DOS Nostalgia: On using a modern DOS workstation.

Premise. 

This blog post is useless. And rambling. As it's useless the machine I'm typing this on, a Pentium 3 subnotebook from the 90ies. You have been warned!

But, it might be entertaining, and I suspect many of the people doing what I do and reading what I write, are in a similar demographic and might be starting to be nostalgic, thinking of their formative years and wondering if they're worth revisiting...

Objectives. 

I wanted to find a DOS machine, not for retrogaming (only), but to do actual "work". Even more narrowly, I had an idea of trying to compile an old DOS demo I made in the nineties, the only production of a short-lived Italian group called "day zero deflection" (you won't find it).

Monotasking. No internet. These things are so appealing to me right now. One tries to escape the dopamine rush of doomscrolling on all the connected devices that surround us. The flesh is weak, and instead of trying to muster the required willpower, shopping for a hardware solution seems so much more attractive. Of course, it's a fool's errand, but hey, I said this post was going to be useless.

A Long, intermezzo of personal history.

(skip this!) 

It's interesting how memory works. So non-linear, and unreliable. I used a lot of computers in my life, and I started early, I began programming around six or seven years old.

This past Christmas, as the pandemic eased up, I was able again to fly and spend time with my family in southern Italy. Found one of the Commodore 64 we had.

The c64 in question. Yes, it needed some love - albeit to my surprise, all my disks worked, with my childhood code! The video glitch is actually a quite mysterious defect, but it's a story for another time...

We, because I grew up with my older cousins, my mother is the last of eleven siblings, so I have a lot of cousins, many close to my house as my family used to be farmers, and thus had land that eventually became buildings, with many of my aunts and uncles ending up living in the same park.

These older cousins taught me programming, and I was using their computers before having my own. In fact, the c64 I found is most likely theirs, as mine was eventually donated to some relative that needed it more.

I remember a lot of this, in detail, albeit I don't know anymore what details are real and what ended up as images remixed from different time eras.

We were in the basement of my aunt's villa, just next door to the building I grew up in, where we had an apartment on the top floor. We would transfer things between the two by lowering a rope from the balcony down to the villa's garden. Later, when we had PCs and network cards, we moved bits between the buildings, having suspended a coax cable that ran from the second floor of my building (where another cousin lived) to my floor, to the villa.

The basement was originally the studio of my uncle, who was the town's priest. I was named after him. He and one of his sisters died in a car accident when I was little, so I am not sure I really remember of him, sadly.

But I remember the basement, the Commodore 64, and later an 8086 with an external hard drive the same size and shape as the main unit. An amber monitor monochrome I think, or perhaps it was both amber and green, with a configuration switch.

I remember all of the c64 games we played, easily. I remember bits of my coding journey, the books we used to study, and once my cousin being dismayed that I could not figure how to make a cursor move on the screen (the math to go to the next/previous row), even if it was mostly a misunderstanding.

I remember playing with my Amiga 600 there too, Body Blows - I switched to the Amiga after visiting... another cousin, this time, in Milan.

I remember the first Pentium they had because it allowed me to use more 3d graphics software. 3d studio 4 without having to resort to software 387 emulation! At the time I had an IBM PS/2 with a 486sx which the seller persuaded my father would be better than a 486dx another guy was offering us - who needs a math coprocessor, and IBM is a much better brand than something home-made... And I know that numerous times I lost all the data on these computers that I did not own, often by typing "format" too fast and putting the wrong drive letter in.

And then, nothing? Everything more modern than that I sort of lost, or rather, becomes more confused. I know the places I went shopping for (pirated) software and hardware, maybe some of the faces, not sure. 

I know used to lug my PC tower for the few kilometers that separated my house in Scafati from the "shop" (really a private apartment) that I used to go to in Pompei, as I was a kid, and did not have a car of course. 

And that tells me that I had lots of different PC configurations over the years, LOTS of them, AMD, Intel, Voodoo cards, a Matrox of some sorts, even a Sound Blaster AWE32 at a point, a CD-ROM and the early CD games, I remember the excitement for each new accessory and card, and the intense hate for cable and thermal management, especially on more modern setups. 

I remember scanners, the first were hand-held (Logitech ScanMan, then Trust), printers, joysticks, graphics tablets when I got into photography, the very first digital camera I had (I think an Olympus). It's all "PC" for me, I have no idea of what I was using in which year.

At a point, around university, I switched to primarily using laptops. Acer or Asus, something cheap and powerful but they would break often (cheap plastics). Then finally the MacBook Pro, and that one has remained a constant, still today my primary personal machine.

