Wordle 1912 Hint

Hint: When you make something the center of your attention -- and then see it clearly.

Not Enough? Get the first letter of today's Wordle below.

New to Wordle? You can play it at the New York Times, and here are some thoughts on how I go about solving each day's puzzle.

First Letter: F

After uBlock Origin

I knew that uBlock Origin was becoming ineffectual in Google Chrome, and knew that was going to happen with Microsoft Edge as well, but I didn't know when. The answer (for me, anyway): Yesterday.

The cause, according to CoPilot:

uBlock Origin originally used Manifest V2, which allowed extensions to intercept and block network requests in real time using the webRequest API .... Manifest V3, introduced by Google and adopted by Chromium-based browsers like Edge, replaced this system with the declarativeNetRequest API, which only allows a static set of rules and removes real-time interception ...

Or, in English, a new era of anti-ad-blocking infrastructure is pranging the old ad-blocking infrastructure.

So this morning I went looking for a new ad-blocking solution. I prefer free or freemium, and the the Edge extension I'm auditioning at the momend is Adblock Plus (not an affiliate link).

So far, so good. If you try it because of this post and if it works for you, you're welcome.

Longer-term readers of this blog may recall that I resisted using an ad blocker at all for quite some time. 

In my view, it was a tacit agreement of sorts: Sites agreed to provide me with content, the price of which was that I had to put up with ads. And I stuck to that for a little while until the damn things became so intrusive and annoying that I just couldn't seem to read an article without nine pop-ups every 30 seconds and 39 static ads lining the edge of everything. Then I became a hypocrite on the subject.

These days, if I like a site, I usually turn my ad blocker off to see what happens. If they keep the advertising to a reasonable maximum, I leave the ad blocker off. If the ads make the site effectively unreadable, well, ad blocking gets turned on, or, if I consider the site valuable enough, I might pay cash for the ad-free version.

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #36

"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present." (Buddhism, Majjhima Nikaya 131)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

Focus on the present seems to be the most common thread in Buddhist practice, because the end of Buddhism is liberation from suffering and its means is achieving nirvāṇa -- a state without desire or sense of self. There's no room in that state for either regret or ambition, so the meditation, etc. used to reach toward the state emphasizes "mindfulness" of nothing but the present.

It's not limited to Buddhism, of course. David Hume (among others) held that we can only know the past and future through inference and that our reality actually consists entirely of the present, because it's our only directly perceivable environment (my first really powerful philosophical influence, Ayn Rand, spent a good deal of time attacking that notion, which happens to have been the subject of my first college philosophy paper).

It seems pretty obvious to me that the idea doesn't lend itself to getting much done in a practical sense, achieving new things, advancing the human condition in areas other than "enlightenment" itself. How would one incorporate feedback from past failures into plans for future successes? Anecdotally, it seems to me that Buddhists who are well-known for anything other than being Buddhists either don't commit to that, or commit to it after they've already made their mark on the world.

Not that I have anything against focusing on the present. That can be very useful when distractions impede movement into one's desired future. But to me it seems like a failure to engage with reality when adopted as a general commitment.