These are bookmarks, events, replies, likes, following the microformats2 format.
📖 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Brandolini’s law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the difficulty of debunking false, facetious, or otherwise misleading information: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it.”
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“In college I took an Engineering Ethics course. It focused heavily on mistakes.”
“I wish this course had covered the idea that people might be harmed not because of an implementation mistake, but because an engineer did a good job building the wrong thing.”
I think this nice zine displays awareness of what David Koepsell dubbed the “eventual” fallacy of technological risk, which is something along the lines of: “someone will develop this anyways, so we may as well do it (us being the good guys)". From Koepsell 2010 - On Genies and Bottles: Scientists’ Moral Responsibility and Dangerous Technology R&D:
The ‘‘eventual’’ fallacy is committed by simple recourse to the truism that over an infinite time-span, all natural truths will be discovered, and all potential uses and misuses of technology will be developed, so present research on any science or application of technology is morally justified (131)
With this type of reasoning any research can be justified. The response to the “eventual” fallacy is contained in the following lines from the zine:
“But I chose to make this tool instead of a different tool. I choose to work on it now instead of doing other things.”
That is, you should ask yourself: why should we research this or produce this tool now? Are the risks of developing this tool or researching this thing outweighed by current more pressing concerns and risks?
📖 https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
“Digital gardening is the Domestic Cozy response to the professional personal blog; it’s both intimate and public, weird and welcoming. It’s less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than a Twitter feed. It wants to build personal knowledge over time, rather than engage in banter and quippy conversations.”
📖 https://archives.cjr.org/cover_story/evgeny_vs_the_internet.php
But with Morozov, the audience is always left to sort out where the critique ends and the joke begins. “I’m very conscious of what I’m doing,” he says. “I’m destroying the internet-centric world that has produced me. If I’m truly successful, I should become irrelevant.”
Awesome initiative from Evgeny Morozov: “An eclectic weekly selection of new academic articles, essays, talks, podcasts, and more.” You can compile your own weekly syllabus!
📖 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
📖 https://harpers.org/archive/2019/01/machine-politics-facebook-political-polarization/
Social media’s ability to simultaneously solicit and surveil communication has not only turned the dream of individualized, expressive democracy into a fountain of wealth. It has turned it into the foundation of a new kind of authoritarianism.
📖 https://www.edwinwenink.xyz/etc/contribution_guidelines/
Have a look at the contribution guidelines for this website.
📖 http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Unix_as_Literature
Suddenly the overrepresentation of polyglots, liberal-arts types, and voracious readers in the UNIX community didn’t seem so mysterious, and pointed the way to a deeper issue: in a world increasingly dominated by image culture (TV, movies, /.jpg/ files), UNIX remains rooted in the culture of the word.
I wanted to craft my own solutions from my own toolbox, not have my ideas slammed into the visually homogenous, prepackaged, Soviet world of Microsoft Foundation Classes.
“Policymakers who think that laws can stop this commodificaton of information are deluding themselves. Such commodification is not happening against the wishes of ordinary citizens but because this is what ordinary citizen-consumer want. Look no further than Google’s email and Amazon’s Kindle to see that no one is forced to use them: people do it willingly. Forget laws: it’s only through political activism and a robust intellectual critique of the very ideology of “information consumerism” that underpins such aspirations that we would be able to avert the inevitable disaster.”
📖 https://tech.newstatesman.com/policy/ai-ethics-framework
Without an ethical framework, “better safe than sorry” becomes the only guiding rule, excessive caution overrides innovation, and we all lose out
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From this article I draw two hypotheses: 1) people are more than willing to sell their privacy in return for comfort and/or safety, and 2) the obsession over privacy is typically European
📖 https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html
It wouldn’t conceptually be anymore a “network of networks”, but just a “network of three networks”, the Trinet, if you will.
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That’s a great compliment, much appreciated! I just found https://nadiaeghbal.com/ through you: an absolute gem.
It looks like I copied a random string in that link and wrote :wq without thinking. Not all Vim habits are always good, I guess :-) Thanks for pointing me to href.cool, I’m having a lot of fun over there! Just used deathgenerator.com to write an ultra-short bio: https://www.edwinwenink.xyz/images/deathgeneratormbtt.png
By the way, in order for this webmention to be processed I need to manually remove a trailing slash from the URL of your page. Not sure if that’s intended :-)
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Thanks so much for that shoutout, I’m glad the laser eyes did not go unnoticed! Your site is an absolute gem with great style, I’ll have a lot of fun exploring it. I suspect you already know most of it, but perhaps you’ll find an interesting link here: https://www.edwinwenink.xyz/etc/web_paleontology/ .