So. My nostalgia is about three machines, really, even if I had dozens. The Commodore 64, the one I remember the most. I am eager to play around with that one more, I ordered all sorts of HW, but I have no intentions to use it "daily" - that one belongs to a museum. 

The MisterFPGA c64 core is great and can output 50hz!

The Amiga, which for some reason I don't care as much for anymore, I suspect mostly because I was using it primarily for games so I did not create as much on it - I think that was the key.

I had some graphic programs, but I was not a great 2d artist (DeluxePaint) and I did not understand enough of the 3d tools I happened to get my hands on (Real3D, VistaPro)... and I did no coding on it. At a point, I had a (pirate) copy of Amos, but no manual.

Swapping disks, real or virtual, is also not fun.

And then the PC, specifically the 486sx that I used both for programming again (QBasic, PowerBasic, Assembly then C with DJGPP), for graphics (Imagine, then Lightwave among others), photography, the internet...

That 486 captures all of my PC memories, even if I know it's wrong. For example, during my C demo-coding times, I must have had a different computer, because the demo we were making would never run on a 486, they were sVGA, I even remember coding our sVGA layer, fixing a bug in the Matrox VESA bios - they were out of spec, not setting the viewport to be the same as the screen resolution when changing the latter, and many demos did run with the wrong line pitch because of that. Not mine! And the demo was, for some reason, writing buffers in separate R,G,B planes, with some MMX code I made to then shuffle them back into the display frame. 

So, it could not have been the 486 - but this is great, it gives me the freedom of not trying to recreate a particular setup but instead going for that same feeling and toolset I remember using, on an entirely different system. 

What do we "need"? 

Here's the plan. First and foremost, we'll get a laptop, because I don't have space in my apartment, no, in my life, for retrocomputing desktop or tower. Also, I want to go to hipster coffee shops and write on my hipster retro workstation, as I am doing right now. 

I planned, regardless of the machine I would end up getting, to rip out the cells from the battery pack and reconstruct it - batteries are mostly a liability in old computers and I prefer the weight savings of not having them - this also means, technically, "luggable" computers could be considered.

We will look for:

• Something fast, because if I'm buying something it must be the best I can get! I don't even care about being period-accurate, this will be a monotasking monster, not a museum piece.
• Something I can program on, because hey, what if I like it and want to make modern retro-demos? Ideally, this means a Pentium I, Pentium Pro, or Pentium MMX, beautiful in-order CPUs with predictable pipelines I still know how to cycle-count (sort-of). But anything less than the dreadful Pentium 4 will do, P2 and P3s are OOO but still understandable enough.
• RAM is not an issue really, and we will max out whatever configuration we will settle on. 
• Storage is not a problem either, because we will replace whatever HDD the machine comes with an SSD (yes, an actual SSD, albeit most people use compact-flash adapters instead) via an mSATA to PATA/IDE 2.5' enclosure which can fit any half-size ssd (I got a 64gb one just to be "safe" as you never know the limits of old motherboards and firmware. You do want to make sure that the machine did originally support hdds of a decent size (tens of gb) though.
• DOS-compatible (SoundBlaster-compatible) soundcard, is a must.
• A TFT screen, also is a must. The resolution doesn't really matter, but we want something as modern as possible because old LCDs were really terrible. Ideally, 640x480 would get us the best DOS compatibility, but in practice, it's not a problem.
• Ideally an sVGA card with good VESA/VBE compatibility, and with good scaling from the VGA resolutions (640x480 text, 320x200 graphics) to whatever the LCD resolution is (that means, either integer-scaling and the right LCD resolution or good quality filters when upsampling).
• An USB port is highly recommended, as we want to be able to plug in a USB storage device to easily transfer files from and to modern, internet-connected machines. Setting up networking, using PCMCIA cards, etc would be much more painful.
• We want a good keyboard. And, because we can, we want something cool looking, maybe an iconic piece of design, not some random garbage brand. Also, something that is easy to service.
• Reasonably priced. There is no way I burn 1000$ on this just because certain hardware is right now "hot", I find it borderline immoral. 

Expectations vs Reality.

After long, long deliberations, research on forums, scouting eBay and so on, I landed on an IBM ThinkPad 240x. The ThinkPads are amazing machines, easy to service, iconic, with great keyboards and the TrackPoint is useable in a pinch.

Beautiful! Pro-tip, a bit of 303 protectant makes the plastics look as new!

I paid around 200$ for it, you will see people getting these for 5$ at a garage sale or stuff like that, but I'm ok paying more for something that the seller verified it's running, has no issues, and so on. More than that I think is crazy, but you do you...

