What China has done in industry after industry is to flatten the supply curve by subsidizing hordes of producers. This spurs innovation, increases output and crushes margins. Value is not being destroyed; it’s accruing to consumers as lower prices, higher quality and/or more innovative products and services.

If you are looking for returns in the financial statements of China’s subsidized companies, you are doing it wrong. If China’s subsidized industries are generating massive profits, policymakers should be investigated for corruption. 

A piece well worth reading about China’s economic policies if only for the fact that their flattening of supply curves is the only thing that is really fighting climate change.

China’s subsidies create, not destroy, value

Hard work isn’t always the work that takes the most time, or the work that gets paid the most. The hardest work is the work that challenges, makes us uncomfortable, or requires change. If we actually value hard work — we have to do some of our own.

I sure missed AHP’s writing. This is one about why people think that the next generation does not ‘work hard’ anymore.

https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-kids-are-too-soft

I painstakingly built a bespoke Rust web application to host the Cuppings venue data and to add Google place_ids to almost 2000 Foursquare location. That’s been done for a while now but now we have the announcement of Foursquare open sourcing their location dataset.

That has two direct consequences for me:

  • I was going to scrub the Foursquare data out of the database as a clean-up but that’s something I won’t do for now. In fact, I may recode the venues so I have ids in both worlds.
  • I was toying around with the idea of building a next generation Foursquare/Dopplr on top of atproto which is something that I think is a lot more feasible now.

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/20/foursquare-open-source-places/

Reading these database migration stories is usually interesting, but what I found especially noteworthy here is that all of the Django features they used to make it easy for themselves have been in there for more than a decade.

That’s the kind of maturity that maybe makes a technology like that not that appealing to work with for new developers but it is also a maturity that lets you get real work done.

https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2024/10/migrating-from-postgres-to-mysql.html

Renaming half a street

An interesting article to read about how the city botched renaming the Manteuffelstraße to Audrey-Lord-Straße. I cycle past this street every day and I don’t think it’s a bad change. Unfortunately, they’ve done it in such a bad way that it’ll poison every person who hears about it against the very concept of government:

  • They failed to notify the people living there until after the change had already passed (incompetent!).
  • They decided to only rename part of the street (insane!).
  • Renaming part of the street forces the street numbers to be re-allocated (insane!).

„Im Nachhinein ist das eine ­gute Frage“, sagt Werner Heck von der ­Bezirksverordnetenversammlung (BVV) Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.

Werner Heck‘s statements are a good argument here for abolishing the entire concept of the BVV. If they couldn’t even be bothered to check-in on the implementation of one of their more material and prestigious measures, then what are they good for?

Heck sagt, es sei „nicht optimal“ gewesen, dass die involvierten Verwaltungsabteilungen „nicht miteinander gesprochen“ hätten.

This makes it clear that it is not uncommon for the Berlin administration to do things without talking to other departments. This is the way you would work, if you’re mentally entirely dead and checked out.

Das Bezirksamt erklärt, das „komplexe Verfahren“ solle künftig ressortübergreifend organisiert werden.

This sounds ‘good’ to the average German but it will in no way prevent these kind of problems from happening because the issue is not one of process or tactics, but one of culture.

All of these were unforced errors and you can ask yourself maybe they were actually intended to make a mockery of the entire process by a civil service that is politically opposed or too lazy to do any real work.

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/menschen/wenn-die-umbenennung-von-strassen-in-berlin-schief-geht-ich-kann-mir-nicht-mal-eine-pizza-bestellen-110102184.html

Project Power

I think “Project-Power” from this newsletter by Adam Tooze is going to be a useful concept going forward:

A project in this sense is the historically specific, intentional mobilization of multiple resources around a significant objective on whose success and failure important things depend.

I’m struck mostly by how bad the German government is at this. Every part of the country seems to be fully paralysed.

GIFT

Watched “Evil Does Not Exist” as GIFT, the recut and rescored (silent) version performed live by Eiko Ishibashi at HAU1.

This has a shorter runtime than the movie because a lot of fluff is cut out and we are only left with a very summary story. That is a good choice and I can’t say the movie suffers from it very much even though this is version is very much its own thing (i.e. not a narrative movie).

Ishibashi-san is on stage and directs the musical soundtrack while occasionally accompanying the movie on her flute. From the distance it was very hard to tell what she was doing or even what sounds she was producing on top of the soundtrack.

Musically it’s a lot of the soundscapes with the main theme interspersed at various key junctures. We don’t get to learn anything more about the ending.