📖 https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/PhilosophicalEngineering.html
Harry Halpin and Alexandre Monnin interviewing Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the www).
📖 http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/2.html
“The web is a single, increasingly complex infrastructure which has been adopted for mutually incompatible purposes.”
📖 https://adactio.com/journal/9016?skin=default
“What if the fundamental differences lie deeper than the technical implementation? What if the web is suited to some things more than others, not because of technical limitations, but because of philosophical mismatches?”
“The web has no gatekeepers. The web has no quality control. The web is a mess. The web is for everyone.”
📖 https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/1/144824-artificial-intelligence-past-and-future/fulltext
“As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore,” complained McCarthy. Yet it is recent worries about AI that indicate, I believe, how far AI as come.
📖 https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-teach-artificial-intelligence-common-sense/
“With Deep Blue we had a program that would make a superhuman chess move—while the room was on fire,” Etzioni jokes. “Right? Completely lacking context. Fast-forward 20 years, we’ve got a computer that can make a superhuman Go move—while the room is on fire.”
Start of a new project where Sanne Blauw will interview people involved with AI over the coming months
📖 https://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/download.html
For later reference, if I ever consider self-hosting a mailing service.
The lecture was a philosophical tornado, leaving the audience dazzled. A semi-random quote of my choice: “There is no intelligence without a problem to be solved”.
“Is politics possible without an image of the enemy?” Interesting lecture about the legacy and relevance of Carl Schmitt by well known Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg. The lecture was a continuation of his essay “Vriend en vijand”.
Went to see The Myrrors, stayed for Minami Deutsch, which was a great surprise.
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“Als abrupte bezuinigingen elders de prijs zijn die betaald moet worden voor een versterking van de bèta- en technische disciplines, dan passen vele bèta’s daar vriendelijk voor.”
📖 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96WOGPUgMfw
Superb explanation of min-hashing as a method for efficiently approximating Jaccard similarity on bit vectors.
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The use of algorithms is a “fourth power” for which regulation is needed. Call in the Dutch news for an organ that regulates government algorithm use.
📖 https://odino.org/my-favorite-data-structure-hyperloglog/
Intuitive explanation of the HyperLogLog algorithm for multiset cardinality estimation
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📖 https://nasseralkmim.github.io/notes/2016/08/21/my-latex-environment/
Guide for setting up LaTeX in Emacs
📖 http://timharford.com/2013/09/3180/
Very good read about how to manage email in a sane way. For an implementation with mu4e and org-mode, see here
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Nice reflection on the tension between the local and the global in the Anthropocene. I appreciate Boris’ attempt to ground thinking on global issues in local practice.
📖 https://medium.com/@tasshin/implementing-a-second-brain-in-emacs-and-org-mode-ef0e44fb7ca5
Long read with many useful links. Ideas are not Emacs-specific.
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Media attention in Dutch national news for potential biases in the use of predictive algorithms by the government
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Now that Chrome has a large market share, it was a matter of time before Google - an ad-selling company - made their browser an ad-displaying machine.
📖 https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/
If my workflow ever really starts revolving around Org mode, I should revisit this way to write content for this Hugo website in Org mode
📖 http://kavita-ganesan.com/tfidftransformer-tfidfvectorizer-usage-differences/
Nice introduction to TF*IDF in Python using sklearn
📖 http://matt.might.net/articles/productivity-tips-hints-hacks-tricks-for-grad-students-academics/
I do pretty OK on many of these points: 3,4,5,6,7,9,12. What I can do better on: 2,13.
📖 https://kadekillary.work/post/cli-4-ds/
How to do common data manipulation tasks from any UNIX machine.
📖 http://matt.might.net/articles/how-to-blog-as-an-academic/
This post summarizes my own approach to blogging, and some more!
📖 https://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/
Love the rough but humorous styling. Eclectic Zizek Magic.
I attended the iHUB LED Conference on Lifelong Learning, hosted at the Microsoft Headquarters at Schiphol.