When it arrived it looked amazing. Yes, it had scratches on the top, and even some hairline cracks, one near a hinge and one on the bottom of the chassis, but these are not a problem as I planned to disassemble the thing anyway, see if I needed to clean the internals, replace batteries, check for any leak, re-apply thermal paste if needed and so on.

Regardless of how much research you have done, the reality of the actual machine will surprise you in good and bad ways.

All the hardware setup was trivial, and all the things I thought would be hard were not. 

I gutted the battery as planned (the cells were already a bit bulging). I feared the most for the initial OS setup, but my strategy worked flawlessly. I bought an IDE-to-USB adapter, connected the SSD in its SSD-to-IDE enclosure, and mapped it as a virtual drive in a VirtualBox VM with Windows 98. 

That allowed me to use Win98's fdisk and format to create something I knew would be recognized by the ThinkPad - I was not sure at all the same would have happened with modern tools. For extra safety, I also made two partitions under 2GB, to be able to format them with fat16, and the remainder of space was left in a third partition using fat32.

Installing the OS was a breeze, and Lenovo still hosts all the latest IBM drivers - Windows 98 just works.

The first tiny hurdle I had to overcome was with the firmware update, IBM tools are adamant about having a charged battery to perform the update... which I clearly did not have. But in reality, the tool just calls a second executable, and even if the binaries have different extensions than the default the flashing tools wanted, it did not take too long to figure out the right switches to use.

Upgrading the OS was also trivial, some people made install packs with all the official patches and lots of unofficial fixes (used mdgx ones, htasoft is an alternative), I just grabbed one and it mostly worked. The only issue I had is that the first time around the OS stopped booting with some DMA error, but disabling a specific patch having to do with enabling DMA on drives solved the issue. Re-installing the OS via the SSD is relatively fast, and I also used an old copy of Norton Ghost to create snapshots.

To my surprise, even USB in DOS mostly worked (via Bret Johnson's drivers, albeit many options exist). It is not 100% reliable, nor it's fast... but it does work! Same for the TrackPoint, via cutemouse.

I ended up with the classic config.sys/autoexec.bat multiple-choice menu for things like emm386 and so on, I remember these being so painful to deal with, but in this case, it was all easy, probably also because this machine has so much RAM. 

That is not to say there aren't problems. There are, but in a way, luckily for me, they seem to be unfixable, so I don't need to spend a ludicrous amount of time trying to overcome them (alright alright, I already did spend more time than it's worth, using DOSBox-debug and a few different decompilers to reverse an audio TSR... but I won't anymore I swear). And I did not foresee them.

First, there is the VGA. I obsessed over resolutions, because I knew, that most laptops of this time do not do resolution scaling well. I had an epiphany though that allowed me to stop worrying about it. It's true that ideally, 640x480 makes you not have to worry about scaling. But! Laptops with 640x480 screens tend to be incredibly crappy and small LCDs, so much so, that the unscaled 640x480 area on a more modern laptop (say, an 800x600 panel) ends up covering a bigger screen estate and looking better!

So, problem solved, right? Yes. If you get a card with good firmware! Unfortunately, the laptop I got has an obscure chipset that not only has crappy VESA/VBE support but is also not software-patchable via UniVBE. 

Some TSRs help a bit (vbeplus, fastvid), adding more modes by using other resolutions and forcing the viewport to clip, and you can play around with caching modes, but most DOS sVGA demos do not work. 

TBH, that was just plain unlucky, most laptops would not be this bad at sVGA... but expect I guess to find at least one bit of "unlucky" hardware you did not think about in your machine.

The other issue is with DOS audio and this is a biggie. 

Yes, I paid attention, and I got a chipset that does support DOS SoundBlaster emulation. But OMG, nobody told me it was going to be this crappy! It's basically useless, with most software just not working at all, especially when it comes to digital audio. The OPL3 FM music fares better, it tends to work, albeit it might not sound great.

It's sad but most DOS software, especially demos, have a much higher chance of running in Windows 98 than in pure DOS, as when Windows is loaded the audio emulation is much, much better.

This is something that apparently one simply has to live with. No PCI sound card has great DOS support, now I learned, especially with laptops, as DOS audio support for PCI relies on a combination of the right soundcard, the right motherboard and the right firmware. 

It doesn't help that often, when people online report audio working in DOS, they mean dos-under-windows, not pure dos... And you get a laptop from the pre-PCI era, then you're likely on a 486 or less, which not only will be worse in all other areas - but also many of these laptops used not to bundle any audio card at all, so they are strictly worse.

