Posts

“I was so happy renting in New York City for so long because renting—or at least the way I rented, which involved never lifting a finger to better my surroundings—allows you to let things literally fall apart all around you. Then, when it gets to be too much, you just move on.

Nothing will bias a session faster than you trying to sell him on your ideas. You’re not there to talk. You are there to listen.

The idea is that by sharing orders, delivery status, and customer feedback each member company can improve efficiency and service quality, while remaining separately owned.

I saw a starter task fly by in the Swift Weekly Brief and jumped on it. Now it turns out that the Swift project has a util directory full of various Python scripts that perform various tasks including cloning and building the project.

There were walls around all his thoughts.

Ik ben een trouwe luisteraar van GBI en het was leuk dat Vasilis toen hij in Berlijn was de tijd nam om ook eens met mij te praten. Volgens mij is het een leuk gesprek geworden.

Successful people consistently compare themselves favorably to their peers.

But if globalization is capable of holding out any fundamental promise to us, any temptation to go along with its havoc, then surely that promise ought to be this: we will be more free to invent ourselves.

I believe it has to do with the belief system of our times: in a hierarchical worldview, there can be only one brain in command, just as there must be a single boss at the head of every organization.

“I believe that the dominant paradigm for managing product development is fundamentally wrong.”

The Spaniards are good at many things, but not at making war. All foreigners alike are appalled by their inefficiency, above all their maddening unpunctuality.

“The establishment in many ways is as suicidal as some of the far left

“Inspector Thomas Mathew seemed to know whom he could pick on and whom he couldn’t. Policemen have that instinct.”

I’m putting this here so I don’t have to keep looking it up.

“Association with those you hate is suffering.”

“You must see the people who work with you.”

For my personal archive, here is the talk I gave at Thingscon Amsterdam last year.

Here or there, our blood will plant olive trees.

One for the archives, this a talk I gave last summer that I thought went pretty well.

Modern! How quickly that word had surged forward and multiplied itself like bacteria throughout the world.

Last Tuesday I gave a talk at EMERCE Tech Live on the main stage of the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. It was a lovely event and it was fun being back in Amsterdam however briefly.

Ik heb me de afgelopen weken geërgerd aan en gegeneerd voor de domme venijnige kritieken die het boek ‘Hallo Witte Mensen’ van Anousha Nzume kreeg. Zoals de uitgever van het boek Ebissé Rouw zegt: Nederland is een intellectual wasteland. We zijn nu eenmaal een klein taalgebied waar iedereen zich heel slim en onschuldig kan voelen door het Engelstalige debat over een onderwerp compleet te missen en zelf wat bij elkaar te verzinnen.

“Let us not mix up heaven and earth

Naar aanleiding van de Zomergasten met Leon de Winter had ik al wat aantekeningen gemaakt. Deze zaterdag las ik in de Volkskrant Femke Halsema’s veroordeling van de Winter en zijn debat-techniek. Ik heb mijn aantekeningen van toen er maar weer bij gepakt.

I don’t think you can draw a lot of conclusions from this bit of selectorate theory but it’s interesting to get a feel for the numbers.

The USA example of resistance against Trump in the form of Tech Solidarity quickly gained a following in the Netherlands with TechSolidarity.nl and here in Berlin with some Tech-Solidarity-Berlin. I’ve had a small role in both of those groups’ creation but I’m currently not an active participant.

“there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.”

[soundcloud url=“https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/308750042" params=“auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=“100%” height=“450” iframe=“true” /]

A grouch through and through, but it was he who first taught me the value of memory, and how to think of it as mental music, a setting to iambs and trochees.

Geert Wilders, leader of the PVV —the far right Dutch Freedom Party— had his campaign start today for the upcoming parliamentary elections in Spijkenisse, one of his traditional strongholds.

Just another day in the Dutch election campaign.

it might have been only a temporary confluence of interests, but everything was temporary now— with so many traditions broken or vanished, it left what John used to call the necessity of creation;

The right decision, even when all seems lost, can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The wrong decision, even when a victorious outcome seems all but certain, can result in deadly, catastrophic failure.

“The insistent permissiveness of the late Twentieth Century had produced fully as much sex-guilt and sex-fear in its heirs as had the insistent repressiveness of the late Nineteenth Century.”

Like every year the books I read and the movies I watched. Recommended ones are in bold.

We went over to the client’s office and spent an entire eight-hour day going over each and every pixel and word in that deck. When it was over, the client clapped (really). They loved it. We were relieved. And we never looked at that deck again. Six months after that meeting, nothing had changed on the client’s site. I don’t think they ever looked at that deck again, either.

Kuhn had written about Priestley— that a scientist who continued to resist after his whole profession had been converted to a new paradigm might be perfectly logical and reasonable, but had ipso facto ceased to be a scientist.

“In fact, bad behavior is more often than not good politics.”

Next up, @alper talking about conversational interfaces. Join the livestream at https://t.co/mdVhV45tsg

Somewhere between language proficiency levels C1 and C2 lies a plateau that I’m finding difficult to cross in German. Living in Berlin I’m simply not exposed to enough of the language on a day to day basis. The usual advice would be to join a Verein and hang out with Germans. That sounds fun but I’m not in the market for a new hobby.

This network is the seat of scientific opinion; it is split into thousands of fragments, held by a multitude of individuals, each of whom endorses the others’ opinion at second hand, by relying on the consensual chains which link him to all the others through a sequence of overlapping neighborhoods.

Riukhin sat in complete solitude, hunched over his bream, drinking glass after glass, understanding and recognizing that it was no longer possible to set anything right in his life, that it was only possible to forget.

That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

There was something immodest about her modesty: it announced itself.

When you shoot a person, you say why and do it, without excuse. This is how the Radchaai are.

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

War strategies, however, rest on a deeper foundation of people working together under stress and uncertainty, and good ones shape the terms of the conflict to their liking before combat begins.

“Whenever scientists say they’re Christian,”Sax said, “I take it to be an aesthetic statement.”

I strolled through the massive exhibition ‘Welt am Draht’ at Leipziger Strasse this weekend. This is a selection of video art from the massive Julia Stoschek Collection exhibited in the former Czech Cultural center.

I’ve spent June until October writing a brief but comprehensive book called “Designing Conversational Interfaces” introducing the creation of messaging applications and chatbots to a non-technical audience.