Author: SekhmetDesign

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Links I’d share in private #5

This week, I’m sharing links, quotes, images & videos that I came across while Internet binge-watching/reading. Keywords for this week: Younger generations have it harder; Software/Web Development is going to shit; how to start in Cybersecurity/Information security; and the use of memories and history in the current Israel/Gaza conflict.

  • An interesting video to watch: Scott Galloway’s “How the US Is Destroying Young People’s Future”

    The speaker may use American statistics, but we can easily relate it to our Canadian experience. Capitalism is making it so hard for young generations to success in life, and the rising cost of education, housing and food makes it hard for us to acquire wealth. The promised transfer of wealth from older generations to younger ain’t happening, and corporations are getting insanely richer while workers’ salaries is stagnating. “We’re economically attacking the youngs…but I know, let’s attack their emotional and mental well-being” Things need to change…

  • “JavaScript bloat in 2024”

    Up until very recently, my full-time job was as a Web Developer. And boy did my day-to-day job changed A LOT in the last 5 years. Everything became JavaScript frameworks: everything became React, VueJS, Angular, etc. And while it does simplify “sometimes” the job of a developer in quickly creating websites and tools, it has unfortunately helped participate in the enshittification of the Internet. This article shows how websites across the globe relies too much on JavaScript frameworks, making the websites bigger and bigger to download and process on folks’ browsers and devices. This quote resumes what I think about it: “It’s not just about download sizes. I welcome high-speed internet as much as the next guy. But code — JavaScript — is something that your browser has to parse, keep in memory, execute. It’s not free. And these people talk about performance and battery life… Call me old-fashioned, but I firmly believe content should outweigh code size. If you are writing a blog post for 10K characters, you don’t need 1000× more JavaScript to render it.”. Websites should be just that: HTML, CSS and some backend languages like Python or PHP, with a little sprinkle of JavaScript here and there. NOT the entire website coded in JavaScript!

  • “React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity“

    Which brings me to another subject in the Web Development sphere: the rise of frameworks over languages expertise in my field of work is bad for software/web developers everywhere! This quote from the article resumes it well: “If you work as a software developer, it means employers will continue to emphasise frameworks over functionality because that makes you easier to replace. They will sacrifice software security to make your job easier to outsource. They will let their own businesses suffer by shipping substandard software because they believe they can recoup those losses at your expense.” It suddenly puts into perspective all the tech layoffs for 2023-2024! Frameworks make workers interchangeable, and experts workers are finding it harder to perform well in this type of environment, as they are forced to get into one coding mindset over a multitude of skillsets/expertises. The entire article is quotable, as I think it pinpoints why the software/web development field has gotten shittier in the last 5 years… Let’s bring back unions!

  • “In the shadows of the Holocaust“

    The article give a good overview of how politicians can weaponize the Holocaust history to their own political agenda, amplifying the antisemitism we are seeing across the world. “How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today.” A powerful article to read on the subject.
  • Quote: “Everything gets old. Life is full of diminishing returns. At some point, more money, fame, prestige, travel, or sex won’t make you any happier. Learn to recognize when you have “enough.”” Source

  • “Getting into Information Security“

    As someone involved in the cybersecurity scene, we get asked a lot about how to start in that field: where to start studying, what to study/read/watch, where to look up for work, etc… This article is a good base for how to start into, and give good tips and advices on how to do it.
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Links I’d share in private #4

This week got me busy on the reading. Again, lots of interesting articles and shares coming your way!

