Icebreaker

According to a popular myth, sir Isaac Newton came up with his Law of Universal Gravitation after an apple fell from a tree and landed on his head. I was taking a walk in a park today, slipped on an icy patch, and fell and here I starting blogging again (after two decades). My fall and my blog restart have two unrelated events that just happened to occur on the same day. I just needed something to write about. 


The icy spot where I fell




Now, after I broke the ice, and took your attention, let me write what inspired me to start this blog. This is not the first time I started a blog. The first time was twenty years ago. After a few posts, I asked myself who was going to read it and deleted the whole thing. So why again and why now? What triggered me to do it again? What was the mythological apple that fell on my head?  

It was a YouTube video where TwoSetViolin talked about fake TikTok musicians (the video at the bottom of the post). I watched it and started to think. 

I have graduated on March 10, 1989. It was a Friday. I started working on Monday, March 13. These two dates were significant to me, to my colleague Zlatan Šabić who graduate and started working on the same dates, to our families and close friends but not to anyone else. While I remember the events that occurred during those two days I have no recollection of what was going on during the weekend between them. While that weekend was of little significance to me it was one most significant dates in the history of the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web on Sunday, March 12, 1989. So I can state that my computer science degree is older than the WWW and I am one of the last pre-Web computer science engineers. 

The World Wide Web is one of the most significant inventions of all time. It helped connect the people across the world in a way never imagined before. Originally it took technical skills to publish anything on the Web. As the time progressed it was easier and easier to do so and together with the wider and wider WWW audience the number of creates kept increasing. We have more and more content. Some of it is great. One can find virtually anything. Numerous talented creators put hard work to produce quality content. However, the ease of content creation also allowed people who do not care about what they post as long as it brings the view, the likes, the followers. Chasing views, likes, and followers might enslave so-called influencers. There is more and more plagiarism, copyright infringement, trivial content, stupid memes, fake quotes attributed to famous people,  anything that would catch attention, bring followers. When the WWW launched I had great hope for it. I could never imagine the amount of stupidity that it would bring. However, looking on the bright side, it still delivered much more than I could ever hope for. There is so much great content. One just needs to find it. 

The video that inspired me to start blogging





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