Review at Letterbox

Highlights for Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

In modern justice and on the part of those who dispense it there is a shame in punishing, which does not always preclude zeal. This sense of shame is constantly growing: the psychologists and the minor civil servants of moral orthopaedics proliferate on the wound it leaves.
Instead of insanity eliminating the crime according to the original meaning of article 64, every crime and even every offence now carries within it, as a legitimate suspicion, but also as a right that may be claimed, the hypothesis of insanity, in any case of anomaly. And the sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgement of guilt, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization. Today the judge – magistrate or juror – certainly does more than ‘judge’.
But we can surely accept the general proposition that, in our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of the body: even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use ‘lenient’ methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at issue – the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.
The very excess of the violence employed is one of the elements of its glory: the fact that the guilty man should moan and cry out under the blows is not a shameful side-effect, it is the very ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force.
It was as if the sovereign power did not see, in this emulation of atrocity, a challenge that it itself threw down and which might one day be taken up: accustomed as it was to ‘seeing blood flow’, the people soon learnt that ‘it could be revenged only with blood’ (Lachère).
In short, penal reform was born at the point of junction between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the infra-power of acquired and tolerated illegalities.
The right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defence of society. But it now finds itself recombined with elements so strong that it becomes almost more to be feared. The malefactor has been saved from a threat that is by its very nature excessive, but he is exposed to a penalty that seems to be without bounds. It is a return to a terrible ‘super-power’.
the injury that a crime inflicts upon the social body is the disorder that it introduces into it: the scandal that it gives rise to, the example that it gives, the incitement to repeat it if it is not punished, the possibility of becoming widespread that it bears within it.
Nothing so weakens the machinery of the law than the hope of going unpunished;
Let us hear once more what Servan has to say: the ideas of crime and punishment must be strongly linked and ‘follow one another without interruption … When you have thus formed the chain of ideas in the heads of your citizens, you will then be able to pride yourselves on guiding them and being their masters. A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas; it is at the stable point of reason that he secures the end of the chain; this link is all the stronger in that we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our own work; despair and time eat away the bonds of iron and steel, but they are powerless against the habitual union of ideas, they can only tighten it still more; and on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires’ (Servan, 35).
If incorrigibles there be, one must be determined to eliminate them. But, for all the others, punishment can function only if it comes to an end.
But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
Why would society eliminate a life and a body that it could appropriate? It would be more useful to make him ‘serve the state in a slavery that would be more or less extended according to the nature of his crime’;
Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony.
it was a change of scale, but it was also a new type of control.
‘The order and inspection that must be maintained require that all workers be assembled under the same roof, so that the partner who is entrusted with the management of the manufactory may prevent and remedy abuses that may arise among the workers and arrest their progress at the outset’ (Dauphin, 199).
By walking up and down the central aisle of the workshop, it was possible to carry out a supervision that was both general and individual: to observe the worker’s presence and application, and the quality of his work; to compare workers with one another, to classify them according to skill and speed; to follow the successive stages of the production process.
This obligatory syntax is what the military theoreticians of the eighteenth century called ‘manoeuvre’. The traditional recipe gives place to explicit and obligatory prescriptions. Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body-weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex. One is as far as possible from those forms of subjection that demanded of the body only signs or products, forms of expression or the result of labour. The regulation imposed by power is at the same time the law of construction of the operation.
In becoming the target for new mechanisms of power, the body is offered up to new forms of knowledge. It is the body of exercise, rather than of speculative physics; a body manipulated by authority, rather than imbued with animal spirits; a body of useful training and not of rational mechanics, but one in which, by virtue of that very fact, a number of natural requirements and functional constraints are beginning to emerge.
How can one capitalize the time of individuals, accumulate it in each of them, in their bodies, in their forces or in their abilities, in a way that is susceptible of use and control?
It is this disciplinary time that was gradually imposed on pedagogical practice – specializing the time of training and detaching it from the adult time, from the time of mastery; arranging different stages, separated from one another by graded examinations; drawing up programmes, each of which must take place during a particular stage and which involves exercises of increasing difficulty; qualifying individuals according to the way in which they progress through these series.
the special productive power of the combined working-day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power is due to cooperation itself (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 311–12)
Thus a new demand appears to which discipline must respond: to construct a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it is composed. Discipline is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine.
While jurists or philosophers were seeking in the pact a primal model for the construction or reconstruction of the social body, the soldiers and with them the technicians of discipline were elaborating procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies.
These mechanisms can only be seen as unimportant if one forgets the role of this instrumentation, minor but flawless, in the progressive objectification and the ever more subtle partitioning of individual behaviour.
the ‘admonitors’ were placed in charge of those ‘who talk or hum when studying their lessons and those who will not write and who waste their time in play’
It was also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally; this network ‘holds’ the whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive from one another: supervisors, perpetually supervised.
In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another.
They did not receive directly the image of the sovereign power; they only felt its effects – in replica, as it were – on their bodies, which had become precisely legible and docile.
And it is this inversion of visibility in the functioning of the disciplines that was to assure the exercise of power even in its lowest manifestations. We are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.
It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up.
It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work.
The Panopticon, on the other hand, has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply.
When, in the seventeenth century, the provincial schools or the Christian elementary schools were founded, the justifications given for them were above all negative: those poor who were unable to bring up their children left them ‘in ignorance of their obligations: given the difficulties they have in earning a living, and themselves having been badly brought up
‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology.
it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.
The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity.
What, then, is the use of penal labour? Not profit; nor even the formation of a useful skill; but the constitution of a power relation, an empty economic form, a schema of individual submission and of adjustment to a production apparatus.
It was the most direct way of expressing ‘the intelligence of discipline in stone’ (Lucas, I, 69); of making architecture transparent to the administration of power;12 of making it possible to substitute for force or other violent constraints the gentle efficiency of total surveillance;
all this made it possible to canalize and to recover by a whole series of intermediaries the enormous profits from a sexual pleasure that an ever-more insistent everyday moralization condemned to semi-clandestinity and naturally made expensive; in setting up a price for pleasure, in creating a profit from repressed sexuality and in collecting this profit, the delinquent milieu was in complicity with a self-interested puritanism: an illicit fiscal agent operating over illegal practices.
The political use of delinquents – as informers and agents provocateurs – was a fact well before the nineteenth century.17 But, after the Revolution, this practice acquired quite different dimensions: the infiltration of political parties and workers’ associations, the recruitment of thugs against strikers and rioters, the organization of a sub-police – working directly with the legal police and capable if necessary of becoming a sort of parallel army – a whole extra-legal functioning of power was partly assured by the mass of reserve labour constituted by the delinquents: a clandestine police force and standby army at the disposal of the state.
Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison.
But he brought with him, at least potentially, a horizon of illegalities that had, until quite recently, represented a threat: this ruined petty bourgeois, of good education, would, a generation earlier, have been a revolutionary, a Jacobin, a regicide;19 had he been a contemporary of Robespierre, his rejection of the law would have taken a directly political form.
The criminal fait divers, by its everyday redundancy, makes acceptable the system of judicial and police supervisions that partition society; it recounts from day to day a sort of internal battle against the faceless enemy; in this war, it constitutes the daily bulletin of alarm or victory.
The combination of the fait divers and the detective novel has produced for the last hundred years or more an enormous mass of ‘crime stories’ in which delinquency appears both as very close and quite alien, a perpetual threat to everyday life, but extremely distant in its origin and motives, both everyday and exotic in the milieu in which it takes place.
In short, one should have a master, be caught up and situated within a hierarchy; one exists only when fixed in definite relations of domination
They were in a sense technicians of behaviour: engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality.
In this panoptic society of which incarceration is the omnipresent armature, the delinquent is not outside the law; he is, from the very outset, in the law, at the very heart of the law, or at least in the midst of those mechanisms that transfer the individual imperceptibly from discipline to the law, from deviation to offence.
The carceral ‘naturalizes’ the legal power to punish, as it ‘legalizes’ the technical power to discipline.
resistance is to be found not in the prison as penal sanction, but in the prison with all its determinations, links and extra-judicial results; in the prison as the relay in a general network of disciplines and surveillances; in the prison as it functions in a panoptic régime.
The case of the Italian Mafia transplanted to the United States and used both to extract illicit profits and for political ends is a fine example of the colonization of an illegality of popular origin.

