Egorcentric

I'm a huge fan of Linux and open-source projects. Unfortunately, such projects always were incredibly unappealing for a wider non-tech audience, which felt really frustrating to me. Even during the privacy crisis and whole Snowden scandal the number of open…

If you miss the old internet's charm - you are not the only one. I really liked the grime take in the article, but in the recent years more and more I hear the second take that can be summed up with "suck it up, users", which I don't really support.

Let's all hope this claim won't be retracted later

What's better — orgasm or universal basic income? GTA 4 or land tax? Now you can compare anything. You can also check the leader-board here - currently "universe" has the highest rating and "the Holocaust" has the lowest.

I'm a huge fan of Linux and open-source projects. Unfortunately, such projects always were incredibly unappealing for a wider non-tech audience, which felt really frustrating to me. Even during the privacy crisis and whole Snowden scandal the number of open-source supporters and Linux users has barely risen, while corporations kept collecting as much user data as they could through their operating systems. Lately as a design studio co-founder I wanted to make a difference in this regard and try to make Linux more appealing. The first thing that I encountered was just direct decline that said "our Linux distro is perfect the way it is, we don't need any design help". Now I'm at my second attempt at creating absolutely free and open branding for Linux Mint project. If you can support this initiative by upvoting the following post, I would very much appreciate your help: https://github.com/orgs/linuxmint/discussions/36

https://annas-archive.org/search Shadow libraries indexer. Really glad that something like this continues to appear cause sci-hub’s stability felt worrisome a couple of years ago.

Recently more and more I've been thinking about AI governance and I feel like this will be a defining point for the next five to ten years in the AI progress in terms of adoption, as right now we are seeing the product launch effects. Governance was one of the core reasons to stabilise web3, but at the same time, it tremendously affected the adoption. Initiatives from the big tech players were seized right before the major releases - good examples are Facebook and Telegram. The latter has launched in the end by trying to deny all of the connections to the core team, which doesn't help the project. Apart from the adoption, I wonder how the technology might be twisted and used by the government and big corp. I feel like "Age of Surveillance Capitalism" might be a good start for that but haven't got my chance to read it yet. If you've already read it, what are your thoughts? Worth the time?

I rarely find articles discussing the state of design, and even fewer articles do it well enough to consider them seriously. But the report from Float really hooked me with some of the threads pointing to existential issues for the industry that just can't be ignored. In many ways, some of the issues (especially the ones brought up in thread two) are relevant not only to the design field but to content in general. The report has many downsides as well - from populism among the designers' ideas on cultural tyranny to climate change alarmism. I'd personally say that threads one and four seemed ultimately weak - the first feels naive, in many ways outdated and simply not relevant with issues brought up in the latter chapters, while the fourth is just majorly under-researched, making the whole thread a giant speculation.

Recently found this article referred by Scott Alexander, who had a similar experience at the APA meeting almost four years ago. I believe that "woke-ism" has affected on a different level almost every field in the western world. However, I hold an optimistic stance and have a feeling that we are past its peak. Interestingly I started to notice more and more studies on woke-ism, where it can be quite objectively measured. But my point is simple - more and more people are starting to note 'woke' culture and recognise it as an ultimate threat (especially in science), so there is a strong chance we will see how it goes down already in the near future.

Doctorow gives a very interesting perspective about BigTech (not only). I found that I personally don't agree with a lot of stuff he shares but at the same time I really like his takes and argumentation. Here is just one of his thoughts that I found very interesting to think about: What that narrative can do is shift the point of peak indifference. But, just as importantly, it can keep denialism from sliding into nihilism. What you have to show people is not just how bad it will be if they don’t take action but how much room there is to take action to make things better. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/cory-doctorow-wants-you-to-know-what-computers-can-and-cant-do

Bye, Cynic! In the past years, writing posts as Cynic became more and more strange to me. I don't know whether it's due to the format of the old posts or just a general lack of themes that I wanted to discuss with a larger audience for a while. Therefore, I've decided to change the format of the channel - from now on posts won't have any specific format, I will just share, brag, and describe what's interesting to me. It can be something serious or can be absolutely random - will depend on my mood at the moment. Posts won't be limited by any theme - the only limitation will be the scope of my interest. Also in the past years, I felt like editing messages to ensure that they are 'ready for publishing" takes away the liveliness of the texts, so more likely most of the future posts will be almost unedited.

Another day of the war Russia started a war with Ukraine that they cover up for their people as a "special task force operation". In Russian media, you are not allowed to call it a war as you are not allowed to call anything by its name and without proper confirmation from the ruling party. Every day from its start feels fast and slow at the same time. People outside of Ukraine live by following the news and hoping that innocent people will not be hurt. Every day gets harder, every night gets scarier. As a Russian citizen, the insanity of a single person and the spinelessness of the whole parliament was not a surprise for me. For the past decades, Russia has had its inner war. Opposition leaders are getting killed, some survive but still are going to be imprisoned until the end of the current regime. Over these years, Russians didn't manage to change anything: some like me felt pointless to fight it and decided to flee, some decided to fight and got imprisoned, others became a part of it. This war is a result of decisions made by a mentally disabled person supported by hundreds of corrupted yes-men. This war is showing the darkness of Russian reality to the world at cost of the lives of thousands of innocent people. In this war, I believe that Ukraine will defeat the enemy, and every day they prove it. In this war, I believe that it is Ukraine that saves Russia and not the otherwise as Russian propaganda is trying to picture. In this war, I believe that the whole world will come together to finally stop the nationwide oppression of the Putin government, which has shown to be a bunch of war criminals who intentionally started the genocide. In this war, the truth will win, no matter how hard propaganda is trying to prevent it. Long live Ukraine! Слава Украине!