  • I hate the word Happiness. There is an entire philosophy and ways of life behind this word that I do not like: people seeking Happiness at all cost tend to ignore bad emotions (like pain, grief, loss, sadness), and push this goal as an ultimate must. Which is why I prefer to say that I want to be content with my life, and to have interesting moments instead. This quote from the article is a good résumé on it: “The fact that you might desire a man, a woman, a car, a watch, a piece of jewelry, or a trip doesn’t matter. On the day you have that man, that woman, that car, that watch, that piece of jewelry, or that trip, you’ll realize it’s time to desire something else. So, I usually say I don’t want to be happy… I want to have an interesting life. Having an interesting life means living fully. This presupposes being able to despair when losing something important to you. You need to fully feel the pains: losses, mourning, failures. This idea of happiness that tries to shield us from everything bad is a tremendous disaster.”
  • The entire saga of J.K. Rowlings and her stance on transidentity have left a sour taste in my mouth: as a “Potterhead”, fan of the Wizarding World and all of its literature, Rowling’s opinions on trans activism abruptly made me lost my interest in the entire Harry Potter world. And I am not alone: tons of fans felt abandoned after the author’s vocal opinions on trans people, making a lot of fans feel empty and broken. Laurie Penny wrote a post over the disillusion and treason folks felt in the fandom after Rowling’s opinions became public, feeling completely abandoned. “The children who grew up reading Harry Potter became teenagers who used the Potterverse as a way to connect with each other and interact with politics. That’s a good story. But it’s not the end of the story. Because what happened next was that we became adults, many of whom questioned what our most beloved stories had taught us about what it meant to be good – and what it meant to have power, or to misuse it.” “And what I’ve observed is glorious and heart-breaking: a core fandom that built itself around a series of stories about tolerance, friendship, fighting for what they believe is right and using power responsibly taking those lessons seriously enough that when the time came, it simply rejected its creator and walked away.”
  • A nice music video – Nia Archives Unfinished Business
  • In “Are Well-Being Apps Actually Harming Us?“, the article highlights concerns regarding the potential negative impacts of certain well-being apps, and advocates for more responsible practices within the industry to safeguard user well-being and privacy. A study conducted by Mozilla suggests that many popular well-being apps may be causing more harm rather than providing benefits. And since these apps are being pushed more and more at work by well-intentioned HR and managerial teams that want to show they care about their employees’ mental and physical health, it cause major harm. “The lessons learned? Despite ostensibly helping vulnerable workers, these apps frequently harm them in three key ways. They promote unrealistic expectations; they shift the responsibility for maintaining a healthy workplace away from the employer and toward the employee; and they amplify harmful mentalities such as performative positivity.”
  • Poetry presented in interesting multimedia/interactive ways? The HTML Review will be your fix! (better viewed on desktop/laptop)
  • Instagram account of the week: Vallesia Obscura
    I’m a sucker for anything Goth. Goth art, goth fashion, goth aesthetics…My soul is a Gothic Punk, and any image in that aesthetic will catch my eyes. Which is why I share this artist’s account!
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Links I’d share in private #3

And I seem to be on a roll again, another week of blogging and commenting on links & readings I came across on the Web! Weeeeeeeee!
Where I comment on topics like: personal branding; workplace burnout; our ways of life isn’t sustainable and we are going nuts; online privacy’s alternative tools.

  • Read on Mastodon: “I understand why “we’re secretly ruled by lizard people” is a popular conspiracy theory because the idea that actual humans are doing this to us is intolerable.”
  • Read “Everyone’s a sellout now”: kinda ironic that I share this article as someone who is trying to be a content creator on the Internet, but here we are! Still a fascinating read about how personal brands has become a “must”, an obligation, to thrive online: it is everywhere. People dreams to build a following and a community around their fields of interest, and earn a living, but the ways things are in many fields (like in the literary world, or the music industry) kinda destroys the authentic voices. “Because self-promotion sucks. It is actually very boring and not that fun to produce TikTok videos or to learn email marketing for this purpose. Hardly anyone wants to “build a platform”; we want to just have one. This is what people sign up for now when they go for the American dream — working for yourself and making money doing what you love. The labor of self-promotion or platform-building or audience-growing or whatever our tech overlords want us to call it is uncomfortable; it is by no means guaranteed to be effective; and it is inescapable unless you are very, very lucky.” Personal branding, or the invasion of #marketing in our personal lives, makes my eyes roll so much, and I hate it (I knooooooowwwwwww, ironic that I say it as a blogger who tries to get her voice heard). I guess we are all “attention whores” in a way, vying for people’s short attention for our 15 minutes of fame. But we have to “sell” ourselves out more and more now, otherwise we won’t get the job we want, the apartment/house we dream of living in, the relationships we want in our lives, etc. The type of society we live in makes it harder to not get into this painful “marketing” relationship with others, making it difficult to distinguish if our relations are real/authentic or just fake, and making big companies profit from our personal branding’s attempts. Another interesting quote: “In a recent interview with the Guardian, the author Naomi Klein said the biggest change in the world since No Logo, her 1999 book on consumerism and inescapable branding, came out was that “neoliberalism has created so much precarity that the commodification of the self is now seen as the only route to any kind of economic security. Plus social media has given us the tools to market ourselves nonstop.””.
  • Beautiful picture! Source: https://www.threads.net/@emackphoto/post/C34bLQir0rz
  • “The way we live in the United States is not normal”: This article was a punch in the guts, very depressing. While it is USA-centric in terms & description of everyday’s life, we Canadians aren’t immune to the Americanisation of our sociopolitical & economic ways of life. The state of our education and health systems are in shambles, we have to pay out of pocket more and more, everything is becoming expensive, and our salaries aren’t on par with the inflation…We are stuck being so busy, but at the same time we feel so lonely. Our society is truly getting worse by trying to follow the American Way of Life & Capitalism, and it just makes us more depressed. I kinda wish to move out of here and go live anywhere but in North America, where life follows another beat, a slower one…
  • Twitter thread on workplace burnout: the author attempts to describe why we are seeing more and more people being burnt out by work, and gives a hint on how to slow down (hint: say NO a lot more to not feel overloaded!)
  • Link of the week: Awesome Privacy A curated list of services and alternatives that respect your privacy because PRIVACY MATTERS.
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Links I’d share in private #2

