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  • Just World Model Substack

    Just World Model Substack

    I’m trying something new. Always something new. I’ve set up a substack at https://unfocus.substack.com. I’ll use that to talk about the Just World Model engine I’m building with LLMs. The posts there will be more intentional, and more focused on that specific effort, while the posts here will be somewhat meta, or random, like a personal blog. The first post at substack is similar to material I’ve posted before on medium, refined. The Circus and the Big Tent.

    Seems like a good split! I’ve been thinking about this topic for ages, so it’s kind of nice to finally be writing about it. The general idea is that most political communication from those other than the very organized, well funded right wing, is narratively, completely reactive. No one other than the right wing seems to have much of an understanding for how this stuff works, even though they are the more compassionate, and more reasonable ones (they don’t want to literally invoke rapture through nuclear war – mostly.)

    There is an app build coming with that – which is really more what the project is about than the writing. I probably won’t touch on technical aspects of that app, how it works, what its built with, there, but I might do that here from time to time, because it’s technically interesting stuff, and that is, after all, what I used to blog about here.

    More soon!

  • Destructive Social Media 2026

    Destructive Social Media 2026

    I’ve written before about the horrendous algorithm at the core of every social media platform‘s “engagement” algorithm. They align political posts with human posters, on an incredibly ignorant and stupid single dimension, based on American 2 parties, with left (Democrat) and right (Republican) steps. In Facebook you used to even be able to see this – but they’ve hidden it all now. In the old days, you could have people who were anti-abortion, and anti-gun (but only motivated to vote on one or the other). These days, those idiotic sorting algorithms are so good a sorting posts and people to match everything and everyone against that single measure, that they effectively propagate uniformity among 2 opposing, and increasingly extreme sides.

    It’s maddeningly simple to understand and explain (1 short paragraph,) and would have taken almost no effort to fix back then – except now, the problem is exacerbated by LLMs and other AIs having been trained on this nonsense. Now AI sorts people in to the same 2 extreme camps, except we can’t actually fix it any more, because even the people who make this slop, don’t understand how it makes decisions.

    So – we are utterly screwed, when it comes to these anti-social platforms (to be clear- that’s Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram, most especially TikTok, even YouTube, etc.) The only real way to fix it, is to divest – to just stop using those hateful platforms.

    In that vein, I’ve jumped out of medium, back to the old web 1.0 model of hosting my own blog. I’m also in the process of trying to break away from all the centrally planned hosted “web 2.0” platforms, and more toward decentralized platforms. Roughly, that means:

    Medium -> unfocus.com (a simple blog)

    Facebook/Twitter -> mastodon (social.unfocus.com) – https://unfocus.com/@kevin

    Discord/Slack/etc. -> Matrix (a synapse server) for private messages – @kevin:unfocus.com

    I don’t quite have an answer to the finance half of this. One of the things that those Web 2.0 things can do reasonably well is create a financial structure, where you can actually get paid for your contribution, with varying levels of success, and more than a bit of abuse. YouTube most especially has a decent (but not great) model, though Alphabet/Google are doing what they can to mess it all up. Twitch and Medium have this, TikTok to a very very limited extent. We don’t have an alternative to that that I’m aware of, just yet, but I felt the need to get started anyway. But even there, those web 2.0 financial transactions are really a subversion of essential capitalism.

    However you feel about that word these days, capitalism generally has at it’s core 2 aspects – profit motive for making things (over rent) and open markets (not free markets, they don’t exist, have never existed, and will never exist – markets are man made, authority regulated social instruments.) A double sided algorithm driven faux-market, where a rent seeking middle man, controls what the suppliers get paid, and what the buyers pay – and controls both not through markets, but through algorithms, is in no way capitalism. It is rent over profit, and it there is no real market.

    Those of you who like capitalism really should be paying attention to these changes. Those of you who criticize the current system as capitalism, should also pay attention. We don’t have capitalism anymore. That’s why Tesla, for one example, doesn’t need profit to keep it’s stock value high. (See Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis if you’d like to learn more.)

    (There’s an argument that this is just a rentier form of capitalism – or that it’s just plain bad regulation. I don’t buy the former argument, but the latter, sure – maybe. It’s possible it just all collapses under the weight of its own nonsense.)