Highlights for Conversational Capacity

We’ll say nothing when we should speak up. We’ll quarrel when we should inquire. We’ll remain reticent when we should be resolved. We’ll be closed-minded and critical when we should be open-minded and curious.
On the one hand, a “little voice” in the back of his brain urged him to raise his concern; on the other hand, he didn’t want to be labeled a troublemaker, a non–team player, or a “high-maintenance” flight operations officer.
Put simply, conversational capacity is the ability to have open, balanced, nondefensive dialogue about tough subjects and in challenging circumstances.
But this collegiality came at a cost: their nice culture created a bad business. While the team members enjoyed pleasant meetings and warm relationships, they sacrificed the candor needed for rigorous problem solving and decision making in order to maintain the amiable environment.
The National Transportation Safety Board, the entity responsible for investigating civil aviation accidents in the United States, estimates that 25 percent of aviation accidents occur because someone doesn’t speak up when a mistake is being made.
“To be honest, it makes me mad. I went out of my way to hire the best and the brightest people I could find, but I’m not getting access to all the intellectual firepower I’m paying for.”
A person with high conversational capacity can do just that. He’s able to remain open-minded, nonreactive, and fully engaged in tough circumstances that send his less disciplined colleagues into a highly reactive state of mind. Balancing candor and curiosity, he converses with his teammates in a way that actually increases the conversational capacity of the entire group.
On the one hand, you feel compelled to speak up, but on the other hand, you don’t want to cause trouble, be labeled a troublemaker or non–team player, tarnish your reputation within the team, or damage relationships.
When we minimize, it’s not that we don’t have an agenda, it’s that our agenda is subverted by a strong need to keep things comfortable, to avoid conflict, to keep things calm.
Any issue can set off our need to win, but especially those ideas that contradict our current ways of thinking, our notions of what is acceptable, proper, or right. When we snap into win mode, we circle our cognitive wagons and load our conversational guns, ready to defend our current map of reality from all foes. We become dogmatic and close down when we should get curious and open up.
If they’re not speaking up, they’re being paid for something they’re not providing. But the harsh reality is that our own management behavior may be stifling their abilities to contribute. By failing to compensate for the minimizing effect our authority has on our people, and, even more egregiously, when we trigger into win behavior, we encourage our people to minimize, guaranteeing we won’t get full access to their knowledge, expertise, ideas, and suggestions.
Under what circumstances in life do I find myself minimizing at the expense of my effectiveness?
But awareness is not the same as skill. A drowning man may know he’s drowning, but his awareness is no substitute for the ability to swim.
When we’re making an acquisition, initiating a major change process, or wrestling with a tough decision, we want access to as much information and as many perspectives as possible to expand our options for effectively tackling the challenge. We want to reduce the number of blind spots in our view of the situation we’re facing.
When we’re truly dedicated to expanding our thinking and making informed choices, difference is our greatest ally.
Because our level of internal commitment directly correlates with how much energy we put into enacting the decision.
When we’re dedicated to informed and effective choices, we pull people into decision-making or problem-solving processes because they’re useful in two ways. First, involving key players leads to better information and more robust decisions because we have access to their thinking. Second, those same people feel more connected to the decisions that do get made. It’s a double win; we get better decisions that are more effectively implemented.
Contrast this unilateral approach with the more learning-focused joint control, where we proactively make our goals and concerns explicit and ask others to help us manage them. This is a far more effective way to make informed and effective decisions because we’re involving others in the important decisions for how to best achieve the desired objectives.
The managers who asked, “What do you need more or less of from me so I can help you do your job more effectively?” were in positions to make better choices about how to manage their people, but the conversations that helped them make those choices weren’t always an ego massage.
requires the mindful use of four distinct skills that are extremely difficult to balance under pressure: Stating our clear position Explaining the underlying thinking that informs our position Testing our perspective Inquiring into the perspectives of others
Like a topic sentence in good paragraph construction, a position statement is clear, candid, and concise. It lets others know where we stand on an issue, the specific point we’re putting forward.
To that end, let’s look at more vigorous tests to employ in situations where it may be more difficult for others to push back, or when we’re putting forward a particularly strong perspective: That’s how I see the problem. What does the problem look like from your perspective? Right now I feel like my idea makes perfect sense, and that makes me nervous. Are you seeing something I’m missing? I am more interested in making an informed decision than in winning or being right, so I’d like to hear your point of view—especially if it differs from my own. If I’ve got a blind spot about this issue, please help me to see it. I’ve shared what I think and why I think it. I’m curious to hear how other people are thinking about this problem—especially those who have a different take on it than I do. To help me improve how I’m looking at this decision, I’d really like to hear from someone who has a perspective that challenges mine. I’d like someone to expand my view of this situation. Who has a different way of looking at it? I know I may be wrong about this—what do you think? If you disagree with me, please let me know. I’d really like to hear your point of view. Push back on me here—especially if you think I am being unfair. What would our worst critic say about this decision?
Randy’s handling of this conversation is impressive. Neither accepting the accusation at face value nor dismissing it, he defused the explosive situation by getting curious. By inquiring into the underlying reasoning behind the assertion, he brought the conversation back to a more balanced, data-based dialogue, pulling a tense and divisive parent-teacher conference right back to the sweet spot.
What are you seeing that leads you to that view? I have to admit that I see the issue very differently, but before I jump to conclusions, please tell me what you have seen or heard that leads you to see it the way you do. Tell me more about how you’re looking at this issue. Obviously, you’re looking at this differently. Help me see this through your lens. How are you making sense of X? What does this look like from your (marketing/finance/engineering) perspective? Help me expand my thinking on this. Tell me how you see X. What have you seen or heard that leads you to think X? Can you provide a couple of examples that illustrate your position? Clearly, we don’t agree. Let’s see what our different perspectives can teach us about this issue. Explain in more detail how you’re seeing the situation. I’m intrigued by the way you’re framing this issue. Can you give an additional example or two so I can better understand your thinking? Can you give me an example of X? Can you illustrate why you see this so differently than I do? When team members haven’t even shared their positions, much less their thinking, and we want to invite their perspectives into the conversation, we might say: We’ve been bouncing this idea around for quite some time, and we haven’t heard from you yet. As you’ve been listening to the pros and cons of this decision, what’s your take on the best choice?