That's not to say that there are no Pentium laptops with built-in ISA audio - there are, and probably I was again unlucky with the 240x being a rare combination of a dos-compatible-ish PCI on a "bad" motherboard (apparently using the intel 440mx chipset which does not support DDMA), but again... expect some issues, there are no perfect laptops, and even back in the day, there was hardly a configuration that would run everything flawlessly...

Conclusions. 

Was it worth it? Should you do it? Yes and no...

It's small!

For retro gaming, or in general, passive consumption (demos, etc), it's overall a terrible idea, I'm pretty confident all laptops would be terrible, and even most desktops.

The early PC landscape was just a mess of incompatible devices, buggy, unpatched software, and crashes. You were lucky when things worked, and this is true today as well. DosBox is a million times more compatible than any real hardware. Yes, it has bugs, and lots of things can be more accurate, but on average it is better than real hardware.

There are many DosBox builds out there, and I'm sure this is going to be quicky outdated, but at the time of writing I recommend:

• On Windows, primarily DosBox-X
• I also keep vanilla for debugger-enabled builds - you can even get a dosbox plugin for ida pro, but that's for another time, and DosBox-ECE
• On Mac, Boxer - Madds branch and vanilla DosBox on Mac
• Last time I tried, DosBox-X had issues on Mac with the mouse emulation - might have been fixed by now.

On windows, and especially if you care about Windows of any kind, there is 86box (a fork of PCem) which is a lower-level, more accurate emulator. DosBox does not work great even with Win3.11, for some odd mouse emulation problems that seem to be different in each fork.

If like me, you want to experience a monotasking machine that you can grab for a few hours at a time to play with a simpler, more focused experience, then I'd say these laptops are great fun!

I'm even collecting a bit of a digital retro-library by mirroring old websites, often grabbed from the Wayback machine, and grabbing old magazines from the Internet Archive, to recreate the kind of reading materials I had back then...

Overall, setting this up took me less time and energy than tinkering with a Raspberry Pi or say, trying to install a fully functional Linux on a random contemporary laptop. It's one of the least annoying projects I have embarked upon.

My conscience feels ok too. It won't become garbage, I hate clutter, I hate having too much stuff, too many things I don't need in my life, especially digital crap that creates more problems than it really solves... With this one, I know I can sell or donate the hardware the moment I don't want to use it anymore, it's not going to be in a landfill, it's not another stupid gadget with a short lifespan.

The best part, all the software is portable, DOS doesn't really care about the hardware, you only need to replace a few lines in your config.sys if you have specific drivers... so I can migrate all I have on this laptop to a DosBox setup (even today I do keep the two in sync) or a different machine. 

Not bad. You want to try? Luckily it's easy, this is what I learned! You don't have to stress over the hardware (as I did), because none is perfect.

I went for something relatively "modern", a laptop that would have ran in its prime Windows 98/NT/2000 - and "downgraded" it to do mostly DOS - I think that's a good choice, but I don't think this ended up working much better or worse than any other option I was considering.

OT: To my white friends. A few words on #BLM.

Hi all.

We all see what's going on in the US these days, so I'll cut to the chase. This isn't going to be a lecture, do not worry, nor I'm turning this blog into a political platform.

But, I realized over the years that I've not been always part of the solution for our ongoing social issues, and I hope some of the following can help others.

This is not about where to donate or what to do or not to do to help. 

This is about how to help yourself. It is our responsibility to solve our own conflicts, and only through that, we can be good to others.

Forgive yourself. Then move forward.

This is not easy. There is a reason why we minimize social issues, why our brains are always trying to see a justification. Yes, it sucks, but... But he shouldn't have done this. But let's see how it goes. We have to hear from both sides. But, but but...

You're fighting against yourself. We are all privileged in some way, we truly are.

To be open to that means shaking your foundation. We've been given something that we didn't do anything to deserve. But we do deserve things! We are smart, we worked hard, we have our issues, we have our self-worth. We matter!

Saying the word "privilege" is an attack, no matter if it registers consciously or not, it erodes some of our self-worth. Our brains, our very own humanity, is not built to accept it.

Have you ever looked at a person on the street and felt an idea forming in your mind, that perhaps they did something to deserve it. Perhaps their situation is a result of their actions?

That's the mechanism in action. We cannot accept that we are not the masters of our lives, that we don't have control. It's scary and uncomfortable, and we are built to resist it. What meaning does life has if the biggest differences between people are left to the toss of a coin?

This is not about justifying our actions or inactions. It's not about moral judgement at all. It's about understanding how ego and feeling work, understand that they are part of humanity and for a good reason.

But also, once you truly understand it, you can move past them, not by suppressing them, but by knowing they exist for a reason, and not having them dominate your choices.

