A Short Guide to Internet Fishing
A Short Guide to Internet Fishing
If you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.
Another Sunday, Another Naive Weekly - Observations From The Internet Wilderness.
Good morning.
I wrote a short guide to catch odd fish on the internet.
Preparations (3-5 min)
Make yourself comfortable. Turn off mobile phone notifications. Prepare your favourite drink, hot or cold. Close all applications and (ideally) every tab. Breathe in, breathe out, slowly. Observe your breathing, without judging.
Journey (1 min)
Open a new window in your preferred browser. Go to special.fish. Once your screen is full of a colourful mosaic with internet handles written inside you have arrived at your fishing pond.
Fishing (5-50 min)
Now click on one of the colourful mosaics. If you need to have a rule to guide your behaviour, click on your favourite colour or a handle with the same number of syllables as your name. Each click is equivalent to casting your fishing rod. Sometimes it comes empty, sometimes you are lucky to discover a new beautiful corner of the internet. You never know beforehand.
Once you are on a profile, look for the hyperlinks. One hyperlink I discovered while fishing was nazli-ercan.com/sky. I look for odd-looking domains, those whose names I don’t know from before. Sometimes one hyperlink takes you to a website with many other odd-looking hyperlinks, when this happens, it is important to allow yourself more time to dive deeper. One good example was this hyperlink I came across; https://pitscher.net/index_v1.6.txt.When you have clicked on the hyperlinks on the profile, you can either go back to the pond overview on special.fish or you can click the random button. Personally, I enjoy clicking ‘random’.
Continue fishing until your stomach is full of internet diversity.
Document (1-3 min)
As with fishing, the circle is only complete when you get home to brag about your catches. Prepare the tales of your deep-sea catches and share them with me in this form. Then, one day, when you least expect it, your legendary catches will be shared with the wider world.
Enjoy.
ROADSIDE FLOWERS
Swap the view from your window with a random stranger.
Capture your natural beauty on your laptop with The Online Mirror.
Get a perspective on what 100,000 lives look like.
Explore these odd bikes created from memory.
INTERNET STORIES
You don’t have to be a designer to enjoy this proposal for a different approach to proofing fonts. For example, you’ll learn what is unique about this sentence: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
How Much Did AlphaGo Zero Cost?
Back in 2018, one blogger estimated the cost of training the famous AlphaGo Zero algorithm was $35,354,222. That is a lot of money, raising valid questions around who has the opportunity to play with edge technologies outside big companies and venture-backed startups. Many things have changed since 2018, so make sure to read the comments and the linked conversation on Hacker News.
If you are unsure what I am talking about above, I recommend you to watch the excellent AlphaGo documentary.The Story of Being Homeless in The Sims 3
This is a thriller and horror story. The author creates a single, mean dad and an unlucky, good-hearted daughter and plays them as homeless in The Sims. I could not stop reading.
VISUALLY PLEASING
UNDERSTORY
I’m slowly evolving the links and stories I cover in Naive Weekly away from the news cycle. For those of you who are looking for ways to stay updated on what is moving in technology, I’d recommend you to give a chance to these three newsletters instead:
Big Revolution by Martin Bryant (Daily)
I very rarely manage to stay subscribed to daily newsletters for very long. Big Revolution by Martin Bryant is the exception. For two years I have religiously read Martin’s fine-tuned curation on the most important stories in technology.
Exponential View by Azeem Azhar (Weekly)
I have been subscribed to Exponential View since 2016 when Antal recommended it to me. Over the years the focus has expanded from exponential growth, to cover technology’s influence on society, especially with strong coverage of artificial intelligence.
Benedict's Newsletter by Benedict Evans (Weekly)
I subscribed to venture capitalist Benedict’s newsletter back in 2014 when my startup interest was peaking. Since then I have grown eerie of the promises of Silicon Valley technology narratives, but my respect for Benedict is intact (maybe because he moved back to London?).
Naive Weekly
Hi, I’m Kristoffer and you have just read Naive Weekly - Observations from the Internet Wilderness.
Maarten, thank you so much! It was your birthday, I should have sent you a present, instead you upgraded to paid. And thank you to the mystery subscriber who yesterday went straight to paid. Honestly, I can’t believe it.
Last week this newsletter was sent to 541 subscribers. Twenty-two people are crazy enough to chip in every month/year to support me making time to write this newsletter: Nikolaj, Ditte, Antal, Cecilie, Søren, Dries, Sarper, Maarten, Mystery, Joshua, Thomas, Mikkel, Aydo, Lukas, Hans, Csongor, Dad, Ida Marie, Yinka, Stine, Troels & Angela!
Photograph by Ana Santl.
<3
Kristoffer