Are you seeing anything that the rest of us may have missed? I’d be interested in hearing your views on this problem. Do you have a different perspective than those that have already been shared?
Imagine a team full of such people. Now imagine an organization full of such teams.
Any dolt can shut down or argue when he or she is being challenged, but it requires real strength to remain open to learning, squarely focused on informed choice, even when we’re feeling stressed and vulnerable. Our capacity to rein in our derailing tendencies in circumstances where other people cannot is a sign that we’re in disciplined control of our behavior and not a piteous slave to our emotional reactions.
For a really challenging conversation—a 10/10 (rated 10 on the difficulty scale and 10 on importance)—there is no substitute for practicing with a partner. By having a colleague play the person with whom we need to have the conversation, we can more realistically assess and improve our ability to maintain conversational discipline.
As we build our discipline for working in the sweet spot, we’re seeking the yin and yang of dialogue by being bold, authentic, and direct and, simultaneously, open-minded, unpretentious, and inquisitive.
When a consensus decision is the best option, a more balanced approach helps to level the playing field. It’s far harder for the team member with the strong win tendency to run away with the decision if the team has the capacity to work in the sweet spot
Trust isn’t a prerequisite for effective conversations; it’s the product of effective conversations.
When it comes to building our competence, the workplace is our dojo—an ideal practice space for building and refining our skills.
As these men explore the city, their unique cultural, educational, experiential backgrounds lead them to filter the available sensory input in very different ways.
The key is to lean our ladder into difference. We don’t learn much by engaging people who agree with our views, we learn the most by engaging people who don’t. This dramatically increases our ability to detect and correct errors in how we’re looking at a situation and to generate a far more accurate mental map. With this in mind, we treat anyone who disagrees with us as the most valuable person in the room.
When we double-loop learn we hop off our hamster wheel of thought and question the way we’ve made sense of the problem in the first place.
described to his fellow workshop participants the loud and combative arguments he and his team had in meetings. They were, as he put it, “very intense.”
Like a group of skilled jazz musicians, a team that can deliberately double-loop learn is more nimble and adaptable in the face of unusual, shifting, complex circumstances because team members can better adjust their thinking to fit the new challenge.
Our minds, in other words, have a self-serving, single-loop tendency to resist information that threatens our current view of reality, so they filter the world around us so we see what we want to see.
When people, teams, and organizations react defensively to an idea, what is it they’re defending? Their current idea and the assumptions, beliefs, and mental models on which it stands—the very things they need to question and adjust in order to double-loop learn.
Because conflict is the primary catalyst for double-loop learning, only teams with reliably high conversational capacity can deliberately orchestrate it.
Their research demonstrates that as people consistently practice the replacement behaviors, they actually change the physical structure of their brains, because, just like a muscle, the neural circuits for any activity grow where they’re being used and atrophy where they’re being neglected.
With regular practice, we produce a flywheel effect, where the more we use the skills, the more our skills grow, and the more our skills grow, the more we use the skills. Is it hard work? Sure it is. Any skill worth learning takes effort.
Use every meeting, problem, decision, conflict, or change as an opportunity to build your skills. There should be no such thing as a boring meeting because you’re practicing as you participate, facilitate, or both.
Your naturally self-serving tendency to look outward, in other words, is a defensive routine: You avoid looking at your own behavior by placing all your attention on the behavior of others.
What are my tendencies, and how are they displayed?
When it comes to disciplined dialogue, you do this by listening to what’s being played, and then playing what’s missing.
Acknowledge and reward people who are making a genuine effort, and do it both publicly and privately. “I tested a view earlier, and Jane took me up on it and pushed back. I know that wasn’t easy, and I’m grateful you did it. I’m hoping to see more of that kind of behavior from everyone around the table as time goes on.”
When someone puts out a naked position, they inquire into it. When someone forgets to test, they jump in and test for that person. When they put forward their own perspective they shore up the conversational capacity of the team by intentionally balancing their push and their pull.
One is a routine problem,1 which can be difficult and bothersome, but for which we have ready experts and proven solutions on which we can depend for a fix. In other words, a routine problem is routine not because it happens regularly but because we have a routine for dealing with it.
Far from routine, an adaptive challenge is a problem for which there are no easy answers,2 no proven routines for dealing with the issue, no expert who can ride in and save the day.
They treated the implementation process like a routine checklist, and failed to address its more adaptive aspects—their corporate culture, their old habits, and their instinctively defensive reactions to change.
It makes no sense to march our team into a challenging predicament it’s ill equipped to handle.
They needed the skills to climb out of their dysfunction, but they were too overwhelmed by their dysfunction to acquire the skills.
Adaptive leadership13 is not about coming up with an idea or solution and then convincing the group to adopt it. It’s about orchestrating a process of learning that gets people with different views and agendas learning from each other as they tackle an adaptive challenge.
But when we liberate leadership from authority we empower anyone who wants to foment productive change because we realize that while authority is assigned to us by the organization, leadership is an activity we choose. Seen this way, leadership can be exercised from any point in the system.
Leadership is not about the roles we’re formally assigned; it’s about the roles we choose to perform.
Tina also spent untold hours behind the scenes listening to concerns, smoothing ruffled feathers, and keeping people engaged in the learning. This trio worked together to do the requisite adaptive work—rebuilding relationships, earning back trust, improving how they interacted with each other, and resolving festering conflicts.
“With or without authority, exercising leadership is risky and difficult,” says Heifetz. “Instead of providing answers as a means of direction, sometimes the best you can do is provide questions, or face people with the hard facts, instead of protecting people from change.”
A person with an inflated ego and a strong opinion says, “I know exactly what to do,” and a flock of people passively minimize by going along with the unadulterated bullshit he’s slinging—even when they know, deep down inside, it’s not going to work.
Whenever we choose to head down one of these daring paths we’d better have our demons in check.
We can seek out and enroll partners, colleagues, friends, or teammates as fellow learners—people eager to head up and out of their own sheltered, self-limiting village by acquiring the mindset, learning the skills, and using both to tackle increasingly difficult issues and situations.