Another week, another sharing moment about all the links and tools I have seen and read during this last week. All the things that I consider that are worth sharing with you folks! This week, I focused a lot of my readings on the impact of AI on us; the erosion of LGBTQ+ rights disguised as the protection of Women’s rights; the monoculturization of the Internet culture; and injustices.

Enjoy these links & the reading!

  • A scary read about our eroding rights in North America, and the attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, disguised as a Woman’s Rights: this article, while focusing on American’s politics, is worth a read because we are seeing the same tactics across our northern borders here in Canada. “State Republicans across the nation are pushing bills commonly titled the “Women’s Bill of Rights.” You’ll be shocked to learn that contrary to the title, however, Republicans haven’t suddenly started to care about women’s equality or agency—they just want to use that banner as a cover for stripping away our rights as LGBTQ+ individuals”. I’ll always be an ally for LGBTQ+ & trans rights, as I consider trans women are women, trans men are men, and there is no discussing human rights! But the scary rise of conservative & ultra-religious movements in our political lives is to be watched and counter-act as much as we can. It’s time we become aggressive in the protection of our LGBTQ+ & Trans rights! Do not let them use Women’s rights to demolish trans’ & queer rights!
  • Useful link – “Blocking AI bots on your online content“: if you’re a content creator like me, and just don’t want AI businesses to profit over your online content on your website, there are ways to block those AI from scanning your websites. This article explains how to do it. If you aren’t a tech person, poke me in DM, I will help you set this up!
  • And to continue on the subject of AI – “AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?” My current opinion over the rise of AI in our society (and in tech) is pretty much summed up in this article by Molly White. I share her skepticism and ethical concerns over the over-use of AI in our daily lives right now, as well as the damages it is wreaking among professional circles (like software/web developers), and the security vulnerabilities found in those LLM models and tools. A step back would be needed for us to really reflect on how we want to use this technology moving forward, but I seriously doubt it will happen, as the business people are having such a “hard on” making money with AI right now, and damn the consequences. “Though AI companies are prone to making overblown promises that the tools will shortly be able to replace your content writing team or generate feature-length films or develop a video game from scratch, the reality is far more mundane: they are handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern. Still, I do think acknowledging the usefulness is important, while also holding companies to account for their false or impossible promises, abusive labor practices, and myriad other issues. When critics dismiss AI outright, I think in many cases this weakens the criticism, as readers who have used and benefited from AI tools think “wait, that’s not been my experience at all”.”
  • The Internet culture and online communities is getting bland, and I hate it! We’ve seen the rise of online communities, rich with dialogue and sharing diverse life’s experiences, in the end of 2000s/early 2010s, and I was all for it! It was so refreshing to finally find your tribe and peers across the planet, and not feel alone! Since the mid-2010s, the rise in popularity of social media has pretty much killed off the few nested circles and communities that were online, eliminating the diversification of voices. The rise of aggressive comments by trolls also ended up killing the desire to share lives that people had in these communities, preventing people from grouping together and sharing things in common. And the rise of those social medias gated the communities into their platforms and communities’ guidelines, restricting more and more their diverse voices online and killing off these vibrant communities as time passes by. This article uses the metaphor of ecology, and cultivating a vibrant a diverse forest, to talk how the Internet is becoming a bland monoculture finding ways for us to spend money on trying to connect with other human beings in different ways, be it as gatekeeping communities by making us pay (à la X/Twitter), or by making us pay for trying to belong to a community that we so want to belong to. “The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few. Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.”
  • “Why I swear by “My year of No” “: this blog article really called out to me, because I had several phases in my recent past when I said no to everything: no to going out, no to seeing people, no to overbooking my schedule of activities or tasks, no to family’s obligations… Saying no, and just staying home doing nothing, having no obligation… It was such a liberation! A freeing sense of freedom and control over my life, where I felt good about myself. And when I realized in therapy that my old ways of overbooking my calendar was a way of running away from my traumas and past, the moment I started refusing and saying no… It gave me the space to work on my issues, start accepting myself as I am, and be able to enjoy life again, but at a much slower pace. I highly recommend saying no more, it’s worthwhile!
  • Ohhhhhhhh How I miss George Carlin! I would have loved his views on our current society’s problems… My punk rage against society’s injustices is feeling validated by this quote.
    Quote: “A person of good intelligence and sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality – and it’s not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing – it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavored dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street.”
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Links I’d share in private

Been a while I haven’t shared random links and readings I had through my Internet’s binging. Enjoy these useful links and content!

