Watching Steins;Gate, all I can say is that the following comment by Talha Ashraf (when I had asked him about Serial Experiments Lain) was so right.

looking at the cover for this [Serial Experiments Lain] anime, hell no!

You know I’ve seen sad movies but the thing with dark animes is that the word sad does not cover it. They’re on a whole different level. A dark anime will reach into your chest, squish your heart, pull it out, put it through a meat mincer, twice, and then put it back in its place while you try to grasp what happened.

There couldn’t have been a more apt description.

Funnily, Serial Experiments Lain wasn’t that dark. In a sense, you can say, it kind of was. But not in that way.

 After spending hours trying to debug a Critical Error on a client’s WordPress site, realized that I was debugging it in the wrong place. I had SSHed into the VM on GCP while I myself had transferred that site out of GCP to my own server when it was impacted by malware. Now, I was in the GCP server seeing woah, there’s malware here, trying to clean it up and then trying to debug, but nothing seemed to change anything, tried everything. Eventually decided I will move this backup stored in wp-content to my own server and then will set up a new site there and restore that backup, and it was after I had copied the backup to my own server, that I realized that site is being served from my server and not GCP’s. Meh

Turns out, it was a theme issue, which got fixed by replacing theme content manually.

Then spent some time streamlining my personal site publishing workflow. Firstly, I created a proper git rep on my local device and version stored the previous versions in git. Then, I added a mechanism to push the changes live on my server (not git) by just executing ./.deploy.sh

That took some time but not much. But then spent hours trying to figure out how to set up conf on my HestiaCP server which is running apache + nginx reverse proxy, to perform the following two seemingly simple functions:-

• Serve respective html document (domain.tld/essay.html) when user visits a non.html url (domain.tld/essay) if it exists
• When user visits url with .html appended (domain.tld/essay.html), redirect to clean version (domain.tld/essay)

What I essentially wanted was a single cleaned url for every piece of content. Because it doesn’t seem a good practice to have two urls serving the same content.

But it wasn’t as simple as it seems, primarily because of my messy HestiaCP apache + nginx setup. I really should move to pure nginx server but I’m being lazy about that. Anyways, when I figured out it should be done in nginx conf and not apache, the issue was I couldn’t edit the main conf rule because HestiaCP rebuilds it every time. So, I had to add to nginx.conf_custom, but somehow it wasn’t working. Realized, they should be added in nginx.ssl.conf_custom since my site has an https redirect.

But now, one rule was working but not the other. That was because we can’t add a new location tag in the custom conf which is being included from the main conf file. So, I had to use a different rule (Even though this took me much time, but thanks to LLMs, I could get the rules atleast, otherwise I would have to spend a whole day understanding rules, which I wouldn’t have spent on it) for that which wasn’t a / location tag.

This worked, but it broke the www to non-www redirect. Figured out that custom conf is included before the redirect conf and that is why, when a redirect rule is matched in custom conf, later rules aren’t applied. So, I added that part (which hestia has separated out) in my custom conf as well, and finally I had it working.

Still, a url such as http://www.tamseel.pk/internet-companions.html is redirecting 4 times before reaching out https://weblog.tamseel.pk/internet-companions which isn’t great and can obviously be fixed, but maybe that’s for another day.

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Also, I listened some more part of Henrik’s recent podcast and there was this part where he describes how the book by a mathematician, with title something like proofs and refutations, was helpful in his internalizing of this method of increasing the surface complexity of the problem – no, I guess that’s not a good description. But, I thought of it like as was talking with Talha on how there are no books on how to think. This seemed to be (according to Henrik’s description) a book that was indirectly about how to think.

Since it’s the last semester going on and our degree is about to end, the idea that MUA had shared first 2 years ago, which I had later become disinterested in, resurfaced in my curiosity.

So I did that—analysis of WhatsApp group chat of our class. Here’s the gist of around 4200 messages sent in span of 15 months.

Note: Words message and edited were WhatsApp generated and thus do not count as valid. The 6th most used word (at 8th no.) was a teacher’s name.

These were the charts I sent in the group and asked my fellows if they were curious to know about something else.

One was about message count of others apart from the top 25. This shows us the total distribution.

Another was about who most used the most used words, specifically the most used word class and the teacher name at 8th no.

The funny part was when the class-fellow who was the 3rd (/2nd) person with highest mentions of that teacher asked when she had taken that teacher’s name. So, I filtered the dataframe with her as sender and text containing that teacher’s name, and sent the results. The results included that instance when she was ranking (satirically) various teachers and some other students were provoking her. The texts are very hilarious but can’t be shared here since they contain TMI.

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The most tedious part in the whole exercise was mapping the missing phone numbers (those not in contacts) to the names of students by searching for any instance when a text containing the roll number or other identifiable information was shared from that number.

Anyways, this was the overview of the group which was formed around 4th semester when morning and replica classes were merged. In the earlier group of morning class, messages were sent in an amount incomprehensible for me. Explains why I had joined that group several months later.

The part that hit the most was when I thought of converting my R script for analysing whatsapp chat export into an R package, and found that someone had already built that 😭. Had I known that before, I wouldn’t have needed to write that script. (Actually, I am not sure. I probably wouldn’t have found this interesting if I wasn’t writing the code. Maybe I would have. Who knows?)

Code: https://github.com/aiktamseel/whatswrapped

So one of our professors assigned us some group presentations. And there was one topic or argument, and he asked a bunch of students to present or debate or give arguments in favor of it (whatever that was) and then to a bunch of other students ask to prepare presentation with arguments against that thing. Then, he explained how you have to consult sources, like research papers, news articles, and this and that in order to form basis of your arguments. Like you have to first review such material and then you use those sources to back your argument.

This pissed me off so much. I asked what if the topic that I have been asked to present in favor of, is something I am against, and same thing can apply vice versa. He didn’t understand my point and said that you have to use sources and blah blah. But I was so angry and I think I couldn’t control my frustration and that’s why I was unable to articulate my point clearly, and it came out something like, ‘it’s not the way it is. Something either is, or it isn’t. How can one pre-decide if it is or it isn’t.’ Yeah, I know it was very weirdly phrased. My voice this time was slightly loud and had some kind of argumentative tone in it. He replied the same blah blah but at the end he said something like, that’s what research is; to find things out. I knew it wasn’t any use. I said nothing.

Two of my friends later told me that sir didn’t understand the question. And on some level, I think that yes he didn’t understand my question, but not because I articulated it badly (my friends were smart enough to understand me, he wasn’t?), it’s because he had been trained and indoctrinated in that manner.

There is an enormous amount of people who don’t understand what research is. They think research or science or whatever the academia is supposed to do, is to find out things (which I think is correct). But their way of finding things out is so wrong. They think of it like finding the right source to quote, or finding the right data to analyze, or the right econometric model to apply, or finding some other right thing to do, and this kind of finding will result in production of some academic work. Yes, it will produce academic work but not valuable work.

What a true researcher simply needs to find is truth. Some overlooked, un-discovered piece of truth. That is the end. Rest are all means. Why don’t people such distinguished understand a matter that simple. You can’t give conclusions to people, and ask them to research arguments in favor of the conclusion because that exactly is the opposite of research. IT’S ANTI-RESEARCH!!

I don’t know to what extent this applies to academia at other places but atleast here, we are all producing an enormous amount of anti-research work.

Thank you for coming to my Rant-Talk.