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The idea that German television is necessarily terrible has to be reconsidered. I’ve recently started watching Deutschland ‘83 which is amazing (more on that later) and yesterday I finished season two of the web series Mann/Frau by BR PULS.

This is an expanded transcription of a tweetstorm (based partially on conversations with Peter) that starts at this Tweet about the Volkswagen emissions scandal but actually as we go along it will be clear that it is about ethics in software engineering. First the news that started it all.

I went to “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” yesterday in one of Berlin’s three operas thanks to this piece in the Guardian. Yes, I have to rely on a British paper for reliable cultural advice about Berlin.

Last week there was some debate spurred by some of the larger insurers of the Netherlands who want to use tracking data to personalize insurance coverage. A piece in the Reformatorisch Dagblad of all places and Rob Wijnberg talking about it at DWDD.

Talk about this is increasing all around us (see this piece by Cennyd) and I think it’s time for me to share some of our recent thinking on the topic as well. We believe that conversational user interfaces will be the way that most people will interact with digital systems from the near future on. That can be chat or voice or something else constrained to offer only specific responses or fully freeform. Natural language processing has improved to a point to make this workable and will continue to improve further.

The great Peter and Michelle have written a book called “Understanding the Connected Home” based on current developments around the topic and both of their professional interests.

Yesterday I saw the documentary on the Nakagin Capsule Tower by Rima Yamazaki as part of the DOKU.ARTS festival here in Berlin. I wasn’t aware of this landmark during my last visit to Tokyo though I must have passed close by while cycling through the city. I’ll make a point to see it when next I visit if it still stands because that is exactly the topic of the documentary.

Last week we finally got featured with Bycatch on Boingboing and Fast Company thanks to our invitation to the XOXO festival. It is amazing to see what that attention does and what kind of effect that has on sales.

This is turning into a traffic blog more than anything else. After taking stock of the plans for the new Maaßenstraße which is very slowly nearing completion, now let’s take a look at another place close to my heart: Moritzplatz. The square is right underneath my office and as such I cross it several times daily both on foot and by bike.

A couple of weeks ago already, James Bridle opened his first solo show The Glomar Response at NOME gallery here in Berlin. The opening was attended by more or less everybody I got to know when I first got to Berlin, a reunion of sorts.

This was my situation for most of last week watching The International main event take place thanks to the time difference.

Berlin is rebuilding the Maaßenstraße into the first Begegnungszone (‘Encounter Zone’) of its kind in the city. Works are underway now after a public consultation was finished last year or the year before. I looked around a bit but I couldn’t find the plans for what they are actually building there. A quick e-mail to the senate solved that problem and I got a PDF of the plan.

With some trepidation did I read Evgeny Morozov’s latest piece “The Taming of Tech Criticism” but thankfully the firebrand has matured and this piece is both readable and relevant.

Matt Jones: Jumping to the End – Practical Design Fiction from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

This is the best photo ever taken of Terry Pratchett, and indeed one of the best photos ever taken of anybody pic.twitter.com/p1JCQtfX05

I’m really into the series Da Vinci’s Demons right now (thanks to Kevin Slavin) which is a light hearted affair for the off season when there’s no Game of Thrones, True Detective or Sherlock.

Mirror’s Edge looks great but the tutorial was really difficult and frustrating already. Not sure this is the best interface for a parkour game.

Modern Warfare 2, I’m in a deep cover mission with a Russian terrorist and anytime I kill a civilian I have to restart. Whenever I die the game gives me quotes by Cheney and Gandhi.

This is just a lovely experience. A small, beautiful, near perfect game with graphics that have held up excellently over time. Are there more games like this? If not there should be. This has such a broad appeal and playability.

I have found myself in the custody of a Playstation 3 console and have borrowed a couple dozen games to play over the holidays. This came to be after I mentioned to my local game design support group that I hadn’t played anything on a console for over ten years and that I was quite happy with that state of being. They thought that this was unacceptable.

Extremely crude but a decent shooter nonetheless. Can be a bit of a slough at times but now that I’ve played more from the genre that seems to be par for the course.