    Anyway, I chose these specific platforms for the following reasons:

    WordPress for unfocus.com – honestly, I just had a lot of history with WordPress, and an old blog with old posts, and it’s just kind of easy to use. I did replace it with an alternative for a couple of months, but it was too much. Despite the nonsense going on with the owner of WordPress.com, it’s still an easy to use, backward compatible, and mostly stable platform, with a rich ecosystem of themes and plugins.

    Matrix for chat – Matrix/Synapse has a bunch of different servers and implementations, is decentralized, and it uses e2e – end to end encryption, for chats. I’m not some super privacy nut – but I’m tired of corporate data mining, grabbing everything they can, including private conversations, and turning that in to ads. So e2e is the way.

    Mastodon for socials. Mastodon is an interesting mix of Facebook’s private posts, with Twitter’s public posts, and it’s decentralized. Bluesky does something similar, and I did consider it. But at the end of the day, it’s still algorithm driven, and measured by “engagement” which means it has all the wrong incentives. Mastodon is decentralized in a cleaner way, and it’s feed is just based based on who you followed, in the order they post, not based on “engagement.” This lines up better with what I’m after. Bluesky does let end users manage and even define their own algorithms, so it’s not off the table, and I do respect what they are at least trying to do, more than any of the manipulative ad driven monstrosities. So, Mastodon for now, maybe Bluesky one day. We’ll see. (It was also a lot easier to self host Mastodon.)

    Over time, I intend to get away from the centrally hosted, algorithm driven anti-social machines. The internet used to be fun and productive. We made the wrong move with web 2.0. Maybe there’s a way to go one step back, to take two steps forward.

    Update: I deleted my old twitter/x account @touvan. If you see posts there in the future, it’s not me.


  • unfocus.com – What Are We Doing Here?

    unfocus.com – What Are We Doing Here?

    I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want this space to be. The original idea behind unfocus.com, maybe born out of the naivete of youth, was that there was too much focus on myopic ideas around political ideas. The idea then was to take a step back and think about the bigger picture, thus the idea of “unfocus”.

    Since then, I’ve learned a lot about politics, about political theory, strategy and especially messaging and how that works in our embodied minds. Most of that hasn’t really made its way on to these pages. I did spend some of the last few years blogging about those topics on medium, with dozens more drafts than published articles. I still find that space interesting, but it’s I think, not what I want to spend my effort on here.

    I think what I’d like to focus on here, are projects. That’s what I used to blog about, before the algorithm driven economy burgled the attention from my mind. That’s what I’d like to blog about again. I’ll probably leave the old political stuff up (to mirror medium,) but will likely remove it from any feeds on the site.

    So let’s talk projects!

    What do I want to do? I’m not sure. The software space is in a state of jubilee, from the over hyped, but still useful LLM driven AI bubble. Many things really are possible, and some things have never been easier. How to get passed the hype, and land on the slope of enlightenment early, might be worthy of some blogging. In this place, in the archives, there are still many articles about to achieve very difficult things with fun tech like Flash from back in the day. Today, the LLMs are actually pretty good generating code that can achieve much of what was hard back then, at least for “solved problems,” easily (ethics aside – we’ll get to that.)

    I’ve got a couple of ideas about things to work on. I’d really like to step away from the political turmoil we find ourselves in, and just make games, and other forms of art, but the collapse of western civilization is quite distracting. One idea I had which is technical, but still adjacent to politics, was to use an AI model to do some kind of analysis, and try to tease out the different moral world models (worldviews) that different factions are promoting, mindfully (Republicans) or not (non-Republicans – basically, everyone else.)

    There is a whole framework to communicate here, but I’ve had so little luck explaining it. Anyway – that’s one project. A kind of Ground News, but not just filtered on the bias of the publication, through an idiotic and destructive left/right spectrum, but analyzed per article, on the substance of the article itself, to reveal the underlying moral world models, and how it fits in or contrasts with competing models. Could be fun and interesting. Definitely is needed in the world. But it’s also very difficult, especially since there doesn’t seem to be many who understand how this stuff works (it really seems like Republican strategists are literally the only ones, and they use it to foment hate and derision… very disheartening.) So that could be a fun side project, and I might yet build it.

