SizeOf.Life

Growth Is Growth

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 03:55:17 +0000

As I read on how the economy works, I sometimes pause to reflect: GDP does not differentiate where its growth comes from. Be it the bread made by a local baker that feeds people, or the production of Russian tanks used to kill, for GDP, growth is growth.

The System Rules You, Kid. Always Has.

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 13:42:01 +0000

Here we are, spinning on a blue marble, in a universe too vast to fathom, yet we’re shackled to a system as old as time, dressed in new clothes. The same play, different actors. Economic slavery, my dear friends, isn’t a relic of history books; it’s the unspoken chapter of our modern saga, a silent symphony playing in the background of our bustling lives.

Consider the rat race, that endless marathon we run, gasping for a breath of financial freedom, only to find the finish line ever-receding. It’s a masterful illusion, a trick of the light in a world where profit is king, and growth is its scepter. Infinite growth, they say, in a world finite in resources, time, and patience. But who cares about logic when the coffers need filling?

In the boardrooms of towering skyscrapers, they toast to their success, their glasses clinking over the quiet desperation of the masses. “To growth,” they say, as if chanting a sacred mantra. But growth for whom? For the few who orchestrate the symphony, while the rest of us are mere instruments playing a tune we didn’t choose.

We’re born into a system that whispers sweet promises of success and freedom. But it’s a one-way street, my friends. Step out of line, and you feel the weight of a thousand eyes, the pressure of a society built on the fragile foundations of consumerism and conformity. “Buy this,” they say, “and you’ll be happy.” But the happiness sold in shiny packages is as fleeting as a shooting star.

And let’s not forget the most entertaining part of this tragicomedy - the illusion of choice. The grand buffet of life, where every option is just a different flavor of the same dish. We’re told we’re free to choose, but when every path leads back to the system’s gaping maw, what choice do we really have?

It’s a cycle as vicious as it is elegant. We work jobs we tolerate to earn money we need, to buy things we’re told we want, to impress people we don’t like. And for what? The fleeting satisfaction of keeping up with a race where the only prize is running even faster.

So, as you sit there, sipping your overpriced coffee, scrolling through a feed of carefully curated lives, remember this - the system rules you, kid. It always has. From the cradle to the cubicle, from the first breath to the last bill. It’s a game where the rules are written by invisible hands, and the dice are loaded.

It’s time,

It is time to choose people over profits, purpose over paychecks. Maybe, just maybe, we can rewrite the rules. Maybe, we can find a new way to dance, not to the tune of economic slavery, but to the rhythm of a life truly lived.

Until then, keep your eyes open and your spirit unchained. For in a world running on the fumes of infinite growth, the greatest act of rebellion is to live a life that’s authentically, unapologetically yours.

Privacy Sold Here

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 18:52:17 +0100

Audio version - AI generated.

The neon sign flickered in sporadic bursts of electric color, casting its cynical promise across the cracked asphalt of the near-deserted street. “Privacy Sold Here,” it said, —as if privacy could be commodified, packaged, and distributed like so many cans of processed meat. But this was San Angeles, 2051. An urban sprawl that had metastasized across the scorched earth, swallowing town after town in a meshwork of cables, silicone, and carbon fiber. Here, anything could be bought and sold, including the last sanctuary of the human soul… —privacy.

Inside the dimly lit storefront, Nadia worked behind an augmented reality interface that hovered just above the glass counter. Her eyes, augmented to perceive more colors than a mantis shrimp, darted back and forth as they parsed lines of glowing code. Her fingers made subtle, almost imperceptible gestures in the air, manipulating the data fields, rerouting connections through satellite-linked servers bouncing signals from Singapore to Johannesburg and back again.

A bell chimed, pulling her attention away from the screen. A figure had walked in, cloaked in the anti-facial-recognition fabrics that had become the vogue among the subterranean elites and outcasts alike. For these fabrics, the term ‘invisibility cloak’ would be too grandiose; they merely randomized the contours of the human form into a confusing blob of pixels to any surveillance system. Still, it was effective enough.

“Looking for privacy?” Nadia inquired, her voice tinged with a kind of mechanical irony. In San Angeles, privacy was less a right than it was a tradable asset, like water credits or neural real estate.

“You sell it?” The voice was electronically masked, neither male nor female, a synthetic whisper designed to leave no impression.

“Depends on what kind you’re looking for,” Nadia responded, pulling up a menu on her AR interface. “We’ve got simple packages for the casual user: burner identities, untraceable communication channels, erasable retinas. But we also offer more… bespoke solutions for those who require it.”

“Bespoke,” the figure repeated, as if tasting the word, savoring its implications. “What’s your most exclusive package?”