This is not about judgment, it's not about being nice either. It's a continuous self-reflection that helps us live consciously. It's not easy, it's definitely uncomfortable, and there is no victory to be had.

It is, what some might call, a practice, or a philosophy. You cannot win or lose, fail or succeed, because judgment is not part of any of this. It's about being conscious of our own humanity.

All lives matter?

That said, I want to address a couple of issues that I think stem from our egos, maybe you will agree.

The first is the phrase "all lives matter", which is always uttered by us, white people. Now, given the above, you might know where I'm going.

Why do people say this? Are they racist? What does it mean to be racist anyway? Is being fair racist now? Let's try to untangle these things.

First, you have to realize that this is an emotional response, that your brain masks with rationalization. Wait a second, hear me out, don't get defensive now. I think you can see how the phrase is at face value, quite silly.

When an acquaintance faces a loss, we say, I'm sorry for your loss. We do not say, I'm sorry for all the people that lost others in the world. Imagine being on the receiving end of a similar rebuttal. You feel strongly about something, and someone feels the need for interjecting and shifting the attention. You see the problem?

And it's a rationalization. It's obvious that "black lives matter" does not subtract from the worthiness of others, but it shines a light to a specific imbalance of power. A picture is worth a thousand words:

The "all lives matter" crowd is not about good or bad people, shades of racism. It's a natural response that we have. The feeling is human, but it is not a justification. It is our own responsibility to learn how to deal with feelings, understand what are they telling us, and act after we observed them, not driven by them.

There are bad people on both sides.

Now that we got the easy one out, this is going to be a bit more of a challenge.

How do we feel about looting? Here we have a divide, the uncomfortable line. Should I say ACAB? Can I justify riots, destruction? What do they want to achieve! Don't they realize they're undermining the message, the mission? I stand for political change, for laws being passed, the bad apples removed, this doesn't help at all!

I understand. And you're right. But, realize this is a matter of perspective. And hold on! Because I'm not going to justify anyone here, just try to look at the problem from a different angle.

The reason why we want change, actual action, push for laws, make donations, perhaps even study the problem in papers and publications, understand how's best to spend money, de-fund police and prioritize social programs and so on...

All these thoughts I understand, I grew up in a middle class, intellectual, left-wing, progressive family. I get fighting the good fight, being involved, I get socialism and welfare.

What I didn't get, until recently, is how other people didn't see the same. How is it that even if we want the same objective, some people are looting and some people are reading?

In retrospect, the answer is obvious. It's because I believe in society. And why wouldn't I? It always worked great for me.

The thing I cannot see is the perspective of someone that doesn't believe in it anymore. That is not willing to fix the social contract, it's just ok to tear it up because it never worked. I can imagine the scenarios. What if my life didn't matter much anymore? Would I be thinking of what's best for the world, or just watch it burn?

Understand that you will never fully understand. That it is not the responsibility of others to explain either, nor it justifies actions. Actions will be the perspective of history, and what in the end did or not change society.

I think that looting will probably not help, it's actually a complex effect like anything real world is, that's not the point.

The point is that we cannot escape living lives from a given perspective. It's not because we're good or bad, it is yet another limitation of being human.

If we get that, then hopefully we can understand how we feel, understand that others feel, and have less a need to justify nor judge.

Lastly, when it doubt, take responsibility. You might think "butwhatabout... X", or "yes, but...Y". And you're right. X and Y matter, it is true, it's not crazy, it's not a lie. But check if X and Y are about others, other communities, other people's behaviors, farther from you.

Then, understand that responsibility starts with us, radiates from us. Again, this does not justify or diminish X and Y. They are still true, and important. But, as a great philosopher once said "I'm starting with the man in the mirror".

As all my posts are, this is improvised, and I might revisit it in time. Stay safe. Love you all.

Menger sponge-ish

Did these a while ago for the namecards of our rendering team at Roblox.

Figure someone might like them as desktop backgrounds...

They were done in Processing, exported as SVGs and finalized in Inkscape.

Sample...

Grab the Images here

Sketches

Privacy, bubbles, and being an expert.

Privacy is not the issue.

Much has been said about the risk of losing our privacy in this era of microwaves that can turn into cameras and other awful "internet of things" things. It seems that today there is nothing you can buy that does not both intentionally spy on your behaviors and is also insecure enough to allow third parties to spy on your behavior.

It's the wrong problem.

Especially when dealing with big, reputable companies, privacy is taken really quite seriously, there is virtually zero chance of anyone spying on you, as an individual. Even when it comes to anonymized data, care is taken to avoid singling out individuals, it might be unflattering, but big companies do not really care about you.

