Amit's Thoughts

From Amit’s Thoughts

Non-consensual personalization #

I want to personalize things I use. I want to change the settings. I want to change the colors, the design, the functionality. It used to be more common that I could do this type of thing. But these days, it seems like companies want to use "AI" to personalize things without my consent. Instead of asking me what I want, they decide what I want.

On Netflix, I'd love to change the order of the various categories. But I can't. Netflix decides for me what the order should be. I no longer have a choice. This kind of thing seems to be happening across products and services. It's not only commercial software, but also places like Linux (edit: I mean the ecosystem, not the kernel) and Firefox (edit: I was thinking of the extensions and ui). And it's not only personalization. It used to be when I misspelled something on Google, the page would ask me "did I mean:". But these days, Google decides for me what I meant. It just goes ahead and changes the search words without asking.

One very surprising exception is Mac OS, which after decades of only allowing blue controls added the choice of color. But in most ways MacOS doesn't allow me to personalize things.

These companies might argue that it's for my benefit or that it's been studied or whatever, but it doesn't matter. There's a big difference between me choosing to paint my room green and a corporation coming into my house in the middle of the night and painting my room green.

Update: [2022-02-04] This post unexpectedly got on hackernews; see the comments.

Roman numerals and currency #

I find that Roman Numerals didn't "click" for me. At an intellectual level, I understand how they work. But they felt unintuitive. Until now!

Firefox 89 tab appearance #

Firefox 89 has a new appearance, removing features (ugh) and annoying some people while delighting others. It can be disabled by setting browser.proton.enabled to false:

I mostly like the new design though, but I strongly dislike some elements, especially the tabs:

Labels: firefox, howto

Automatically generate IDs for emacs org-mode headings #

I write some of my web pages with emacs org-mode, and then export to html. Like markdown, org-mode is a convenient format to write a simple subset of html.

Each heading in the document will get exported with an ID so that it can be linked to from the table of contents. The default IDs look like #org3091de9. I usually replace these with a custom id that matches the section heading, so a heading Bounding box will get an id #bounding-box.

Labels: emacs

OpenTTD on Windows 10 + Steam #

Transport Tycoon / OpenTTD is my favorite game of all time, and I wanted to play it on Steam. I kept getting "file not writable" error. I tracked it down to the Windows security system blocking it. To unblock:

1. Start →
2. Settings →
3. Update & Security →
4. Windows security →
5. Open Windows Security →
6. Virus & threat protection →
7. Manage settings →
8. Controlled folder access →
9. Manage Controlled folder access →
10. Allow an app through Controlled folder access →
11. Add an allowed app →
12. openttd.exe

I am not a fan of making exceptions like this but I didn't find anything else that worked. If you have an alternate method of solving the permissions error, please let me know.

Labels: howto