    The other things I thought of would all be efforts at media and artistic expression. I’ve always wanted to get in to the video game space. Ever since I was a small child, I have dreamed about which mechanics I’d add to the various games I’ve played. I haven’t really spent my career working on that skill, but hey, it’s never too late. I also have some stories I’d like to tell – and maybe that’s a better place to assert my insights about humanity, politics and moral world models, than some grand plan to fix the world. I could easily channel that in to some stories. Another muscle to build – something new and entirely different from what I do in my day job. That might actually be nice.

    I also might start simply writing more. An easy way in, could be to write more game reviews. I did write one for Metroid Dread a while back. I hated that game. But I also wrote quite a long review of Final Fantasy XVI, after it shipped to PC, that I never published. That one was fun – and I love that game. I might really lean in to that for the year. I’ve been playing a few AAA games, and a lot of indy games. I’ve also almost entirely been playing on Linux (and a bit on Switch 1/2,) on either Steam OS (original Steam Deck) or my custom Bazzite machine. There’s probably some cool stuff I could share about those. Maybe I’ll start by finishing that FF XVI review, then share some thoughts about gaming on Linux.

    I’ve also been running some cool home lab type stuff in my basement, including some web services, and some home assistant lighting coordination. That’s a whole domain that could be fun to blog about.

    In the short term, I’ve basically been dusting off some old hobbies. This blog for example. It’s not really what I want unfocus.com to be, but it’ll do for now, until I get the itch to build something different. For now – I’ll continue to blog some hobby stuff here, starting with the resurrection of Quint Dice! More to come on that soon.

  • Update from the future!

    I resurrected this blog! I intend to make some updates here eventually, hopefully not a false start. This blog has been dormant, and barely even functioning for years. In that time, I did post a bit on medium. Those posts are mostly political commentary in nature, as I watch my civilization implode, and I’ve back ported them here. But I’m actually looking to pivot away from that a little bit, so we’ll see if I keep them. I want to get back to my technical roots, and fun – I have updates coming for Quint Dice, and some other thoughts about technology (AI!) The intention is to use unfocus.com as central location for a bunch of things, on medium (maybe), youtube, and other stuff. The focus will be on tech, with maybe an occasional political rant. Longer form thoughts coming soon.

  • Windows Color Management, a Rant

    Windows Color Management, a Rant

    Microsoft is uniquely unable to solve a problem Apple solved ages ago.

    Photo by Fotis Fotopoulos

    I just got a new monitor, and it supports 98% of the P3 color space, a high gamut screen. I had a high gamut screen some 10 years ago. Just as 10 years ago, Windows is still unable to properly support this screen. The result is that on Windows, all colors are over saturated for everything.

    Now, the monitor maker has some blame here. The associated profile seems to resolve in the sRGB color space, and Windows is applying that. But the problem is, there’s no easy or obvious way to simply select a better color profile (like a generic P3 color profile). And, even if I do go to the ancient, incomprehensible ICC screens (I’d bet $100 the developers who built that thing don’t even know how it works), it doesn’t actually apply to most apps! The app has to be aware of color management and tag the content appropriately. But even apps that are aware, like Photoshop, only tag the content you might be working on?—?so their own UIs are often over saturated. Even color aware apps on Windows aren’t properly color managed…

    The problem is breathtakingly easy to describe, by simply describing the way it works on macOS. In macOS, I can simply choose a different color profile, including one that I produce myself with a color calibrator (Spyder or similar), and the result is that all the windows that aren’t color aware, are adjust to look not over saturated. It’s like magic! It’s also easy to describe why—macOS simply treats the unmanaged stuff as if it were sRGB, and adjusts it accordingly.

    So why is this so hard for Windows to photocopy? All I want to do is apply a more appropriate color profile, and not have red icons stab me in the eye. It already works on macOS. So what’s the problem? Get out your photocopiers, Redmond, and make it work.

    Maybe if this stuff worked right, we wouldn’t need “sRGB” mode, like this new monitor supports. What a crock?—?it should be called “Windows backwards compatible mode” because that’s what it is. Support for a hopeless platform. Maybe if this worked right, the associated profile could accurately reflect the capabilities of the monitor, instead of assuming broken, weak support in Windows, and using an insufficient sRGB profile.

    And don’t get me started on HDR…