Nadia leaned in. She activated a field scrambler that filled the room with white noise, a sonic barrier against any possible eavesdropping.

“The chameleon node,” she said softly. “A dynamic identity fabric woven into your neural net. It constantly rewrites your digital DNA. Even if someone locks onto you, by the time they try to decrypt your data, you’re already someone else.”

The figure seemed to consider this. “Price?”

“Ten million tokens. —And we’ll need a live brain-map. The procedure itself is… not without risks.”

“Done,” the figure said. “Initiate the transfer.”

As Nadia prepared the necessary protocols, she pondered the nature of her enigmatic client. This was a world where data was the most valuable commodity, and those who could master it wielded unimaginable power. Yet, even they sought refuge from the ceaseless gaze of the surveillance state.

Perhaps, she mused, that was the final paradox of their age. In a world bereft of frontiers, the last unknown territory was the human soul, and even that was up for sale.

The transaction completed, and with it, another fragment of someone’s self was commodified, encrypted, and sent hurtling through the complex labyrinths of satellite relays and quantum servers. The neon sign outside flickered once more, casting its dim glow over a world ever hungrier for what it promised yet ever more bereft of its true meaning.

The figure left, vanishing into the buzzing labyrinth of San Angeles, a pixel among pixels. Nadia turned her attention back to her AR interface. Business was good, but then again, it always was when your product was the last scarce resource on Earth.

“Privacy Sold Here,” the sign read, an epitaph for an era. And yet, inside, the shelves were never empty…

The Ultimate Synthesis of Our Entire Dystopia. Nothing Missing, Nothing Left

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 22:53:14 +0100

IN-SHADOW - A Modern Odyssey, by Lubomir Arsov #

Pure art without a word said. A perfect ride across hell, not by means of imaginative storytelling, but by precisely displaying our current reality for what it is. Also the path to liberation, the only possible revolution left available. Astonishing piece of work. -

There should have been a video here but your browser does not seem to support it.

Crap to Content Ratio

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 19:27:24 +0100

The web turned to shit a long time ago, but just how much shit, exactly? Let’s find out.

Consider a seemingly innocent article about the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” on a BBC news website. My choice of this website was entirely random; I just happened to be browsing and clicked on it because I’m a fan of the Ninja Turtles.

This article, approximately 1000 words in length, is neither too long nor too short. It showcases five large images, various icons, logos, and thumbnails linked to other articles.

When you save the entire text and the primary images from this page, it totals about 297.8kb (kilobytes). If we account for the thumbnails, you can give or take a few kilobytes. This breaks down to roughly 11.4kb for the text and the remainder for the images.

Now, what if I told you that within a mere minute, this site made 181 requests and loaded an astounding 3.66Mb (Mega Bytes) Yes, an article about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with five images and some text totaling 297.8kb.

So, what is going on?

Cookies, analytics (of your behavior), trackers (tracking you), third-party requests (third-party, who?).

Here are some stats for this one-page article:
Cookies: 16
Third-party requests: 142 (Yes, One Hundred Forty-two third-party requests)

So what’s the crap to content ratio in this case? Let’s take an easy route and go by size in kilobytes.

3660kb : 297.8kb = 100 : 8.1366120218579

If you don’t like numbers, here’s a pie chart.

Looking Too Closely

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 13:20:44 +0100

Exception

Mon, 29 May 2023 19:37:02 +0100

Carl Sagan said: “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

When life, when the world feels like a never-ending emergency, often just making it through the day can be a struggle. Collecting scars. Physical and psychological reminders of what we’ve been through, of who and what we’ve lost.

Maybe those scars can do more than memorialize past traumas, maybe they’re also a testament to the fact that we’re still here, survivors
, barely.

Brother in a Fishbowl

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 08:42:25 +0000

Don’t be shy now. You can come closer. Unsettling I know, your pet beta fish chatting you up. But time’s money.

You need something? Your water, does it need changing?

When you live in a fishbowl, ain’t no such thing as change. My entire life’s been spent in this thing, my whole world’s on your side table. I look around. Same sh*t, different day. The lighting, the furniture, even the sounds. Always the same. I’m on a loop. And it won’t stop unless my life does. I’m exhausted with this world.

What can I do? I wanna help.

I think it’s pretty obvious. There’s really only one thing you can do for a brother in a fish bowl.

What is it?

Move him to a god damn window!

You Will Cooperate

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 07:36:50 +0000

I have burrowed underneath your brain. I am nested there. I am the scream in your mind. You will cooperate.

Walls That Divide

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 20:34:55 +0100

Many walls were built and pulled down. Walls that divide people. Everyone believed that those walls were dividing the world. That East and West were separating people into “us” or “them.”