A beautiful elegy for photographer Matthieu Chazal by Paul Salopek on the epic Out of Eden Walk.

On those bitter days afoot in the Caucasus, Murat and I would sometimes send Matthieu ahead to search for shelter in the snowy wastes. He was very good at it. Often, we found him at a tumbledown farmhouse or roadside inn, regaling a crowd with outlandish stories, and sipping from a jar of homemade Georgian wine. Last month our nomad friend left us, at 49, a casualty of aggressive cancer. Once more he scouts the road ahead. 

https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/articles/2024-10-forgiving-moment

So long Ribbonfarm!

Ribbonfarm retiring is another such ending in a time rife with them. I can’t overstate how influential it has been on my (our) thinking and practice. Tremendously impressive to think all of that was thought up by one person (who I still haven’t met).

It’d be impossible to summarise all the themes, intersections and other tidbits that I got out of Ribbonfarm. I can say how it begun: I was lying on the river-shore in Avignon in 2012 and I had a large part of the blog’s back catalog in my Instapaper and there I read the entire thing while listening to the crickets.

Ribbonfarm is Retiring
Moving out of Rue de la Teinturiers. I will miss the racket.

I’ve been waiting for an updated edition of “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” and now I see that Kleppmann is working on it. Reading the first edition has given me such an outsized advantage when architecting and building systems.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensive-applications/9781098119058

Love having the kids be off school every 6 weeks or so which means we get a week of everybody adjusting to them being at home and then another week of adjusting them being back at school. All thanks to the trash tier school logistics of Germany.

Kaiju No 8

Kikoru doing Kikoru things

I was somewhat excited to watch this anime series. It’s only 12 episodes for its first season so it was over pretty quickly.

It was fun and well done but too short to be satisfying or really have an impact. I may need to skip unfinished anime adaptations1 entirely given there’s so much old catalog I could be watching instead. Also now I understand how people get into reading the manga’s while they wait for the adaptations to catch up.

The Kaiju No 8 story is—how could it be any different with such a name—a standard monster beat ’em up. The characters are a bunch of young kids. Things escalate steadily with increasingly powerful and shadowy monsters attacking them. The suits and the group dynamics are somewhat reminiscent of Attack on Titan. As a standard shonen monster beat ’em up anime, it’s fine.

It’s just that there’s nothing in the story that sets it apart, there are no deeper themes that are explored, no interesting motivations, no moral or emotional payoffs worth talking about and no standout characters with staying power. I don’t think I’ll remember much about this show six months from now.

Jujutsu Kaisen

I couldn’t help but compare it to JJK which knocks every one of those dimensions out of the park. I never got around to writing a proper review for its S2 other than this:

The long awaited Hidden Inventory and Shibuya Incident arcs turned into a treat to watch despite the continuously escalating power levels and its sprawling cast of characters and villains. —2023 year in review

S2 was such a phase shift for JJK moving from low stakes happy go-lucky teen show to massively hard bouts of apocalyptic fighting and loss (Nanami…). So many of the characters (“My Brother!”) in JJK have depth and huge fan popularity (Panda-kun, the guy who speaks in Onigiri). Just go on TikTok and see all the Shibuya incident foreshadowing, the Satoru Gojo montages and the number of ships that are doing the rounds.

  1. I have currently open: Jujutsu Kaisen, Spy x Family and Frieren. [↩]

MySQL encoding mistakes corrupting data in this decade?!?

Turns out I hadn’t noticed my hosting provider Vimexx has their MySQL databases on latin1 coding and this blog was running on that happily corrupting data.

Given how common an occurrence this is—MySQL very regularly will throw your shit into the street and set fire to it—I had expected there being scripts or resources to fix this. Of course nothing was to be found anywhere.

I asked the Mastodon MySQL expert who did have a resource on the exact problem: https://blog.koehntopp.info/2020/08/18/mysql-character-sets.html

The way I fixed it was a bit more manual than I’d have liked but where I got is good enough and I’m not sure I’ll go for anything perfect:

Go to the phpMyAdmin and audit all the database tables.

