Iāve maintained a branch of the old micro-emacs (not GNU emacs) for decades. And by āmaintainedā I really mean āmostly kept workingā. Itās a scrappy little editor from the eighties(!) and the āsā in scrappy is silent.
The version I have grown accustomed to isnāt even the most recent version of microemacs, itās a offshoot from uemacs 3.9 that was maintained by Petri Kutvonen at Helsinki University because it was portable and supported DOS, VAX/VMS and Unix.
Over the decades, Iāve āenhachedā that thing to actually mostly understand UTF-8, and increased some internal limits, but itās mostly the same thing that I used in the early nineties.
Anyway.
I donāt love the fact that itās a very limited text editor. Iād like syntax highlighting etc. But my fingers are absolutely hardcoded to it, and I am not in the least interested in something that makes me switch away from those (much less start using a mouse to move around etc).
Which is just a very long way to say: āDoes anybody know of some slightly more modern GUI editor that actually has good support for really changing keybindingsā.
And I mean really configurable. As in āI can make ESC-J auto-justify text, and ESC-Z be āexit-and-save, and ^X^C will exit without savingā. Not some half-way state where āsure, you can make ^X exit, but no, you canāt make ^X or ESC act as Alt / Meta keys for other keys?
And yes, I know one answer is āteach your fingers new waysā. But my micro-emacs works just fine, and so it really isnāt worth it to me.
And please - donāt even bother replying with āXyz is a great editorā unless you know and can show exactly how to rebind a key sequence like that ^X^C. I donāt use nearly all the uemacs keybindings, but I use an odd set of them.
Iād rather maintain just a keybinding file than a whole scrappy editor.
Edit: clearly I should have specified that Iām not interested in yet another āruns in a terminalā editor, or some even older editor (ie ārealā emacs, or vim) that just has had more lipstick applied over the years.
I saw some of his art online and thought it looked like āInvisible Handsā from Liquid Television, which I LOVED. Same artist! This didnāt have quite the same level of twisted, creepiness as that animated series, but I was so happy to find his work in comic form. Thereās more too.
Always loved Parrish's art: painted panels, odd proportions and perspective. This was kind of a bummer for me, but their art makes me want to break more "rules" with mine.
TITLE: YouTube Pseudo-Psychology, Algorithm Traps, and How I Got Set-Up
to Look Like I Cheat
My wife and I share a YouTube Premium subscription. A few weeks ago I
was scrolling through YouTube recommendations when I came across a video
on different male personality types.
"Sure", I thought, "I'm a therapist -- why not check it out". So I
watched the video as it invited me to try and decide which type of male
I was as they described them. I noticed they made the "Sigma Male"
sound the most attractive -- which was a bit odd -- but I thought little
more about it.
A few weeks later (tonight), up popped a video on 10 characteristics of
a "Sigma Male". I was curious, so I watched it. They spent the whole
video making "Sigma Males" seem like super heroes. Suspicious now, I
went to the channel these videos were coming from to look around.
I was displeased to see that 10% of the videos were on male personality
characteristics, and 90% of the videos were dedicated to how Sigma
Males Get Women. Video after video of how to bag yourself a blonde or
brunette. Yuck.
You can guess where this is going -- now our shared YouTube
recommendations list is full of how-to videos on attracting hot women.
The uncool thing is I have never watched any such video to deserve
this. The really uncool thing is my wife will be spotting this
tomorrow. Happily -- she is very understanding and not the jealous type.
Besides -- she can always look at my view history. I'll also be sending
her this message. :)
Is there actually a valid psychological theory outside pop psychology
including "Sigma Males"? When I Google it, I get lots of pop psychology
websites, including something called the "Incel Wiki".
Now I do feel slightly ill.
-- Michael
APPENDED NOTE:
I sent the original note above out a few days ago on a national psych
listserv and it engendered some relevant psychological discussion on how
AI and algorithms effect the mental health of our clients.
Happily my wife thought the note and situation above hilarious (I
thought she might).
