Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
I did an evening walk today, trying to catch up after several days under the goal of 10k steps/day. I visited Iztok, a popular and calm neighborhood with good sidewalks. Took exactly one photo, and it has a cat.
I find it difficult to meet my 10k steps goal this year.
It’s hard to believe that just days ago we had temperatures of around -10°C.
A whole different question is why I find more life in the bushes outside of the park than within the park where the plants are taken care of. The first photo is within the park, the second is outside.
Erica carnea, also known as Winter Heath, is already in bloom days after the snow melted. Bees were flying around. Feels like it’s time for the sun to show up and for the spring to come.
We also have the next generation of cats already growing up and refusing to pose for a photo.
For me, the most hated question is any opener that leads to someone asking for money. For example:
“Do you have a watch?”
“It’s three fifty.”
“Lots of good things will happen to you—I can see it. Let me read your palm.”
Whenever strangers ask questions like that, I instinctively pick up my pace and don’t respond. For some reason, the most common one I hear is about the time—or, more specifically, whether I have a watch.
It’s trickier when people ask for directions. That one still fools me sometimes.
“Hey, how do I get to the National Theater?”
“Right this way,” I say, pointing in the right direction.
“Do you want a flower for health?”
I don’t mind when people ask for change—it’s their job. But using trivial questions as an opener makes me a worse person because I might end up walking past someone who genuinely needs help.
Since I aim for 10,000 steps a day, I have plenty of encounters with strangers—maybe once or twice a week. Most of the time, it’s just people struggling to find something that’s supposed to be there according to Google Maps but isn’t.
I miss the idea of IRC.
IRC is a technology that gives us a decentralized networks of chat servers, allowing people to meet like-minded strangers. It used to be (maybe) the most popular way to chat online before ICQ and Skype changed everything. I spent years of my life there as a teenager and young adult.
Unlike email, IRC didn’t age well. The whole thing started falling apart due to limitations of how big channels could be while remaining usable. Also, spam, hacks, profanity, botnets, and ToS violations invaded. IRC is still alive but with a low number of daily active users.
We now have Discord and Slack but they suffer one little flaw. They’re for-profit companies.
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