Most people should not bother with specialized productivity software but just see how far they can get with what’s already on their phones: Reminders, Notes and the likes. Apple has made these unassuming tools absurdly powerful without losing too much on usability.
A third truth is that we have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer. Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need, and deserve, more.
Herbert believed that progress was an illusion because he was an ideologically motivated reactionary who hated the New Deal, the welfare state, the Civil Rights Movement, and any political leader who promised to help the oppressed.
Threads works functionally but as a product it’s very bad. As this article mentions being on Threads is a slow-motion exercise in going insane. Threads actively disables many things that make microblogging work and for the rest of the experience there’s very little thought that went into it other than “let’s make a text-based Instagram and see what happens”.
I would be the last to ever watch anything by Lex Fridman, but TikTok has been feeding me clips from his interview with Bassem Youssef and I can’t help but be impressed. Fridman does a decent job interviewing but of course the conversation is carried by Youssef, who is nothing short of a treasure.
More people have mentioned it and I think it should be part of every Rust tutorial to encourage people to just clone() whenever they get in a jam and get their stuff done: “keep calm, clone and move on”. I think that one thing will make it possible to onboard any team onto Rust quickly and get them shipping.
The Netherlands is facing similar problems where depressed salaries, lack of housing and rampant overt racism are making it difficult to attract digital talent from all over the world.
Netzpolitik has done a lot of good things, no doubt. But I’m left with a bit of a double feeling after reading Beckedahl’s farewell post. Imagine having spent 20 years to improve the state of the German internet (“eine bessere digitale Welt möglich ist”) and you leave with the situation like it is.
Amos’s style of software engineering historiography accompanied with snide commentary on the state of the art is both educational and entertaining. The weird factoids about Github Actions are the main act here but don’t miss out on the introduction on software delivery or the lead out on capitalism.
Besides being a clear warning that the open source party is over, this article is a good overview of the different service mesh offerings out there and how they compare to one another. It beats having to wade through the endless amounts of vendor material that’s out there.
The news that an OSINT researcher spent 30 minutes to find a fugitive that the German police couldn’t find in the past 30 years says a lot about how government works here.
Take Germany for instance — when Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer was defense minister, she tried to reform the Bundeswehr Procurement Office with little success. Currently, over 11,000 employees work for the agency — an enormous increase since the Cold War, when considerably more material was being procured by considerably fewer employees. In 2010, the procurement office was already heavily criticized for its inefficiency and large size, with its 8,500 employees — and the situation still seems dire.
Even as the world has caught up with him, Finkelstein remains most comfortable on the margins — ideologically aligned with a left that won’t always have him, platformed by a right that won’t always listen, and insulting them both.
Schools wasting money is not as big of a deal as it is made out to be here. Not every investment can be a good one and you have to deal with that and just keep investing. My business partner used to say that innovation in the education field is like driving a van full of money to a school building and setting it on fire. Soit.
I found a new German podcast crush in Hart Unfair which is my favorite format: three people (Anna Dushime, Yelda Türkmen and Ari Christmann) rambling through one another but in a way that’s funny, intelligent and diverse. It’s a shame that they publish so irregularly that I can’t tell if the podcast is dead or not.
The comments online around the Apple Vision Pro have been pretty deranged in a stupid kind of way. Lots of people jumped to the foregone conclusion that Apple released a failure or that it “wasn’t going to be a success”. Most of that seemed to have been motivated by clout chasing.
Listened to the latest episode of the German eGovernment podcast with the Minister for Digital for Bavaria. That is the state here that’s seemingly the farthest along when it comes to digitalisation and it now has the following ambitious plans:
Last night I sat down to finish Death Stranding and after beating the final boss it took an additional two hours of story, dream sequences, credit sequences and false endings before it was over. Or not quite over but finished and into the open ended chapter: “Tomorrow is in your Hands.”
I’m enjoying another light season of SPY x FAMILY. It’s a light anime whose premise is that of a spy (Loid) who needs live in deep cover in hostile territory and forms a family of convenience. He finds a woman (Yor) who’s secretly an assassin also in need of cover and an orphan child (Anya) who’s a telepath. It’s great fun.
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
The most vocal people in progressive/critical technology don’t have kids (for various reasons) and as such also have zero empathy for the real problems people deal with.
As somebody who dove pretty deep into how to run a creative agency in a way that’s innovative and goes against the grain, I really like what Village One here in Berlin are doing with their cooperative approach.
This piece about moving away from CDK is a bit overly dramatic and comes down to “CloudFormation sucks” which is something that anybody who’s worked with it can testify to.
Simon Willison is one of the best engineering communicators out there and this podcast with him about LLMs and AI is one of the most insightful episodes I’ve heard on the topic.
I don’t really buy this idea that Japan’s urban environment has been the key factor to create its immense specialization in crafts. Compare it to Berlin where rents have been incredibly cheap and zoning mixed but without the necessary human capital the only thing those factors generated were cheap bars.
It’s much healthier for Germany if digital issues have an answer that goes beyond “Let’s see what the CCC has to say!” The CCC is a shady organization which is good at taking things apart but does not have that much constructive to offer.
Late to the party but I very much love this interview with Karri Saarinen, the co-founder of Linear. Their way of working, “The Linear Method”, will be waved away by companies (“we can’t do that because…”) but with leadership with the right mentality and experience I don’t think it’s that far off at all. Ask your leadership how you can work like this.
The last episode of Spaßbremse treats the history of German-Israeli relations and clarifies what the strategic foundations of the current complex are: white-washing and moral standing for one side and economic reparations and industrial capacity building for the other.
Dropbox, a famously private file storage service, has shared files from people with OpenAI. I’d normally say this was a dumb move, but this is far far beyond just dumb.
A strong analysis of the AI concept by Emily Bender who proposes we just call it “automation”instead. Which is fair because if you use these systems, it becomes incredibly obvious how they work and what their limitations are.
Geertz’s theory of involution holds that a greater input (an increase in labor) does not yield proportional output (more crops and innovation). Instead, a society involutes. The Chinese term for involution, neijuan, which is made up of the characters for “inside”and “rolling,”suggests a process that curls inward, ensnaring its participants within what the anthropologist Xiang Biao has described as an “ endless cycle of self-flagellation.”Involution is “the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless,”Biao told me.