The Last of Us is amazing. Even at the easiest level it is kicking my ass. And now that I got some dramatic story progression I am well amazed.

A story I meant to write up for a while is my discovery of the German rap formation K.I.Z. (Kapitalismus ist Zauberhaft) and with that German pop culture that is actually worthwhile and fun.

I read “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” on assignment and I am glad I did because it is a well written, easy to read and profoundly insightful book. It illuminates what capital is and what effects it has in the world to an extent that hasn’t been done before. The book contains lots of insights and it takes down many financial myths that are imposed on us every day.

I read this paper by Acemoglu and Robinson right after I read the book by Piketty thinking that there would be some interesting economic debate. Unfortunately I was proved wrong and this seems to be exemplary for the stagnation of the economic field.

“The new technology was both the virus and the vector of transmission.”— Walter J. Ong

This post was previously published on Medium and is now archived here.

Last Sunday the Senate’s plan to build on Tempelhof was voted off thankfully. Not just to preserve the field which is a one-of-a-kind but to signal to the city that their way of managing construction and housing is not the right way (a full treatment in German).

A couple of weeks ago by now I finally got to visit our new office in the Vechtclub XL building in Utrecht. This turned out to be a great experience.

There is a shack on Tempelhofer Feld that explains the senate’s plans with the park and the construction they plan to do there:

I have been long flummoxed by how terrible the CDU/CSU complex in Germany is. I could not understand how people could be that stupid and that conservative to the detriment of everybody including themselves. The number of examples is near infinite, but this post was prompted by yesterday’s action by the young Union Berlin 1.

I have followed the Turkish elections on the night from Sunday to Monday which turned into a gripping account of prime minister Erdogan trying to steal the elections while most of the people were sleeping. Orchestrated blackouts had drawn out the count. The twitter block didn’t prevent activism from spreading but did reduce the reach of its effects. Those that knew and cared about it were at the counting locations trying to safeguard the ballots and the tallies.

I promised to write an update to the Heist Model a long time ago and never got around to it because of work and other stuff. Then recently conversations with friends moving back into the freelance life prompted this smaller update but it too had been languishing in a draft for far too long.

As of right now I’m frightfully behind on my Latour MOOC. What I have been doing instead is reading up old articles in my Instapaper. One such is this interview with Dutch sociologist/philosopher Willem Schinkel in Vrij Nederland. It’s good to read a fresh Dutch thinker who seems to understand things (and who also is in with Latour). Calling Geert Wilders a proto-fascist and the Netherlands a museum are only a couple of the ringers in there.

This got stuck in my draft queue but I have no idea what to meaningfully add to this absurd amount of highlights. The Unwinding by George Packer is a massive and amazing work with turns of phrase worth remembering on every page. It also shows very precisely how amazingly fucked up the USA is right about now. Here is the book cut up through my lens, but I would highly encourage you to read the whole thing (I tore through it in a couple of days).

We just switched over to Slack and we are quite happy with the tool as a replacement for our previous Hipchat setup. It all feels a bit fresher, it’s easier to integrate with the rest of the web and has more functionality and niceties built in.

I’m currently at a German MVNO called Congstar. Partially because somebody told me that they have LTE (which is not true) and partially because I had gotten rather fed up with my Vodafone prepaid plan (branded CallYa). Like any service in Germany this one too is terrible and since then I have come to call them Cunststar.

On Saturday evening I was in the Volksbühne for Stargaze among others to see Cantus Domus perform a set with an odd German band called 1000 Robota. After that there was an intermission and the main performance of the evening by Pantha du Prince and The Bell Laboratory.

This book by Alain de Botton started out slowly for me because I am already quite familiar with the global logistical infrastructure and the various ways our food is made (thanks to the Keuringsdienst van Waarde). In the second half though with its focus on the moral and spiritual aspects did it pick up and became a very worthwhile read.

Not hugely satisfying but still a nice read. Supposedly the first book in this series is better.

This pamphlet by Adam Greenfield, the first of more is a concise and enjoyable distillation of his politics when it concerns the smart city and also features a number of similarly inclined thinkers: