For a relatively complete and concise rundown of how insane Germany is at the moment, this conversation with journalist James Jackson is highly recommended. Things are really spiralling into pure madness here and it seems likely that that will be the new normal.
Category: Podcast
In Good Company sounds like a good idea for a podcast, but after hearing the CEO of Deutsche Telekom deny how his company is responsible for Germany being in the dark ages when it comes to internet speed, I couldn’t listen to it anymore.
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.
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.
One of the hosts dropped a casual Hasan Piker reference (in a conversation about pop culture and leftist politics) and… I didn’t even know there were Germans who know who that is.
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.
I don’t think that really matters that much other than serving to have the person making the comment show their ass for the entire world to see.
I feel that Apple Vision Pro is a deeply interesting and conflicted technology which is also the conclusion that Cortex reaches here. You’ll notice that Grey and Myke actually used the device and they are fairly knowledgeable about apps and ways of working/playing.
I got to take one home for a weekend and I can testify similarly except for missing out on a bunch of features. Because it’s only out in the US, I could not access a paid App Store or get an Apple Arcade subscription. That means I could only get the free vision apps out there which are incredibly lacklustre.
What everybody seems to have done is to take whatever IP they had lying around, wrap it into a VisionOS starter project and throw it onto the App Store. That will probably be the modus operandi for a while going forward. If you look at the absolute dregs on the App Store and now realise that making a good VisionOS app is probably at least 10x as difficult as making a good iOS app, then things are not looking good.
The only really compelling experience was the Encounter Dinosaurs app which is genuinely disconcerting and scary. But because of its very high production values, it’s also only a couple of minutes long.
Most compelling is using the Vision Pro to consume media. Watching movies in Disney+ is a fantastic experience if the device wasn’t so uncomfortable to use. Being able to watch sporting events on a massive screen with sidecar screens and 3D views of the course/track seems like it would also be excellent. It would be even more interesting if we would see a proliferation of 360 cameras to be able to place yourself in a Formula1 car or on a sports pitch. The amount of embodiment it yields, seems like it could go a long way to make remote meetings feel more real.
I agree with this review that this device is a devkit. I’ll wait for the real deal.
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:
- to have internet reception everywhere
- to remove fax traffic inside the state government by 2026
And then I switched it off because I don’t think anything good could come after that.
https://egovernment-podcast.com/egov165-100-tage-digitalminister/
Learned in this podcast episode about class justice in Germany something rather remarkable.
Germany has a system of income dependent fines called Tagessätze. These are meant to make punishments more equitable by making people who make more money pay more.
It turns out (and I’m sure very few people are aware of this) that courts do not get access to tax records to determine the fine base. They take a guess at the income and most of the time, they guess too low.
Spotify should be very heavily fined for funding and spreading misinformation like the stuff on the Joe Rogan podcast.
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.
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.
Also I already know I’m going to use the term “side quest” a lot.
We don’t use Linear but we recently moved all our stuff from Jira to Github Projects which—even though it is mostly abandoned—is Linear-enough.
Most importantly, it is right on top of our codebase which is where I believe all engineering work should happen anyway.
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.
The thinly veiled racism and colonialism is just the rotten cherry on top.
https://podtail.com/de/podcast/spassbremse/52-whitewashing-and-statebuilding-german-israeli-r/
A small online drama in three parts
Suppose you’re a well-known journalists hosting a weekly rather left podcast around topics such as migration, the climate and criticism of right-wing frames in the media. And then suppose you let yourself get baited majorly by an American alt-right activist.
This particular video was going around on German twitter and all the usual suspects were letting themselves get baited by it including above mentioned Friedemann. I wrote about their podcast previously and I couldn’t resist so I confronted him on it.
So I got blocked.
I mean “obsessive”, sure. Being a major league hypocrite is one of the best ways to bait me.
I did listen to this podcast very regularly but after October 7th it’s become so absurdly pro-Israel that it invalidates their entire previous position. The only situation where I’ve seen people parrot a line so hardcore like that was Dutch men with Russian wives after Putin had just invaded the Crimean Peninsula (“You have to understand Putin has a point.”).
Listening to the Trash Future team describe CulturePulse.ai and the digital twin profile created for entire populations seems very very reminiscent of “The Red Men” by Matthew de Abaitua which didn’t get the attention it deserved but was quite prescient.
https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/waltz-with-the-sims/ (minute 23 and on)
Elements from the book such as the corporation known as “Monad”(!) and robotic public service utilities called “Dr. Easy”are looking back from our current hellscape period a bit too on the nose.
See Dr. Easy act in this short film: https://vimeo.com/68368877
Fragment Ones and Tooze: Live from Berlin – Lindner
Given the current developments around the German debt brake, I think it’s good to refer to this bit about German financial politics and Adam Tooze’s initial prediction (FT, Zeit) that Christian Lindner as finance minister would not be good.
Fragment from around 45:00 clipped below:
“We got quite a lot of shit for doing that actually. Not entirely popular with my German colleagues. ‘Nicht zum Volkskörper zugehörig’ is a phrase that was used. ‘Wie trauen sie sich ein solches Urteil zu.’
Not belonging to the body politic of Germany. How dare you make a judgement like that.
We don’t have any reason to regret it. We were clearly right.
I don’t think about the Roman Empire that much, but when I do it’s great to have it be because of Mary Beard who in this podcast (from the 18:48) talks about Zuckerberg’s fascination with August and how leadership then and now has not changed that much.
Fragment Ones and Tooze: The United States vs. Europe
Tooze picks apart Europe’s failure (mostly political in nature) to keep up with the United States on a bunch of areas.
He also mentions that Germany is debt unconstrained and could borrow much more than it is doing right now to fix its broken infrastructure but won’t do it because of stupid politics.
Fragment Ones and Tooze: Tooze Unplugged
Tooze talking for five minutes about the difference between European and American academic traditions. Excuse the low quality but my WordPress has a 2MB file limit.
That is what we were training people to do to write essays which had powerful attack, big full body and a conclusive finish and ideally you’d have a student who could make a whole bouquet of different essays across 5-6 exam papers, 3 essays per paper, 15 different essays and what you would want is a student who could really modulate across that range of essay writing types.
And another one:
The formula of British economics, French politics and German philosophy is the tried formula for making Marxists and that’s basically —though that’s not my politics— that’s basically the frame within which I understand comprehensive intellectual engagement with modernity. It requires those three elements:
- You need to have a sophisticated political grip
- You need to have a philosophy of history which in the German sense of course comes from Hegel
- You have to understand capitalism otherwise you’re stuck
Fragment Piratensender Powerplay E131: Lina, Law & Order
Once in a while they knock them out of the park in this podcast. In this episode Friedemann Karig goes out and asks for people to understand the necessity and reasons behind violent antifascism in the void left behind when the state fails to protect its citizens.
Fragment Tegengif 87 over OZB
Een fragment uit Studio Tegengif “#87 Het nieuwe politieke pijnpunt: de Nederlandse vermogensongelijkheid” over vermogensongelijkheid en dat belastingen op vastgoed en grond veel te laag zijn.