously with that letter, you send the collection agency a [FDCPA dispute letter], and allege specifically that you have "No recollection of the particulars of the debt" (this stops short of saying "It isn't mine"), request documentation of it, and -- this is the magic part -- remind them that the FDCPA means they have to stop collection activities until they've produced docs for you. Collection activities include responding to inquiries from the CRAs. If the CRA comes back to you with a "We validated the debt with the reporter." prior to you hearing from the reporter directly, you've got documentary evidence of a per-se violation of the FDCPA, which you can use to get the debt discharged and statutory damages (if you sue) or just threaten to do that in return for the reporter agreeing to tell the CRA to delete the tradeline.
No response from the CRA? You watch your mail box like a hawk for the next 30 days. Odds are, you'll get nothing back from the reporter in that timeframe, because most debt collection agencies are poorly organized and can't find the original documentation for the debt in their files quickly enough. Many simply won't have original documentation -- they just have a CSV file from the original lender listing people and amounts.
If you get nothing back from the reporter in 30 days, game over, you win. The CRA is now legally required to delete the tradeline and never put it back. Sometimes you have to send a few pieces of mail to get this to stick. You will probably follow-up on this with a second letter to the reporter, asserting the FDCPA right to not receive any communication from them which is inconvenient, and you'll tell them that all communication is inconvenient. (This letter is sometimes referred to as a [FOAD letter], for eff-off-and-die.) The reporter's only possible choices at that point are to abandon collection attempts entirely or sue you. If they sue you prior to sending validation, that was a very bad move, because that is a per-se FDCPA violation and means your debt will be voided. (That assumes you owe it in the first place. Lots of the people doing these mechanics actually did owe the debt at one point, but are betting that it can't be conveniently demonstrated that they owe the debt.)
If the reporter sends a letter: "Uh, we have you in a CSV file." you wait patiently until day 31 then say "You've failed to produce documentary evidence of this debt under the FDCPA. Accordingly, you're barred from attempting to collect on it. If you dispute that this is how the FDCPA works, meet me in any court of competent jurisdiction because I have the certified mail return receipt from the letter I sent you and every judge in the United States can count to 30." and then you file that with the CRA alleging "This debt on my credit report is invalid." The CRA will get in touch with the debt collection company, have their attempt timeout, and nuke the trade line. You now still technically speaking owe money but you owe it to someone who can't collect on the debt, (licitly [+]) sell it, or report it against your credit.
I just outlined the semi-abusive use of those two laws, but the perfectly legitimate use (for resolving situations like mine, where my credit report was alleging that I owed $X00,000 in debts dating to before I was born) is structurally similar. My dropbox still has 30 PDFs for letters I sent to the 3 CRAs, several banks, and a few debt collection companies disputing the information on my report and taking polite professional notice that there was an easy way out of this predicament for them but that if they weren't willing to play ball on that I was well aware of the mechanics of the hard way.
[+] Owing more to disorganization and incompetence than malice, many debt collection companies will in fact sell debts which they're not longer legally entitled to. This happened to me twice. I sent out two "intent to sue" letters and they fixed the problem within a week.
[Edit: I last did this in 2006 and my recollection on some of the steps I took was faulty, so I've corrected them above and made it a little more flow-charty.]
Other ones worth checking out include:
- https://search.marginalia.nu/ (A non-commercial search engine)
- https://wiby.me/ (Tends to have those really weird and cool indie sites)
- https://searchmysite.net/ (An index of personal websites)
- https://indieweb-search.jamesg.blog/ (Search IndieWeb websites)
- https://millionshort.com/ (Ignore the first million results from Google)