Part of what was so troubling to me here was the clear funneling process
being executed on vulnerable young men on YouTube:
STEP 1: Grab guys just interested in learning about themselves. (Or
psychotherapists interested in personality systems.)
STEP 2: Make "Sigma Males" sound like the most attractive type so they
are identified with. (Lonely geeks are recast as desirable lone wolf
types with all the skills of alpha males.)
STEP 3: Game the YouTube algorithm so the next recommendations are how
"Sigma Males" get women. (I decided to bail at this point so I am not
going to view what is being recommended. Judging by the fact that "Sigma
Male" connects in Google searches to Incel websites, I shutter to think...)
[It's possible that "Sigma Male" is a term from a legitimate personality
system, but if so, its been at least partially co-opted by pop psychology.]
A discussion commenter stated: /"The mental health challenge is to help
people become aware of how AI is taking over their lives so that they
can manage the AI rather than have the AI manage them."/
My new resolve to periodically create new YouTube profiles to get out of
old tracking algorithms is one example of an adaptation.
*People need other ways to escape tracking to get out of boxes* -- like
the old BBS (bulletin board systems) that let you read (or not read)
every community comment from every poster without algorithms tailoring
your newsfeed.
*People need tools to recognize when they are being herded into specific
ways of thinking.* Like many of our political silos. Like my original
example above of an interest in male psychology potentially leading to
Incel-like "education" on how to be a "Sigma Male" who gets all the women.
*Businesses need some government regulation in what tracking they can do
-- in all environments, but especially the free ones.* People may need
to return to PAYING for their information sources so they themselves are
not the product.
Ironically, it was GOOGLE, whose "I'm feeling lucky" button below the
search engine field used to take users to a random website somewhere on
the Internet.
*We are now in need of actively maintaining personal ways to randomly
escape our information bubbles so as to better recognize them.**
***
-- Michael
*Michael Reeder, LCPC
*
*Hygeia Counseling Services : Baltimore / Mt. Washington Village location*
*410-871-TALK / michael(at)hygeiacounseling.com*
#psychology #socialwork #psychotherapy #research #incel #AI
#artificialintelligence #youtube #mentalhealth @[email protected]
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
#Algorithms #personalitytests @silos
Read #Bournville by #JonathanCoe. Redeemed a bit by a strong finish, when the writing and subject matter clearly gets personal, but a really disappointing clunky book. Too reliant on lazy nostalgia; I expected spangles and Choppers to appear at one stage. Some odd writing. Rather than develop characters naturally he just bungs in their internal monologue on one occasion. #bookstodon#BookToot#keefsreads
Just read Animal Life by AuĆ°ur Ava ĆlafsdĆ³ttir. Musings on life, death and light seen through the eyes of two generations of Icelandic midwives. Not much happens. But that's ok. What did I take from it? A reminder that human life is odd in some respects. Babies of other animals develop far quicker...and the earth will outlive us all. #bookToot#bookstodon#keefsreads
If that would be possible, how would you moderate comments, seeing how random things can get?
I donāt know what you mean? If I am the admin of an instance or the moderator of a group, I could delete comments or is this just not possible?
Federating with only approved finstances (federated instance)?
Why doing this? Wouldnāt it be enough to block the illegal instances and those who are explicitly against your topics?
What if you keep your blog, then push every post you make there to your solo-community on a finstance? You can engineer your comment section on the blog to pint here or fetch the comments content from fediverse to your blogā¦
I am trying to be as green as possible. Having a blog on one server and the comments on another sounds like an inefficient way of using resources. Why not just put the articles where the comments are?
With Mastodon I had the same idea, that I will publish an article, post a link with short description on Mastodon and then use the Mastodon post as the comment section, then edit the blog article and put the link to Mastodon on the end of the article with a simple text link like āComment sectionā.
But even this idea felt a bit odd and more unprofessional.
Lemmy looks like a really good solution to this atm.
Can lemmy be used as a blog (with comment section)?
I am looking for a fediverse solution for a blog and I tried it with writefreely, but it has some disadvantages I canāt live with....