Notes

14/5/2024

Bebop

Jack Cheng has been highly influential in my work with his “The Slow Web” manifest. He recently launched his first app, called Bebop, “an iOS app for capturing notes as text files, saved and synced to the iCloud/Dropbox directory of your choice”.

Earlier this month, I created a shortcut in the Apple app with the same functionality. (I had no idea that Jack was developing Bebop at the time!)

Despite being Jack’s first app, Bebop offers a more tailored solution than my simple shortcut and yet remains lightweight and pleasant to use.

Some advantages I noticed within minutes of using it include:

• It’s easier to set and change the directory where the notes are saved.
• You can revisit previously saved notes.
• The app creates an entry on the share sheet (although this is possible with my shortcut, it’s not automatic as in Bebop).

On the other hand, I like that my solution doesn’t require an additional app and automatically includes the date and time in the file name. (Bebop does offer an option to append the date and time to the end of the note/text.)

Bebop is free and offers more customization options with a one-time purchase of USD 5.

It’s worth checking out Jack’s blog, where he details the process of creating Bebop and discusses his decisions in its development.

6/5/2024

Reply guys

Americans have a notable talent for naming phenomena, a fact exemplified by the term “reply guys” – individuals who post disparaging comments on public posts made by women.

Recently, two women who have made significant strides in traditionally male-dominated fields — Veronica in Linux/free software and Sophie in web development – expressed frustration with the behavior of reply guys on Mastodon.

Veronica opted to temporarily deactivate her Mastodon account. Sophie, on the other hand, had a light-hearted post matching her hair color with her IDE end up on 4chan because the code snippet wasn’t accessible — not an issue in that particular context.

This isn’t a new issue. Back in 2020, Twitter rolled out filters to curb the antics of reply guys. Come November 2023, Mastodon followed suit, introducing alerts on Android for those attempting to respond to posts from non-mutual followers or ancient posts.

These measures make sense. Sophie acknowledged Mastodon’s blocking and muting functionalities in her post, though she found the implementation in her favorite app, Ice Cubes, lacking.

Maybe the biggest harm inflicted by 2010s social media platforms on public discourse was the notion that we’re obligated to opine on everything, that we can’t resist hitting “Reply” online—especially if the other party isn’t male, or if the matter doesn’t concern us, or if the error is inconsequential.

Believe it or not, it’s entirely possible to scroll past a trivial opinion or comment and move on.

One unintended consequence of these regrettable incidents is the stark reminder that there’s no utopia on the internet. While Mastodon is often seen as the antithesis of post-Elon Musk Twitter, it’s not without its flaws. Don’t get me wrong: I still believe Mastodon beats out Twitter/X and other alternatives — but only because those options were/are pretty dire.

29/4/2024

How to be less pessimistic?

A reader of my Portuguese-written blog unsubscribed from its newsletter because he was feeling bad about my ‘negative bias’.

I police myself a lot not to focus only on the negative part of consumer technology, even if it (or how I see it) is, in large part, negative.

I’m failing at this, as the reader’s comment shows.

While digesting his message, I remembered my discomfort with a politics podcast that I used to listen to weekly until I realized that, despite enjoying the hosts, the topics they covered were making me feel bad.

It’s often said that to be well-informed is to be selectively ignorant. Maybe that’s the recipe so you don’t get mad too, or a little less so.

I thanked the reader for the care in justifying himself and renewed my promise to try to better balance my blog’s editorial choices.

Do you have any tips not to let yourself be shaken by life as it is? Moving away, in this case, is not an option — my job is to inform myself to inform those who read me.