Leuk en informatief interview over ICT-projecten bij de overheid met Cokky Hilhorst.
Alleen een raar moment waar beide personen in de aflevering zich afvragen waarom de mensen zo boos worden terwijl zij projecten waar honderden miljoenen mee gemoeid zijn kapot schiet. Misschien draait het hier om het geld?
Frank Lantz has a well balanced take on the opportunities and perils of AI that is good (and if you didn’t think Harari was a grifter yet, you might after reading this).
In this podcast episode a court case is treated (with the public prosecutor) where during a fluke accident a girl riding along on a bike is killed by a bus in Amsterdam.
The thoroughness and consideration with which that is done contrasted immensely with how things run in Berlin and made it clear to me (again) how unserious this city is.
The last Oxide and Friends is very timely and covers what’s happening now between Mastodon and Bluesky in an incredibly thoughtful way.
Immensely bored with all the podcasts in my app but glad to see that the new podcast by David Runciman “Past Present Future” has now surfaced.
Ik weet nog dat bij elk bezoek aan Hilversum het duidelijk was dat de mensen daar geen idee hebben van wat er buiten Hilversum gebeurt. Grappig om te lezen dat dat nog steeds zo is.
https://www.npo3.nl/brandpuntplus/het-portret-sahil-amar-aissa
Here’s an absolutely staggering number to take with you: four trillion dollars per annum
That’s what it takes to turn the entire world sustainable. That’s an awful lot of money but also it’s not that much more than things like military expenditures or the assets of a handful of billionaires.
As Tooze says:
Rather than shrinking away from the $ 4 trillion in shock the really striking thing about it, is that it is far from utopian. If we take the Songwe, Stern, Bhattacharya figures at face value then the explosive conclusion is that sustainable development for the entire planet is within reach. All the more egregious and inexcusable will be our failure, if we do not. It is one thing to fail grandly in the face of an impossible challenge, it is quite another not to do something of immense important that is, in fact, manageable.
We can leave it at that.
Sustainable development is totally possible and it’s being blocked by a minority elite who stand to lose a bunch of assets and revenues if we would do this.
Looking back over my notes and reactions from Interaction16 where I gave a talk calling chat interfaces the “UI for AI”. Feels good to be right.
Cucumber saudis. Nice.
Two questions have long dogged Dutch farming. The first is whether quantity made up for quality: having tasted the tomatoes, cucumbers and chilies grown in its hyper-efficient greenhouses, one may be forgiven for not being able to tell them apart.
picking people over cows turns out to be politically fraught
Well, the cows are owned by millionaire farmers so it’s more a question of which people you are picking.
The Netherlands, a generally well-run place, has made a hash of adapting its economy to ecological constraints it knew about for decades. That does not bode well for everyone else.
Chaser.
One of the most interesting applications of Rust is to take over after algorithms have been prototyped in Python and create dramatic performance improvements.
This write-up is a good example of exactly such a situation where the Python code is using Numpy but is nowhere near fast enough.