What they care about is targeting. Is being able to statistically know what various groups of people prefer, in order to serve them better and to sell them stuff.

CV Dazzle

The dangers of targeting.

Algorithmic targeting has two faces. There is a positive side to it, certainly. Why would a company not want to make its customers happier? If I know what you like, I can help you find more things that you will like, and yes, that will drive sales, but it's driving sales by effectively providing a better service, a sort of digital concierge. Isn't that wonderful? Why would anyone not opt in in such amazing technology...

But there is a dark side of this mechanism too, the ease with which algorithms can tune into the easiest ways to keep us engaged, to provide happiness, rewards. We're running giant optimizers attached to human minds, and these optimizers have access to tons of data and can do a lot of experiments on a huge (and quite real) population of samples, no wonder we can quickly converge towards a maximum of the gratification landscape.

Is it right to do so? Is it ethical? Are we really improving the quality of life, or are we just giving out quick jolts of pleasure and engagement? Who can say?
Where is the line between, for example, between keeping a player in a game because it's great, for some definition of great, and doing it so because it provides some compulsion loops that tap into basic brain chemistry the same way slot machines do?

Will we all end up living senseless lives attached to machines that provide to our needs, farmed like the humans in the Matrix?

Ellen Porteus

Pragmatically.

I don't know, and to be honest there are good reasons not to be a pessimist. Even with just a look at the history behind us, we had similar fears for many different technologies, and so far we always came up on top.

We're smarter, more literate, more creative, more productive, happy, healthy, pacific, rich that we ever were, globally. It is true that technology is quickly making leaps and opening options that were unthinkable even just a decade ago, but it's also true that there is not too much of a reason to think we can not adapt.

And I think if we look at newer generations, we can already see how this adaption is taking place, even observing product trends, it seems to be becoming harder and harder to engage people with the most basic compulsion loops and cheap content, acquiring users is increasingly hard, and the products that in practice make it onto the market doing so by truly offering some positive innovation.

Struggling with bubbles.

Even if I'm not a pessimist though, there is something I still struggle with: the apparent emergence of radicalization, echo chambers, bubbles. I have to admit, this is something hard to quantify on a global scale, especially when it comes to placing the phenomenon in a historical perspective, but it just bothers me personally, and I think it's something we have to be aware of.

I think we are at a peculiar intersection today. 

On one hand, we have increasingly risen out of ignorance and starting to be concerned with the matters of the world more. This might not seem to be the case looking at Trump and so on, but it's certainly true if we look at the trajectory of humanity with a bit more long-term historical perspective.

On the other hand, the kind of problems and concerns we are presented with increased in complexity exponentially. We are exposed to the matters of the world, and the world we live in is this enormous, interconnected beast were cause and effect get lost in the chaotic nature of interactions. 

Even experts don't have easy answers, and I think we know that because we might be experts in a field or two, and most big questions I believe would be answered with "it depends".
There are a myriad of local optima in the kind of problems we deal with today, and which way to go is more about what can work in a given environment, with given people, than what can be demonstrably proven to be the best direction.

Echo Chambers

The issue.

And this is where a big monster rears its head. In a world with lots of content and information, with systems that allow us to quickly connect to huge groups of similar-minded people, algorithms that feed contents that agree with our views seeking instant satisfaction over exploration, true knowledge and serendipity, when faced with increasingly complex issues, how attractive the dark side of the confirmation bias becomes?

We have mechanisms built-in all of us, regardless of how smart, that were designed not to seek the truth but to be effective when navigating the world and its social interactions. Cognitive biases are there because they serve us, they are tools stemmed from evolution. But is our world changing faster than our brain's ability to evolve?

Pragmatically again though, I don't intend to look too much at the far future (which I believe is generally futile, as you're trying to peek into a chaotic horizon). What annoys me is that even when you are aware of all this, and all these risks today, it's becoming hard to fight the system.
There is simply too much content out there, and too many algorithms around you (even if you isolate yourself from them) tuned to spread it in different groups that finding good information is becoming hard.

Then again, I am not sure of the scale of this issue, because if again, we look at things historically, probably we are still on average better informed today and less likely to be deceived than even just a few decades ago, where most people were not informed at all and it was much easier to control the few means of mass communication available.

Yet, it unavoidably irks me to look around and be surrounded by untrustworthy content and even worse, content that is made to myopically serve a small world view instead of trying to capture a phenomenon in all its complexity (either with malice, or just because it's simpler and gets clicks).
Getting accurate, global data is incredibly hard, as it's increasingly valuable and thus, kept hidden for competitive advantage.