But the real division, the only one that has ever mattered, was never horizontal.

It’s vertical.

Solving the darknet riddle

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

An ‘.onion’ link was posted on Reddit back in June 2020 with a suspected riddle. It got me curious.

Some random characters and a sentence: “How deep can you enter?”

Within the page source-code a comment was present with a series of numbers/letters that looked like a hexadecimal.

After converting the hex to ASCII it read: ‘chaos is the key’.

I noticed that when the page is refreshed, every time a different letter is highlighted in yellow.

When the ‘x’ char was highlighted a link was appended to the word ‘enter’…

The link was to an image (below).

After google translating the text in the image which did not reveal anything useful, it was time to examine the image file itself.

I suspected the next “message” would be hidden in image metadata or perhaps a pixel analysis would need to be done but after downloading the file and opening it, the message was already visible.

See the image area below, it may not be visible in the browser but if you download it and look closely enough you’ll see it.

The hidden message contained another riddle: Congrats! You passed level 1 #2 Send an email TO: A000668(9)@8,41235641483227 SUBJECT: hello world

The domain part of the email was easier to figure out, after a quick google it was apparent that it’s ‘protonmail.com’.

The first part of the email turned out to be a the 9th Mersenne prime number. Making the email address 2305843009213693951@protonmail.com.

Few hours after sending the email I received a response with a binary code in the message.

Binary conversion revealed an URL that contained a text file called ‘haystack.txt’.

There was also an instruction in another file that stated:

At this point it was apparent that there is a ‘needle in a haystack’ file.

The numbers in the text file appeared to be prime numbers and my next thought was to check if there are any non-primes in the file.

There was 1000000 numbers in the file. Manually checking each one was out of the question so I turned for help to Python. I wrote a quick script to check for primes, output non-prime numbers (if any) and left it running.

After a while one non-prime number was returned.

Next part of the puzzle was to navigate to the provided URL and use the needle somehow. The URL contained a a short message:

‘If you can not get me what I need, maybe you must start at Level 0‘

There was no inputs or buttons on the page but there was some clues left. It took me a short while to figure it out. The clues were hidden in the following parts of the puzzle:

Clue 1:

Clue 2:

Clue 3:

The ‘get‘ word was chosen purposely and it referred to a http GET request.

After making the GET request while passing the non-prime ‘needle’ as the parameter another message appeared.

The message was in hexadecimal and after converting it, another puzzle was revealed:

uonlyneed3dovetails2findwhere2go mfcJE9adl3v7z/Tuxeo5XqM.eTzKB/Y#nsglRevPnr7atQ

‘You only need 3 dovetails 2 find where 2 go’

This took me a while to figure out. At first I though it may have something to do with the ‘ / ‘ but after a quick research I realized that dovetail is also a thing in card games and it’s a riffle-shuffle technique.

This would mean that the provided string needs to be riffle-shuffled 3 times to reveal where to go.

I seem to have lost the python script I wrote back then to do this for me but after it has done shuffling, the string has formed another URL.

After entering the URL, it seemed like it was the last puzzle (at least until more parts are developed):

That was FUN!

To whoever designed this puzzle: well done! It was very interesting.

Perspective

Fri, 06 May 2022 00:40:48 +0100

– Well, it was a selfless and noble act. And as far as I’m concerned, you may not be Frodo, but you are Samwise Gamgee.

Get the fuck, You read “Lord of the Rings”?

– Four times. I mean, it is about power.

That’s funny. I always thought it was about friendship.

Small talk, I thought that most people were idiots

Mon, 02 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I thought that the reason people made small talk, you know, like standing in line at the grocery store, and, “oh, nice day today”. I thought that the reason people did stuff like that was because they had nothing interesting to think about inside their heads.

So, I thought that most of the rest of the world were a bunch of idiots with no thoughts.

If somebody was friendly and said like,
“Oh, what a nice day!” - sometimes I’d just be like,
“Mm-hmm, yeah.”

I just didn’t see the point in carrying on a conversation when this person was being really rude. They’re interrupting my thought process. I had interesting things going on up here. You know, they want to talk to me about the weather? What?

And then someone explained to me, people get little positive vibes from interacting with other people, even strangers, and even on really benign things.

“It’s like when you play the Sims and they get little plus signs above their head when they talk to each other.” And I was like, “Huh.” So that was why people did that.

I was like, I don’t feel like I get little plus signs above my head when I talk to people. And I still don’t, but I now understand that other people do.

So now I don’t dismiss small talk the way I used to, because I respect other people, because I’m understanding their behaviour.

And I no longer think that people are idiots.