  • Useful Link: https://www.ilovepdf.com : Useful website to edit, manipulate and transform PDF files all for free. Just make sure you aren’t manipulating private informations in your PDF before using this site, as I can’t guarantee how the files are kept and processed on their servers…
  • Quote: “Careers don’t exist. Don’t worry about the narrative of your “career.” Pursue your interests. Take care of your needs. Adapt to new circumstances. And be willing to reinvent yourself at any age.” (source of quote: Calvin Rosser – 40 Unconventional Pieces of Advice That Most People Ignore)
    I’ve learned this lesson the hard way last fall. Careers can be scrapped in a heartbeat: better be adaptable and follow your guts when it’s time to move on and change career. That’s what I did, and so far, my mental health is SO MUCH BETTER! Anxiety has diminished by A LOT, and I don’t feel like an incompetent baboon improvising her ways through her career…I haven’t felt the imposter syndrome in months now, which is refreshing!
  • Interesting Reading: Google is killing Retro Dodo – an excellent story explaining why we should start using alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo when we search for content online: Google is now entering their Monetization era and promoting only paying customers’ websites and links instead of independent websites owners and content creators.
    Now is the time to start paying all the independent creators that you like, as their survival depends on us now. Encourage indie content creators by subscribing to their Patreon; follow their RSS feed through Feedly or any RSS app reader; subscribe to their social medias accounts. Fuck the monopolistic approach of Google (and the Big Techs)!
    Which reminds me: I’ll have to ressucitate the Blogroll section on my own homepage, so I can recommend my favorite bloggers and content creators to follow online!
  • Thoughtful Reading: The state of Culture 2024 – another depressing thought piece, but sooooooo worth the read! Our culture and art, and yes even the Entertainment industry, are being drained through the Dopamine cartel, making us addicted to short attention span’s medias and content consumption. It’s time to start breaking from our addictions, and take small steps into breaking up with our tech devices. Go visit an art exhibit, go see a music show, go walk outside.
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Recap 2023: F*ck this year LOL

Womp womp womp wommmmpppppp….!

Well, it went downhill after my last post! LOL

It started ok, and the first 6 months was looking good: I almost weaned off from my medication, and was on a path of good mental health.

The last 6 months of 2023 have been pretty chaotic and stressful, and while I did end up getting back on my feet after a pretty bad October/November… it was hurtful and depressing. I ended up having panic attacks many times over my future, wondering what would happen, when will I get back on my feet, and it fed my depressive state pretty bad. While I was down, and anxiety was through the roof, I was still able to imagine a better outcome in my future, not despairing too much over the hardship I was going through… At least one positive aspect came out of all of this: I guess therapy has finally shown its payoffs, making me able to visualize positivity throughout the shit storm I was going through. Knowing it could only get better was really all the motivation I needed to get through it all. For now, I managed to survive, and I am crossing my fingers the new path I have taken in December will produce satisfying results in 2024.

On another note, I am looking into 2024 very carefully, having some resolutions in mind for 2024:

  • start writing more here, and see how I can monetize it a little. I miss blogging, and I want to see if I can ever live off from freelance mode.
  • study again. I have a list of online classes I want to take, and since I really want to do more cybersecurity stuff in the future, I need to up my study time a little.
  • exercise on my bike again. I’ve bought a NordikTrack a year and half ago. Lack of motivation and depression didn’t help with my mood, and I kinda feel guilty of spending a lot of money for a barely used device. Having a huge video monitor that can screen bike rides throughout the world is fun, and I really loved the experience. I should do it more often, even if exercising is not of a big help on my general mood.
  • start my freelance career again after almost 10 years of hiatus.

Let’s get back at the end of 2024 and see how good I followed through my resolutions…!

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A year after

A year after, and I feel better.
Content, at peace, calm and joyful.
A year later, I look back,
All I see is the overcoming of pain.
Brutal pain, the kind of pain like your heart was ripped apart.
Devoured, grinded, and spat back out in tiny parts.


But a year after, the heart still beats.
Steady, strong, and healed.
A year later, I feel slowly awakening.
Rising through the fog of memories.
All I want is to trust and love others,
but I fear it’s too late: the betrayal cutted deep this time.


Still, a year later, I’m hopeful
that I’ll gain my desires back,
for I crave it all, primal and all.
A year after, the brain is done:
done with overthinking, reasoning, and mooding.


Now, all it wants is to be excited again.
The thrills, the surrender, the love, the trust:
That’s all I want, the year after.