Al Harkan

A Personal Blog

YouTube Shorts Problems [Thread]

YouTube is the last major social media to let go of community-led content recommendation (Trending page) and joining TikTok’s short video format party. Like others, its contents now go fully personalized for the users —us.

 

Clicking the Shorts tab, we don’t get a list of videos to watch. Instead, we get a video fulfilling the entire screen, automatically played. We no longer get to choose what to consume. We are now being fed —by the algorithm.

 

It’s a form of losing our agency over what to feed into our mind, surrendering it to a mindless computer to decide what we think & what information we consume.

 

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Ramadan 2021 [Thread]

“Unexpected, I did tarawih last night and suhoor on board a warship —my final day after 7-days sailing. That will be a story of its own, but I pray for this Ramadan to be a blessed one —where families are happy, and friends are healthy.”

 

“Really hope this is the last time I read Ramadan & pandemic in the same sentence.”

 

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Data Science Fellowship [Thread]

Selama 2 bulan masa lockdown dan #WorkFromHome ini, di samping pekerjaan mengajar, saya menyisihkan waktu untuk untuk belajar data science dengan mengikuti program Fellowship yang diselenggarakan oleh IYKRA.

Saya membuat log belajar mingguan yang saya rupakan dalam tweet-tweet. Berisi cerita apa saja yang saya pelajari, pengalaman-pengalaman praktikum, juga curhat sana-sani. Berikut ini adalah untaian tweet-nya.

 

Sumber gambar cover: IYKRA

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Ramadan 2020 [Thread]

Feeling uncertain of many things.

The outbreak shows no sign of slowing down. Economic catastrophe. People are losing trust in government. Activists are being silenced.

It’s the month of prayers, and I’m desperately praying for all of these bad things to end.

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Corona & Teman-teman Saya [Thread]

Teman-teman sebaya saya merentang dr mereka yg baru sarjana, kuliah juga, lulus S dua, bekerja/berusaha, juga yg baru membina keluarga.

Buat sebagian besar dari demografi seperti mereka, urusan pandemi Corona ini jadi pukulan sejadi-jadinya.

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Hozhoni

When I was 9 years old, I stumbled upon a book of my father’s. The title read Samudra Al-Fatihah. The cover was worn out, and I don’t quite remember what made me spent hours reading a chapter from that book. But I remember what I read, because that was my oldest memory, the first time my mind being blown away learning about the grandeur of the universe. I learned about how atomic motions were parallel to the planetary and galactic ones. I learned about the tiniest scale of the micro cosmos, to the remarkable scale of the universe. And eventually, I learned about this way of looking at the cosmos, that put everything in my daily life into perspective.

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The Great Hack – A Quick Thought on the Documentary

“You set out to connect people and you are refusing to acknowledge that this same technology is now driving us apart.”

This quote just summed how social media has transformed from a technology to connect people into a weapon to divide society. And this movie telling the story behind it quite well.

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