John W.Tomac

Being an expert, or just decent.

I find that similar mechanisms and balances affect our professional lives, unsurprisingly. I often say that experience is a variance reduction technique: we become less likely to make mistakes, more effective, more knowledgeable and able to quickly dismiss dangerous directions, but we also risk of becoming less flexible, rooted in beliefs and principles that might not be relevant anymore.

I find no better example of these risks than in the trajectory of certain big corporations and how they managed to become irrelevant, not due to the lack of smart, talented people, but because at a given size one risks to have a gravity of its own, and truly believe in a snapshot of the world that meanwhile has moved on. How so many smart people can manage to be blinded.

Experience is a trade-off. We can be more effective even if we might be more wrong. Maybe, more importantly, we risk losing the ability to discover more revolutionary ideas.
How much should we be open to exploration and how much should we be focused on what we do best? How much should we seek diversity in a team, and how much should we value cohesion and unity of vision. I find these to be quite hard questions.

I don't have answers, but I do have some principles I believe might be useful. The first has to do with ego, and here it helps not to have a well-developed one, to begin with, because my suggestion is to go out and seek critique, "kill your darlings".
This has been taught to me at an early age by an artist friend of mine who was always critical of my work and when I protested made me notice how the only way to be better is to find people willing to trash what you do.

In practice, I think that we should be more severe, critical, doubtful of what we love and believe than anything else. We should set for our own ideas and social groups a higher standard of scrutiny than what we do for things that are alien to us.

The second principle that I believe can help is to encourage exploration, discovery, experimentation and failure. Going outside our comfort zones is always hard but even harder is to face failure, we don't like to fail, obviously and for good reasons.
So one cannot achieve these goals without setting some small, safe spaces where exploration is easier and not burdened (I would say unconstrained, but certain other constraints actually do help) by too much early judgment.

Lastly, beware that for how much you know about all this, and are willing to act, many times you will not. I don't always follow my own principles and I think that's normal. I try to be aware of these mechanisms though. And even there, the keyword is "try".

Epilog: affecting change.

I believe that polarizing, blinding, myopic forces are at work everywhere, in our personal and professional lives, in the society at large, and being aware of them is important even just to try to navigate our world.

But if instead of just navigating the world, one wants to actually affect change, then it's imperative to understand the fight that lies ahead.

The worst thing that can be ever done is to feed the polarization forces, cater to our own and scare away people who might have been willing to consider our ideals. It does not help, it damages.

Catering to our own enclaves, rallying our people, is easy and tempting and fulfilling. It's not useless, certainly, there is value in reaffirming people who are already inclined to be on our side, but there is much more to be gained in even just instilling a doubt reaching out to someone who is on the opposite side, or is undecided in the middle, than solidifying beliefs of people that share ours already.

You can even look at current events, elections and the way they are won.

Understanding people who think differently than us, applying empathy, extending reach, is so much harder. But it's also the only smart choice.

OT: Ten pragmatic tips regarding pens & notebooks

A follow-up to my previous guide to fountain pens. Game Developers Conference is next week and you might want to take notes. Some practical advice for what I think it's the best equipment to take notes on-the-go...

1) Get a spiral-bound, A5 notebook. 

It's the only kind that not only stays easily flat open, but they completely fold in half and have thick cardboard backs, making it easy to hold them one-handed when you don't have a table.

Muji sells relatively inexpensive ones that are of a good quality. Midori is another brand I really like for spiral-bound ones.

Midori "polar bear" spiral notebook.
Muji fountain pen. Lamy safari. Kaweco sport. TWSBI Mini.

Rhodia is a favorite of many, but their spiral-bound notebooks (e.g. the very popular DotPad) have side perforations to allow to remove pages, unfortunately, these are very weak and will detach. Not good to carry around, only for temporary notes/scratch.

Stitched (threaded binding) and taped notebooks are the second best, they easily lay flat because only a few pages are stitched together, then these groups are bound together with tape. 
Notebooks held with only staples in the middle are the least flexible. 

2) You might want to prefer more absorbent paper for quick notes on the go.

Usually, fountain pens are used with smooth, non-absorbent paper that helps to avoid bleed-through, feathering, and allows the ink to dry over time, bringing out the eventual shading or sheen.

Unfortunately, this might not be the best for quick note taking (even if I don't mind it at all, the dry times are still quite fast with fine nibs), there are absorbent papers out there that work great with fountain pens. The Midori Cotton notebook is an example.

I also usually buy only notebooks with blank pages, not lined or gridded. That's because I tend to draw lots of diagrams and write smaller than the lines.

