Remember to save to disk, and do so very often

oday in the evening (or earlier tonight) I was typing up a rather long article in Techrights, where I am the main editor.

As usual, what typically happens is, strands (or trains) of thoughts quickly become streams of words, and words add up to sentences, paragraphs, then a draft of an article. Then I go through the article, which tends to be coherent as it was typed in one go (after planning, having had some time to condition myself to put together a topic to write about in the ‘correct’ sequence), I correct typos, improve the wordings, add some more links etc. (where suitable and readily available)

I do this on a remote laptop connected over the LAN with Barrier, so if there’s a network glitch it can result in lost keystrokes and long repeated keystrokes.

Not for the first time, the latter happened when I pressed “undo” (ctrl+z), so it began undoing things I edited, in effect deleting amendments made for several minutes (far worse than when it happens with backspace as the cursor goes all over the place). Typically I’d be “hands-off” when that happens, then re-do what was omitted. This time, however, two things went wrong: 1) I did not keep “hands-off”, not long enough anyway; so I could not re-do all the way. 2) I did not press ctrl+s (save) for quite some time, so reverting back to the file on disk wasn’t a possibility either. I tried, I even did so from another laptop.

Shit!

I lost some work.

On the bright side: 1) I remembered more or less 80% or more of the changes that I made and could reconstruct a lot (with slight variation, imperfect replication, maybe even better the second time around). 2) not much was lost (either words or time). 3) it was only the editing/correcting pass, not the writing pass. 4) there was a lesson or wake-up call here. I should take advantage of it.

I will probably still take the risk of writing over Barrier, but I need to save to disk more often and be vastly more prudent/careful when undoing gets ‘jammed’. There should be a way to re-do (ctrl+shift+z) everything and, failing that, there’s a file on disk that maintains a recent copy, not what’s on the screen/buffer.

My editing skills typically use past experience (incidents) to reduce chance of loss/error, so my wife was surprised that it happened to me. Writing this blog post probably takes a lot more time than the time the incident ‘cost’ me.

I wonder if other people can relate to this.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this (over an hour already), so documenting to myself – and maybe to others too -what happened can be hopefully prove useful.

There is no perfect (error-proof) way to edit text, but there are ways to reduce the risk and the cost of mistakes/crashes.

Mountains of debt as “economic activity”

think Rianne and I share the feeling that many companies (not just GAFAM) hide their true debt, fire people in secret, and basically bluff their way in this increasingly fake economy where “everyone is doing it!” (Cheating)

We spoke about this with Rianne’s parents today. It’s too easy to be critical of the likes of Amazon, IBM, and Google. Rianne brought up Microsoft as well.

It seems like legal action is heading IBM’s way now.

‘ve begun doing a series about how Richard Stallman (RMS) came back to American campuses earlier this year. GNU/Linux turns 43 next month. RMS started it.

“If you have any questions at all,” one organiser told me ahead of the first such talk since 2018. “please don’t hesitate to reach out. We have several questions prepared for RMS during the Q&A, and if there’s anything you’d like us to raise as well, I’d be more than happy to include it!”

At the time I was too busy dealing with bullies.

To the host, Georgia Tech, there was a political burden. Quoting the organiser (definitely not a Cheeto fan): “P.S. I also really love that y’all hate on our Grand Cheeto Master. I know you’ve mentioned not being fond of air travel on your blog, which I completely understand – but if you ever find yourselves visiting the South, we would be more than happy to host you here at Georgia Tech for a session! Until then, we look forward to continued collaboration with y’all remotely – and, of course, welcoming the “devil” down to Georgia soon…”

“Thank you again for your time and support.”

I was not too far from Georgia on my last trip to the US, but that was 20 years ago and I don’t plan to come to the US again (not any time soon).

I hope RMS will visit the UK some time soon and preferably not too far from here (he was in Oxford).

N 2023 I rebooted my HP laptop, which was acquired a year earlier. Since then it has not been shut down or rebooted even once, so its uptime will soon eclipse 1,000 days:

Today: 08:23:41 up 963 days, 23:35, 2 users, load average: 7.52, 7.19, 7.07

New epic record on the way. Should a reboot be done after then?

T seems clear to me that IBM, the company that existed like 70 years before I was born (by another name though), is going to vanish in a number of years. There’s nothing in the pipeline, only massive cuts and downsizing.

What will we say to future generations about “the company that once existed” and was “called IBM”?

don’t think the quote above has anything to do with Snowden and an actor claiming to be Snowden is just a for-profit Hollywood production.

Unverified quotes are not a new problem. It’s not an LLM slop issue, wherein they call it “hallucination”. Even decades ago one could easily find false “wisdoms” and fake (or misattributed) quotes online. Those were not satires, though sometimes people passed off satires sans the disclosures.

The best solution is to check the credibility of the sources or trace quotes back to their source.

HE other day I wrote about happiness and this morning I explained what that means to activists. I was checking for further input. “Money can’t buy happiness” goes the famous proverb, “but sometimes it can rent it…”

I derive much pleasure from writing. It hardly costs a thing.

“On a more practical note,” a friend told me, “there really is a minimal income necessary for comfort and health.”

Simple life reduces worry and reduced worry contributes to happiness. High-paying jobs are typically not compatible with simplicity in life. But there is an alternative way to look at it – and one who wrote about Om Malik perishing captured that when saying:

I had a tougher week than usual. Someone I deeply care about had a bad fall, followed by the passing of Om. It made me think again about the impermanence of life: the mundaneness of every day can seem like this can go on forever, but suddenly in just a moment everything may change.

I can’t help but keep thinking about Om and how he was writing so much till the end. Sometimes I feel like I take my writing for granted. It seems to be always there. But what if one day it wasn’t?

There is always some self-consciousness involved when publishing a public blog. Will I be flooding people’s rss readers if I post too much? Why would anyone read this obscure topic? Do people really want to know *my* opinion?? Omg people are going to get so tired of my posts on covid cautiousness.

But mortality has this ultimate clarifying effect. Pride, embarrassment, self-consciousness, etc – what are they in the face of mortality?

[...]

(of course, this website may not survive beyond my death, but that is another problem.)

It links to this older post about “website graveyards”, stating 6 years ago: “I am hence thankful to my partner – I have never understood how essential it is to have a witness until these recent years, or at least at this point in my life when everything seems so shaky and transient, how much it means to me that my ongoing existence is being witnessed. That all of this is real, someone is seeing my pain, my struggles. I think this is the outcome of feeling not being taken seriously my entire life. ”

It says: “Websites shouldn’t have to go offline once their creators are dead, yet they mostly will unless they are hosted on a free service that will likely sustain long-term into the future (i.e. wordpress.com or github)”

This did not age well because github is not doing well and wordpress.com shares a bed with sloppers.

The real solution might be friends who can help run a site for you, like Aaron Swartz did.

The above blogger (anonymous except in domain name) should know sites can outlast people by decades, as many have.