2,762 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2023
    1. When I was a little kid (late 50s) my Grandmother would take me to the Brixton market (in London) and for lunch we always ate at the Lyons Tea Room next to Aldgate East station. None of this means much to most but it's a nice memory. This music is the soundtrack to those days. Thank you.
    1. “We have, for a very long time, been rendered less capable of caring for people even in our most intimate spheres, while being energetically encouraged to restrict our care for strangers and distant others. No wonder right-wing and authoritarian populism has once again proved seductive. It has been easily fueled, given the profound difficulties and unbearable collective anxieties of living in an uncaring world. Defensive self-interest thrives in conditions like these since, when our very sense of security and comfort is so fragile, it becomes harder to care for ourselves, let alone for others. In this way, care has been – and continues to be – overshadowed by totalitarian, nationalistic and authoritarian logics that re-articulate and reorient our caring inclinations towards ‘people like us’. The spaces left for attending to difference or indeed developing more expansive forms of care have been rapidly diminishing. To appropriate a term famously used by Hannah Arendt, a systemic level of banality permeates our everyday carelessness. Hearing about catastrophes such as the vast numbers of drowned refugees, or the ever-expanding homelessness in our streets, has become routine. Most acts of ‘not caring’ happen unthinkingly. It is not that most of us actively enjoy seeing others left without the care they need, or that we share sadistic and destructive impulses. And yet we are failing to challenge the limits being placed upon our caring capacities, practices and imaginations.”
    2. “In an experiment revealing the importance of having friendships, social psychologists have found that perceptions of task difficulty are significantly shaped by the proximity of a friend. In their experimental design, the researchers asked college students to stand at the base of a hill while carrying a weighted backpack and to estimate the steepness of a hill. Some participants stood next to close friends whom they had known a long time, some stood next to friends they had not known for long, and the rest stood alone during the exercise. The students who stood with friends gave significantly lower estimates of the steepness of the hill than those who stood alone. Furthermore, the longer the close friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared to the participants involved in the study. In other words, the world looks less difficult when standing next to a close friend.”
    1. Pragmatischer Realismus und Utopie müssen sich ja nicht ausschließen. Auch wer „auf Sicht fährt“, sollte sich überlegen, wohin die Reise geht. Wir haben uns zu lange damit begnügt, nicht mehr über den nächsten Schritt hinaus zu denken. Aber in der Zwischenzeit ist in der Gesellschaft etwas Neues entstanden: eine neue Lust, wieder in größeren Maßstäben zu denken und herauszukommen aus einer Politik des bloßen Reagierens auf Ereignisse.
    1. Die Kritik an Belo Monte war ein Tabubruch. Ich bin in patriarchalen Strukturen groß geworden, in der Väter, Ahnen und die von ihnen gegründete Firma zu einem Überich verschmolzen sind, das man nicht in Frage stellen durfte.
    1. die Utopie ist schon in uns, sie ist der handfeste Stoff, aus dem Träume gewoben werden. Das Utopische ist ein Samen in jedem Menschen, aber auch eine historische Erfahrung. Utopisten sind jene, die das Undenkbare aussprechen, um es vorwegzunehmen.
    1. this appears in writing, and preciously little even in oral communication.The point is that the disrepute of “speculation” or “dream” is such, thateven as a strictly private (not to say secret!) activity, it has a tendency tovegetate – much like the desire and drive of love and sex, in too repressivean environment.
    2. Of course, no creative mathematician can afford not to “speculate”, namelyto do more or less daring guesswork as an indispensable source of inspira-tion. The trouble is that, in obedience to a stern tradition, almost nothing of
  2. Jul 2023
    1. Der Einsatz solcher Techniken werde überbewertet. Die positiven Auswirkungen auf die Lernergebnisse und die wirtschaftliche Effizienz seien nicht so hoch. Nicht immer sei das Neue auch besser. Nur weil etwas neu ist, müsse es nicht zwangsläufig auch genutzt werden.
    1. "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

      Kernighan’s law

  3. Jun 2023
    1. Platform engineering is trying to deliver the self-service tools teams want to consume to rapidly deploy all components of software. While it may sound like a TypeScript developer would feel more empowered by writing their infrastructure in TypeScript, the reality is that it’s a significant undertaking to learn to use these tools properly when all one wants to do is create or modify a few resources for their project. This is also a common source of technical debt and fragility. Most users will probably learn the minimal amount they need to in order to make progress in their project, and oftentimes this may not be the best solution for the longevity of a codebase. These tools are straddling an awkward line that is optimized for no-one. Traditional DevOps are not software engineers and software engineers are not DevOps. By making infrastructure a software engineering problem, it puts all parties in an unfamiliar position. I am not saying no-one is capable of using these tools well. The DevOps and software engineers I’ve worked with are more than capable. This is a matter of attention. If you look at what a DevOps engineer has to deal with day-in and day-out, the nuances of TypeScript or Go will take a backseat. And conversely, the nuances of, for example, a VPC will take a backseat to a software engineer delivering a new feature. The gap that the AWS CDK and Pulumi try to bridge is not optimized for anyone and this is how we get bugs, and more dangerously, security holes.
    1. Setting up RedirectsOne last thing before we leave you, you’ll notice that you tend to get redirected to the blog as opposed to a wiki logon page. That’s done with one final caddy configuration, forcing you to read my blog if you try to go to an arbitrary URL (especially important if you are retiring old sites):NoneBashCSSCC#ElixirErlangGoGraphQLGroovyHaskellHTMLINIJavaJavaScriptJSONKotlinLispLuaMermaid DiagramNixObjective-COCamlPerlPHPPowershellPythonRubyRustScalaSQLSoliditySwiftTOMLTypeScriptVisual BasicYAMLZigKopierenkb.gurucomputing.com { @notBlog { not path /static* not path /doc* not path /s/* not path /auth* not path /realtime* not path /images* not path /locales* not path /api* not path /collaboration* not path /collection* } redir @notBlog /s/blog reverse_proxy http://outline }To get to the logon page, you instead navigate to a /doc or /collection subpath as opposed to the root of the site (and of course you still need authentication). And that’s how I made this blog.
  4. May 2023
  5. Apr 2023
    1. What, then, are we to do? How can we transform a disorganized group into one that is organized enough to take on a collective obligation to prevent harm? A promising solution here might be to revisit the place of individual moral agents in ascribing forward looking collective responsibility in cases where a group is not yet organized enough to be ascribed such responsibility. In particular, we might want to ask how, if at all, individual moral agents might be motivated and even obligated to create the kind of organized collective that is needed here.
  6. Mar 2023
    1. A radical feminist design approach means to me, the acceptance of differences, and the caring of these. Care work is a central aspect of design. For taking decisions I need to invest time to evaluate the situation responsibly. Designing for differences in a world ruled by universal thinking means sometimes designing ideas from scratch, and even rejecting the possibility of using solutions available