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A failure of intelligence

This post came up from a discussion... No, it's not important to inform you of the origins of this post. What finally matters is the content. Is that not why you read the blog. Who cares about all the emphasis on telling a story about the post with the post itself? I mean, I'm not really into meta-blogging, really.

So, what is this post about. No, it's not about the most common excuse raised by some baldies with grey hair (really, since when did baldies have hair?) when some of our neighbours decide to travel over 500 nautical miles to pay us a social visit (with guitars) and try to act in our films (it may be cheap bollywood, but it is much better than the quality of stuff they get at their home, I believe). No, it's about companies with mottoes of Don't be evil deciding what is or is not useful for me. It's also about a website that gives a crappy blue colour to the entire world.

The internet (whatever it is, I really don't understand all this tech jargon) has such a whole lot of information. Some of it Most of it comes from things called content farms, websites that try to trick you into visiting them by inundating the search engine you use with keywords in their code and in their content. What is a search engine you may ask? I don't really know. I used to think that Google is a search engine, but some people think it is a web browser. Well, web browser then. After all, whenever you open up firefox or chrome, you do see Google as the first page, so, in a way, Google is the web browser.

So, a web browser is something that searches for relevant content for you over something called the internets or the world wide web, or the www dot com. (Why is it not called a search engine eludes me.) The web browser then tries to match whatever you type with the content of millions of pages on the webs (don't reach for the vacuum cleaner or the bug spray, this does not involve six legged arachnids. (Though it really does, I think Google uses spiders to crawl over the webs.) (Right now, I wish that my browser had paren-matching highlighting, like emacs or vim. That would have let me know of the paren-matching error made two sentences ago.) (I shall endeavour to correct it like this.)). This web is much messier than the one made by the arachnids. It has a lot of messy information. The web browser tries to match your keywords with those found on the pages that are stuck on the web, being a part of it. So, someone had the brilliant idea to fool web browsers by writing articles like this:

error michael sam winodws linux mark shuttleworth a***h*** idiot smart black white man woman child...
you get the drift, right? The purpose of such sites is to get maximum traffic onto their pages, wherein you would find nothing but advertisements, thereby fetching money (of course not to you, to the sites in question). So the web browsers like Google started to get smarter. They decided to start filtering out such websites from their search results.

And that is where this post originates from. (I realize that despite my promise, I have again entered into meta-blogging; well, promises are meant to be broken. Try to find out if I ever made that promise.) So, now the greatest web browser of them all, Google has decided to make itself a bit more fool proof. (However, nothing can be really fool proof, foolishness is a quality that has the cardinality of an uncountable infinity.) They have finally brought in an algorithm that searches for links you have clicked on in previous searches, or those which you found interesting and shared with the world (I doubt that anyone actually bothers to limit the privacy settings on their posts). This means that someone decides what information you are going to get from www dot com. (Please don't cry out commie or dictator, I am not doing this. I'm merely the messenger, and this is NOT Sparta.)

At the same time, the crappy blue world has now got a new crappy blue look. This new look too tries to decide what is good for you. (Have the bread crusts, they contain healthy bread crust vitamins, whatever they are. If you don't, I'm going to ground you and not let you out of your room for a week.) Apparently, the developers at crappy blue world have decided that it is important for me to receive the report cards of friends, or who are the top 10 friends of whom, and so on, as if I were a guardian concerned with the performance of my 450 odd wards in the crappy blue world. (Which reminds me, there is something called culling the heard. I think I need to look more into it.) So, as a result, I now have the crappy blue world made crappier with posts that I never wanted, and it has given me a task for the next 100 odd days to tell the ones behind the crappy blue world that I'm NOT INTERESTED! But I think that in the next 99 days, they shall change the look to yet another crappy blue look, and this render my efforts wasted again. (Most of my efforts are wasted. I spend so much time writing this blog, but no one ever bothers to read. That's a waste of my effort.)

My email now decides what email is important for me. My mobile phone decides which contacts are important. Another electronic brain suggests possible jobs for me, all of which require either a few years of experience, or which are as financial analysts, even though I have mentioned that I'm in the wireless industry. I'm an engineer, engineering is different from finance (or is it?). My RSS reader recommends items for me to read. My blogging software, thankfully, does not suggest blogs for me to write. (But I'm sure that someone somewhere shall find out a one-click blogging mechanism. Click a button and the weblog post is written and posted. (This shall greatly improve the quality of my posts, I'm sure.) (Paren-matching problems again.))

But heck who cares. Our thoughts and minds are independent (or are they?), and that's what we've always been fighting for. We should be thankful for that. (sarcmark)

Do feel free (read: if you have reached this far, put in some effort lazybones) to post comments to let me know if you agree with me or not. Do we really have access to free content, unbiased and unprejudiced?



UPDATE: Barely 12 hours after I made this post, I came across this youtube video. Do take some time to watch it.


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Comments

  1. Gouri26 September 2011 at 10:30

    I was looking for an opinion. I think I failed to find it amid all the digression.
    Overdose of Rushdie?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Skand Hurkat26 September 2011 at 11:53

    Not really an overdose of Rushdie. I think most of my posts suffer from a lot of digression, and I am duly contrite. Have a look at this post.But yeah, I have digressed much more than usual in this one.

    I really tried hard to keep the opinion as muted as I could. Guess that style really does not go well with most people.

    ReplyDelete

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