A Midori Cotton notebook, threaded binding.
Lamy studio and a Faber Castell Loom.
J.Herbin Perle Noire.

3) The best fountain pen for daily notes is a Vanishing Point (fine nib), bar none.

I have a fair collection of fountain pens, but nothing that touch the Namiki/Pilot Vanishing Points (a.k.a. Capless). They are incredible writers, especially in the smaller point sizes (from medium to extra-fine, which are the ones you'll want for notes).

They are fast and clean, due to the retractable nib, and they don't spill in airplanes either (to my experience, you might still want to travel with pens mostly full/without air bubbles and keep them upright during the trip).

Pilot Capless Decimo

The Capless Decimo and its bigger brother, the Vanishing Point.

4) The best cheap fountain pen is the Muji aluminum pen.

This might be actually hard to find, I got one from a store a year ago but never found another one in my subsequent visits since then.

I have the longer model, not the foldable one (which is somewhat worse). It's very cheap, it writes very well, it's not bulky but it's very solid, it works well in planes and it can easily hold a spare cartridge in the body. 
I also like that it uses a screw-on cap, which is a bit slower to upen but will ensure that ink doesn't get suddenly suctioned out the nib (as some tight push-on caps do, by creating a vacuum).
The only downside is that it's fairly skinny, which might not be too comfortable for some.

Alternatively, a starter pen that is as good (or maybe even better, my only Muji might have been an outlier...) is the Lamy Safari, a solid, no-nonsense German performer. It's a little bit more expensive than the Muji one, but it won't disappoint.
I hear great things about the Pilot Metropolitan as well, but I personally don't own one. Namiki/Pilot is probably, though, my favorite brand.

5) If you write a lot, avoid very thin and short pens.

Once upon a time, I used to love very compact pens, and still today I won't ever buy too bulky ones. But I did notice that very thin pens stress my hand more. Prefer pens with a decent diameter.

Some compact pens: a Visconti Viscontina,
A brass Kaweco Lilliput and a Spalding and Sons Mini.

6) You might want to prefer a waterproof ink.

Inks are most of the fun in playing with fountain pens! Inks that shade, inks with sheen, inks with flakes, pigmented inks, iron-gall inks... all kinds of special effects. 

It's all fun and games until a drop of water hits the page and your precious notes are completely erased... Extremely saturated inks might even smear just with the humidity from the hand!

So, especially if you're on the go, the best ink is a waterproof or at least water-resistant one, and one that flows well while drying fast. 

Often, the more "boring" inks are also the best behaved, like the Montblanc Midnight Blue or any of their permanent inks (black, blue, gray). 

My personal favorite, if I had to pick one, would be the Platinum Carbon Black, it's the best black ink I own, it flows perfectly, it's permanent and looks great.
Unfortunately, it's a bit harder to clean, being a pigmented ink, so I use it only in cheaper pens that I have no problems dismantling (it's a perfect match for the Muji pen).

I tend to prefer cartridge converters in my pens and I usually fill them from bottled ink with a syringe, it's less messy.

8) You won't look back at most of your notes.

Taking notes for me is just part of my thinking and learning process. I like it, and as I don't have a great memory, they work as some sort of insurance.

I have a notebook with me at all times, and every time I finish one, I quickly take photos of all pages with my phone and store them in my dropbox account. Easy.
I still find much easier to work on paper than with my anything else when it comes to notes and diagrams, so much that I will even often just draw things on paper, take a photo with an iphone and send it to my computer during discussions with co-workers, to illustrate a point.

That said, unless the notes are actual, actionable things I need to follow-up on (e.g. meeting notes, to-do lists, ideas to try, sketches for blog posts), I mostly don't look back at them, and I gather that this is common for most people. So, be aware of that!

9) Stick a few small post-its at the end of your notebook.

I always have a small number of different shaped post-its at the end of my notebook, so if I need to put a temporary note on a page, I can. I also use small removable stickers as bookmarks, often.

Another thing that I sometimes do, is to use both ends of a notebook. One side, e.g. from the front, I use for "permanent" notes, things that I am fairly certain about. Meetings, summaries of things I learn, blog posts and so on. 
The other side, e.g. going from the back, can be used as a scratchpad for random quick drawing, computations and so on, if you don't have a separate notebook for these...

10) Try not to go too crazy.

Fountain pens can instigate a compulsion to start a collection, easily. That might be good or not, depending on your point of view. But never fool yourself into thinking that there is a rational need for expensive pens.

Truth is, fountain pens are already a useless luxury, and lots of expensive ones are not really great writers, certainly not better than some good cheap ones. A pen is a pen.