Well, not really much “gone” – I finished the Taiwan travelogue series and edited until April. But as far as bi-weekly blogging, I kept off for a while.
Stuff got busy, the short answer. Long answer is below. Plus some rants for good measure!
February
After the sole “random opinions” post, I was thinking about what to post next. I was pissed last January that the CNY holidays slipped my mind and I just spent 5 boring days at home. Plane fares were too expensive, but I planned for a short cheap jaunt somewhere next month. I planned it around a single holiday but I’ll take it.
But as far as I was concerned back then, it was upcoming work that occupied my mind greatly.
I was mighty dissatisfied with my previous project – it’s a Sitefinity multisite hosted in Sitefinity Cloud on a basic plan, for a major multi-property entity – in terms of speeds. Last year, I tried at first a direct approach to the database by bypassing most of Sitefinity’s built-in data methods for dynamic content and taxons. At first it worked splendidly and quickly – but as the project was revealed to use SF Cloud, I abandoned it as quick. No way I’d risk untested newfangled shit on production cloud servers that I have little experience with. But that brief dalliance with that method helped me realize a lot of things that I could optimize using SF’s basic data methods and functions. I found the optimal routes in SQL, and it’s my task to find the closest analog to them using SF data functions. I created dynamic data queries using SF data calls and monitored the queries using SQL Profiler constantly – set up the monitor, make a call, trap the call, look up the query.
And it helped with me and my subsequent projects after that. Greatly, I’d say. I became a stickler for optimal querying and saving resources whenever possible.
But as February was a bit of a slow month – some service requests got delayed and some projects were awaiting approval yet – I decided to play around with that particular application and try things out in terms of optimization and page loading speeds. I spent weeks obsessively trying to find and save milliseconds off certain intensive functions and pages with multiple custom widgets. The less back-and-forth with the database, the better. So no Youtube, no social media that much (except on weekends and train rides) and less RPG gaming. Brain needed the extra dedication to these stuff, so less posts.
In other news, not so much. I inadvertently diverted my lack of Reddit and X into Facebook, and I caught myself midway when I started posting my third post about politics in a day. Man, shit’s hard to kick huh. Might take me a while. But silver linings – I had zero desire to view any Reddit posts anymore.
But logging again into Facebook for extended periods of time kind of showed me just how different priorities are for feed curation in FB and Twitter/X. I have at least ten thousand accounts blocked/muted on each of those platforms (yes I counted) and clearly the content sifting was markedly different for them. For example, X has privacy settings for muted words. It was very effective – provided you block all synonyms, their algorithm AI isn’t that verbose yet, I assume. I stated all variations of “trump” in there, including “t.rump”, “trumpy” and “donald t” since 2019, and my feed was free of it within a month or two. When that Smash-Panda thing blew up a few years back, I read many articles and I noted the common patterns – like “smash player” and “panda global” – then I muted those, and the algorithm happily complied. Say what you will about the platform’s userbase, but the platform’s tools are retained and at least kept to be very effective, provided you have the IQ to at least use them. Lots of chimps and smoothbrain users though, so I doubt people use them a lot. My muted words and phrases are super extensive now (at least two hundred terms) and as a result my feed is mostly international and finance news, funny cat videos, gaming news, VTubers, sports and cheap memes. It’s an inverse bubble, mind you. I didn’t lock myself in a bubble, I locked a certain Western subset out in a bubble of their own. Like quarantining then out on Alcatraz while the rest of the world just goes on.
Facebook, on the other hand, is abysmally poor at it. Sure, it has the standards like post hiding and account muting/blocking, but the main news feed sucks. It takes far too long for the algorithm to understand things I don’t like but are way quick to assume what I might like. They are WAY too eager to recommend but way too conservative to shave things out. For example, in February I clicked on a PhilStar article about EVs coming to Manila. The platform then picked up on it and (maybe it also saw my IP as from Singapore) started flooding my feed with related articles and ads for easy-broke Chinese EVs. Holy shit, that’s from ONE clicked article. It took me weeks to purge that shit off my feed with hides and blocks. And unlike X, I can’t instruct Facebook to mute out words and phrases. If there was an option, I’d gleefully block certain politicians’ names. But well, damn. It’s like being sold a Fiat Multipla in 2025 – it works but holy shit.
If I have to guess why Facebook isn’t incentivized to give users more blocking power or/and enhancing their filter algo, I have two guesses – one, Elon noted long ago that his team found that the block/mute function is taking so much resources from X’s server computes. If such a similar function is present at a much larger social media like Facebook, I can only imagine how hard the filter-dedicated server resources might be churning. Second, it comes down to monetization and footprint for their user account programs. If Facebook allowed people to mute/block words and phrases, I assume a decent chunk of their userbase would do so, and render huge swaths of account engagements gone. I assume that most social media platforms that are monetized, big or small, would not benefit from a robust user tool allowing users to meticulously curate their experience.
Well, that’s life. And my Facebook feed was swamped with Philippine political posts – it was election season after all.
With the rest of the month… not much, but I started prepping a few things in my room to make it tidier. I’m changing rentals by November and I wanted less hassle to deal with in terms of what I’ll be moving out with, so I’ll send home all the things I don’t need that much anymore. Plan is that I’ll move out with only four XXL storage boxes, two wheeled luggages and one cabinet. Less stuff the better.
Briathrail // Albert 2MNG 
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