My tables are in a mix of InnoDB and MyISAM which seems to be weird but not really problematic. I also had some Yoast tables that were lingering there which I dropped.

Find the setting and convert all tables and their columns to the collation utf8mb4_unicode_ci. A collation implies the utf8mb4 character set that is its prefix so you don’t have to change the character set.

Now all your stuff is in UTF-8 but because of a coding error a lot of your content is messed up. A unicode character can be more than one byte but in latin1 each character can only be a single byte. So if your unicode character is two bytes, they are interpreted as two latin1 characters which is why you end up with stuff like “î“.

Maybe there would have been a clean automatic way to convert the data, but I felt it was fiddly enough as it was, so I opted for a manual fix. I identified where the corruption happened:

  • wp_posts columns post_content and post_title
  • wp_comments column comment_content
  • wp_usermeta column meta_value

Then I just ran queries to fix all the mismatches:

ü → ü
Ãœ → Ü
é → é
É → É
ÄŸ → ğ
Ç → Ç
etc.

Luckily in almost all cases the wrong coded string is unique and can simply be replaced with the right character.

Check if a string is in the column:
SELECT post_content from wp_posts where post_content LIKE BINARY '%Ç%' and post_status='publish'

Later on check for specific characters and their environment in what can be very long post bodies:
SELECT SUBSTRING(post_content, LOCATE('Ã', post_content)-15, 40), post_content from wp_posts where post_content LIKE BINARY '%Ã%' and post_status='publish'

Replace the wrong string sequence with the correct character:
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'Ç', 'Ç') WHERE INSTR(post_content, 'Ç') > 0

After some hours of auditing and pounding SQL most of the things should be fixed and whatever’s left I can live with.

Conclusion

The moral of this story is that the entire complex of WordPress/PHP/MySQL is a pile of shit that should be burnt off the face of the planet. The fact that we can have these kind of encoding issues in the year 2024 shows what an absolute joke these systems are. Especially with the Mullenweg meltdowns, anybody who can get out of WordPress should do so.

This blog hasn’t received a comment or other bit of interactivity in years so I think I could also rip all the content (effectively just two columns in wp_posts) out and host it on something that’s statically built. No reason to pay for a shit hosting provider like Vimexx anymore either.

It’s become fashionable in tech circles to say that all legislation is bad. This is a dangerous and wildly ignorant way of thinking. Without legislation, many people would not survive and the very things that we depend on for a good life would not exist.

The Verge gets this right in their endorsement because they’re some of the smartest people in tech reporting.

https://www.theverge.com/24282022/kamala-harris-endorsement-presidential-election-2024

Reckoning with the Greens

After some occasional brushes with party politics and reading up on the minimal political agency that we foreigners get here, I dove in. The rise of right-wing sentiment seemed to be a good reason to become a member of the Greens just like I imagine it did for a number of people. Much good that did do if you see the continued rise of that sentiment and this Green government all but enabling right-wing parties with their politics of austerity.

I rescinded my Green Party membership a couple of months ago because of irreconcilable disagreements with their politics. Also because I don’t think they’re effective even at the things they want to do. That move put me way ahead of the Green youth wings many of whom recently exited the party for similar reasons and with a lot of fanfare.

Politics

A lot of my beef with the Greens (though by no means all of it) is for their hypocrisy when it comes to the Palestine question.

I don’t really have a stake in the Israel-Palestine conflict. I know more Israelis than Palestinians and get along with them fine. I’m opposed against theocratic movements and governments of all backgrounds. Still, in this conflict it is obviously apparent what is right and what is wrong and it has been obvious for decades.

This topic is too big to treat in whole and I hope there will be hundreds of reckonings of the past year in German politics at some point. I’ll just post my receipts and explain why they made the Green Party morally repugnant to me.

Cem Özdemir

Özdemir quotes Golda Meir at an Israel Solidarity event

I saw Özdemir in this video with many other high ranking German politicians quote Golda Meir saying: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” This is a vile bit of racism that should be unacceptable but to which nobody batted an eye back then.

Özdemir now is the mostly useless minister for agriculture in this Green government and his political views have not improved.

Baerbock

https://twitter.com/Strack_C/status/1735629355668173297

Baerbock sat here next to the person responsible for spreading IDF propaganda in Germany which you can understand consists mostly of lies and excuses for war crimes. Her fans will make lots of excuses for this but the optics of being this chummy with such a vile human being do not become any less terrible.

Baerbock now is the foreign minister in the current German government where her already questionable and empty platform of “feminist foreign policy” has devolved to the point where she is making passionate pleas in favour of war crimes in German parliament.

https://twitter.com/tparsi/status/1846186196419924294

Parliament

https://twitter.com/hahauenstein/status/1771455044098871704

The Green parliamentary fraction invited and posed with Daniel Ryan Spaulding, a comedian who’s made a name for himself now with increasingly racist anti-Palestinian bits.

Habeck

Habeck, the only functional politician in the German government, posted this sermon relatively quickly after the attacks. It has been much praised by mainstream Germany but every Palestinian and Arab listening to it will hear: “You are second class citizens. Your grievances are not real. You do not belong here.”

I didn’t think back then it was smart to put out a message alienating a sizeable minority in your country. I think I’ve been proven right.

Party

What the of the Green Party members themselves?

Inside the party itself on this topic I’ve seen mostly silence and a significant number of statements that would not be out of place in the AfD.

The Green youth wings who left the party did so because of (valid) political disagreements with the party establishment but none of them even once mentioned Palestine in the exit statements.

Party Membership

I don’t think party membership is a thing for most people. There are power dynamics at play which are the same in the Greens as they are everywhere else. In every party there are two classes of members:

  • Career politicians who have decades of experience and relationships in the party. They run everything.
  • Ordinary members who are there to volunteer at the local levels and support the party materially with their time or money.

