“The tears of the poor stir the poets. They don’t move the poets of the living room, but they do move the poet of the garbage dump, this idealist of the favela, a spectator who sees and notes the tragedies that the politicians inflict on the people.”
Carolina Maria de Jesus
People try to rub out things, but they cannot. Things are not so easy. What has passed between us is too much to be passed over in a sentence. We need to talk, to open our hearts to one another, examine them, and then together plan the future we want.
—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat
I find this from Chomsky really helpful when struggling to think how change can come. The how is often hard to articulate but the principles are there and are really what matters.
Well, I suppose I don’t feel that in order to work hard for social change you need to be able to spell out a plan for a future society in any kind of detail. What I feel should drive a person to work for change are certain principles you’d like to see achieved. Now, you may not know in detail-and I don’t think that any of us do know in detail-how those principles can best be realized at this point in complex systems like human societies. But I don’t really see why that should make any difference: what you try to do is advance the principles.
For all the promise and dangers of AI, computers plainly can’t think. To think is to resist – something no machine does
— Read on aeon.co/essays/can-computers-think-no-they-cant-actually-do-anything
In the book The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills emphasizes the importance of keeping a file (a blog, journal of sought) as a way of organizing thoughts, observations, and intellectual development. Here is a quote:
“In such a file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will find your developing ideas, your questions and answers, your personal notes and excerpts from books, your bibliographical items, and outlines of projects.”
He goes on to say:
“By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake.”
This is why I am writing on this blog. To keep an archive of thoughts hence the tag line “not sure how raw these thoughts are”.
“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
Guy Debord (1967)
“The essence of anarchism [is] the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.”
Noam Chomsky
I have spent a huge a mount of time thinking about how to drive engagement and sales using the already existing technology. One of the experience I keep getting back to is chat bots and their ability to automate and drive consumers to making a sale or to provide feedback.
I have experimented with Ohms Law Montana, awarding winning Coast base hip-hip artist. Here is a preview on the experience on Facebook Messenger. This enable a user get a sample of the artist’s music, getting a short bio and ability to purchase concert ticket.
The other experiment I have done is prototype a covid-19 chat bot with key features as FAQs, Facts about the virus and live chat to chat with an expert.
Look forward to running more experiments on this experience.
Every evening I get mild migraines, it’s being the trend for a long time now. It’s as if it’s programmed to act up in the evening at around 6 p.m.
It feels like someone is prevent my brascratching my brain with nails. It gets so bad that I feel like I can hear my brain beating like my heart. At this time I feel like a want to escape, any sound or noise make the migraines worse. I take a pain killer but it makes the situation worse.
I don’t like the timing particularly because it’s the time of the day that I want to keep learning coding. The thought that it’s pulling my plans back, makes my brain ache more. Am a night owl, waking up early in the morning is a challenge, most of my learning is done during the night. By the time everyone is a sleep when I want to get back to coding, my brain feels tired and torn apart by the migraines so I end up doing less. A big setback as I’m under personal pressure to learn and create fast.
On a Sunday afternoon I take time away to give my brain a rest. I walk around the city, stare blankly at the ocean and meet up with a friend if I have the energy. I have stayed away from getting too involved with other people’s problem in an attempt toin from thinking. My problem, once in a situation I think deeply which ends up tiring my brain at the risk of upsetting the migraines. This is taking a toll on my personal relationship as I don’t give a lot of thought.
I need to find a permanent solution to this.
For the next months, my college classmates and I will be working on creating a mobile web app. The details are supposed to be secret, we decided to create the app after attending the Firefox OS Apps Day (refer to previous post).
Why the secrecy? We want to surprise especially our classmates. There is a culture where my fellow students are not doing anything else but reading for their exams, which is really bad for the technology sector. I’m a believer that a first honors degree will not help that much if you do not have the skills of creating something from scratch, solving problems as they emerge and having the drive to learn on your own. We are not that good in programming heck we are just beginners.It’s all about curiosity and the feeling as we see how ideas are convert into something that really works.
How are going to actually create the app?
I’m excited 🙂
britone mwasaru