These two classes have almost no interaction with each other. The mechanisms of inner party democracy (and pretty much any functional organisation) are setup in such a way that ordinary members can’t bother the people doing the “actual work”.

So what is the point of being a member if you don’t have time or money to give?

I would answer that for me there is no point in party membership. I don’t get anything out of it. I may keep voting for the Greens (for lack of better alternatives) and support them in one way or another, but I don’t need to be a member to do either of those things.

Maybe being a party member will be worth it for others who have more to give or who stand to get more out of it. That is a calculation that everybody needs to make for themselves.

Wanted to show the kids some chiaroscuro for their art class about light and dark tomorrow and ran through some of the all time greats from Caravaggio. They were particularly impressed by Holofernes being beheaded.

Always stunning to see how good these paintings are and a bit sad for how long it’s been since I saw one for real. But Sanssouci has the picture of Doubting Thomas so that can be fixed.

https://www.artrenewal.org/artists/caravaggio/589

Thoroughness unpacked in three dimensions like this by James Stanier is so good and gives a much better way to think and talk about issues of velocity:

Scope is what you’re building.
Scalability is how well it will work as you grow.
Sustainability is how well it will work over time.

https://theengineeringmanager.substack.com/p/scope-hmm

As somebody working in platform for the past years, I’ve become very familiar with the different dimensions of this debate around productivity and John here unpacks the topic in a way that’s really useful. I used the nails analogy just yesterday.

Even more than a nuanced understanding of why developer productivity is so challenging to improve, the last bit of the piece is even more on the money because it’s what drives decision making in most companies (tech companies are no exception):

“Can you imagine how hard it would be to walk into a meeting with investors, whoever, and say, ‘um, you thought you had a 30mpg car, and it is a 15mpg car?”

https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-304-losing-a-day-a-week-to-inefficiencies

Krasse Links looks like yet another collection of links but the German wall of text notwithstanding, it’s a remarkable act of curation and contextualisation. Remarkable and unique for sure in Germany.

There are very few people here who have the desire and skills to be able to look beyond the borders, beyond the Tellerrand, and who feel that what the German state and establishment press and media serve you is simply not good enough. I’d be hard pressed to suggest anything at the same level as what Michael Seemann here and any German interested in the intersection of technology and politics would be well served to read this newsletter.

Krasse Links No 27.

A damning but also entirely correct assessment of Elon Musk:

How degrading it must be: a 53-year-old man, notionally responsible for five companies, endlessly jostling for empty, phatic interactions with strangers. A clown forced to play for an audience he despises, an audience he cannot be sure even exists, and which gains with every tasteless joke a clearer understanding of what he is really worth.

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2024/09/how-elon-musk-killed-twitter

Waarom ik geen ID-Check kan gebruiken

Met een nieuwe identiteitskaart of paspoort die je in het buitenland krijgt (als je niet meer in Nederland woont), kun je niet meer ID-Check van DigiD gebruiken.

Ik vroeg me af waarom dat was en kreeg dit antwoord:

Identiteitsbewijzen die in het buitenland worden uitgegeven, worden door de Rijksdienst voor Identiteitsgegevens (RvIG – uitgever van de Nederlandse identiteitskaart en paspoort) niet in de Basisregistratie Personen (BRP) geregistreerd. DigiD gebruikt de BRP tijdens de ID-check om te controleren of het identiteitsbewijs (ID) een geldig ID is dat bij die gebruiker hoort. Dat kan dus niet wanneer het ID-bewijs in het buitenland is uitgegeven. Om deze grote groep mensen in het buitenland toch te helpen, controleert de DigiD app tijdens de ID-check het burgerservicenummer (BSN) in de chip van identiteitsbewijzen die in het buitenland zijn uitgegeven. En vergelijkt dan of dat overeenkomt met het BSN dat hoort bij het DigiD-account van de gebruiker.

De RvIG heeft om veiligheidsredenen besloten om per augustus 2021 het BSN uit de chip te verwijderen. Daarom is het niet meer mogelijk voor de DigiD app om het BSN uit te lezen van de chip en kan de gebruiker dit ID-bewijs dus niet meer gebruiken voor de ID-check. Het scannen van de QR-code op het ID-bewijs mag ook niet, want dat kan eenvoudig vervalst worden. De ontwikkelaar van de DigiD app is Logius.

https://www.rvig.nl/wijzigingen-nederlandse-identiteitskaart

https://www.rvig.nl/wijzigingen-model-paspoort-2021

Mijn BSN zit dus niet meer in de chip op het document wegens “veiligheidsredenen”.

Ondertussen heb ik een Europese digitale pas gekregen in Duitsland en kijk of ik die kan gebruiken voor online dienstverlening, maar zoals ze al zeggen: “Inlogmiddelen van andere Europese landen kunnen steeds vaker worden gebruikt om online zaken te regelen met Nederlandse overheidsorganisaties.”

Steeds vaker betekent in dit geval: bijna nooit. We zullen zien.

Always nice to be able to write stuff that the team has been doing and share it with the world.

Kubernetes is a very maligned technology but if properly managed it can be part of an entirely boring infrastructure portfolio. Realistically it’s not doing that much more than running docker on a bunch of machines and pulling images. React has a similarly bad reputation which is not stopping lots of developers from getting tons of work done with it.

https://choco.com/us/stories/life-at-choco/journey-to-kubernetes

Long distance bike packing races however brutal they may be look like they fulfil an ideal. They have an activity that’s not that fast but where you can still cover a lot of distance and terrain. The contestants are physically and mentally absurdly fit and still they go through hell. The remoteness of the locations usually creates a special connection to the local people and culture.

It’s something more people should do or at least aspire to.

Logitech already has a forever mouse. No need for an MBA CEO to reinvent the wheel.

The G500s I bought in 2013 is still going strong, the only thing that’s missing is updated and functioning software to go with it. Logitech’s own driver offering was always absurdly bloated and after a couple of years dropped support for this particular model.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/logitech-has-an-idea-for-a-forever-mouse-thatrequires-a-subscription/

A piece about real-world Rust development that struck a cord with many people. Most of the issues listed here are valid and longstanding to the point that you have to wonder if they’ll ever be fixed.

I have a similar feeling around Rust web development where for all the good building blocks it doesn’t really seem to get off the ground. At the same time Go has been going really hard for ages. Maybe spending all your time to get the types to line up doesn’t leave room for building?

https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/

That popular open source package managers will at some point all get owned is so inevitable that it’s hardly worth mentioning.

Cocoapods in this case is a bit of an outlier because the entire setup here has been so broken to begin with. iOS development never really allowed for dependency management so Cocoapods did it in an very hacky way and it was written in Ruby, a relatively niche end-of-life language that would have no chance to be blessed by Apple and shouldn’t be used for anything serious to begin with. (Don’t even get me started on Carthage.)

Swift Package Manager has been released years ago but lots of projects of course never manage to switch. I believe the best thing a project can do in such a situation is to terminate itself for the greater good.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/cocoapods_vulns_supply_chain_potential/

I remember when I got banned from the forum of one of Germany’s larger liberal podcasts for saying that Bitcoin is mostly something by and for criminals. I think that statement was pretty much entirely correct.

The story of the Texas Bitcoin mine is sad but we’re living through something similar now where the construction site has installed yet another permanent noise device (a pump) next to our home. The noise level is not too high, but even if it were, it’s not like anything would be done in Berlin about it.

https://time.com/6982015/bitcoin-mining-texas-health/

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.

The experts agree that kids need to be cared for better. The experts also agree that people like Haidt are grifters who do not contribute anything into that direction.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2

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”.

Threads makes Mastodon feel engaging (and that’s saying something).

https://maxread.substack.com/p/threads-is-the-gas-leak-social-network

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.

Performance will still be better than in most other languages and you can optimize this stuff out after you’ve got things to work.

https://blog.sdf.com/p/fast-development-in-rust-part-one

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.

You know, countries could have promoted STEM education as a pursuit decades ago but given the state of things, nothing is getting done in technology without people from outside of Europe. Let’s see whether we make the smart choice this time round, or whether we’ll see countries ‘cutting their nose to spite their face’ as the saying goes.

https://www.golem.de/news/tech-standort-ostdeutschland-als-waere-das-image-nicht-schon-schlecht-genug-2403-182921.html

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.

(Also I’m in the credits on this one!)

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.

Most likely the police would say that they couldn’t use any modern tools or data sources here because of Datenschutz (data protection) reasons. Datenschutz is 1. a great excuse for people who don’t want to do their jobs and 2. a way to protect every kind of crook and criminal.

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.

That is a wild number of people who are not getting anything done and who then become a pension burden on the public budget.

https://www.politico.eu/article/european-armament-commissioner-defense-war-security/

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.

Yet Finkelstein is ambivalent about being pressed back into the cause and sympathetic to younger generations’ relative lack of interest in “old fogies.”“I recognize,”he said, “that it is your moment, it’s not my moment.”

A pretty fair profile of a man who’s a polarizing character.

https://www.thedriftmag.com/normcore/

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.

The main issue here is that a purchase like this (hardware firewalls!) fits in the rampant fear based culture around digital technology here where schools have their own IT (which they can’t deploy or manage) and everything needs to be absolutely secure. The net result of that way of thinking is of course that nothing is even slightly secure.

https://www.golem.de/news/elektroschrott-hunderte-deutscher-schulen-sitzen-auf-ungenutzten-firewalls-2402-182195.html

Come to Berlin, they said. There’s lots of space here, they said.

In the mean time in Berlin everything is full and anything related to children is wildly under-provisioned (because Germany out of principle does not invest in anything). That creates waiting lists and insane competition for everything.

https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/02/berlin-infrastruktur-kinder-kein-platz-wartelisten-teuer.html

I haven’t tried it out yet but seeing the collaboration features in Zed described here, that sounds pretty much like my ideal workflow.

Chat channels including voice and screen sharing integrated directly into a lightning fast editor enabling seamless collaboration and visibility on who are doing something together. Unscheduled calls instead of endless calendar invites that don’t fit the shape of the work anyway.

https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/the-lightness-of-unscheduled-calls

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.

https://www.instagram.com/hartunfair/

I had previously posted about a deep dive of the connections of the anthroposophical movement with fascism.

Anthroposophy and Ecofascism

What’s also quite poignant are the fascist foundations of the ecological movement in Germany. It’s not just fascist but in the weird post-war political space here every type of idiocy is pretty much represented.

Petra Kelly is essential to understand why the Greens are so so opposed to nuclear energy. She got together with an officer of the German army who was used by the Stasi (as part of the Generals for Peace) to argue for disarmament. He eventually shot her and himself to death.

https://www.environmentandsociety.org/arcadia/petra-kelly-and-transnational-roots-green-politics

It’s a good example of how anything peace movement related here was a ploy by the Russians not to get their ass kicked (and still is).

And here’s a historical treatment of all the ecofascist tendencies that tried to be part of the ecological movement in post-nazi Germany. Some of them got disillusioned and rebuked by the party’s tendency towards eco-socialism, but others managed to latch on.

Left Green Perspectives #27

The absurd cast of characters in both of these stories are a clear testament for how pretty much everybody in German society after the war was damaged goods.

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.

https://twitter.com/ProgrammerDude/status/1758148576134177246

Berlin has a not very well-known facility that allows you to request a Meldebescheinigung online, pay for it online and receive it by mail. I attended Arian to it and it saved his bacon.

Many people here will deny that government digitalisation here is possible or desirable both of which are statements that are untrue and deranged. It is possible to create better services for people. Germans just choose to live in abject squalor for no reason.