July 20th, 2020

• Day off! Weirdly enough, I woke up not knowing exactly what to do, even though I'm clearly behing on everything :)
• [[Go Links]]? Seems like they could be a nice little communication/advocacy project.
• The hype around [[GPT-3]] is ongoing.
• [[OpenAI]] as a potential employer.
• [[Eric Linus Kaplan]] and I had an interesting discussion on Twitter.

2020-07-20

Replied to a post by Ton Zijlstra

I’ve been keeping Zettelkasten style notes in Obisidian for about a week now, and this morning I made the first new connection between some of my notes / thoughts. It was a bit of a ‘well duh’ realisation, but one I never made explicit for myself before even if in hindsight it is obvious those…

That’s great. I hear lots of good things about [[Obsidian]]. How did the connection happen? (I’m very interested in [[constellation]] formation!)

Replied to a post by Ton Zijlstra

Bookmarked for reading (found in Neil Mather’s blog). Actual cases of ‘tethered’ economic transactions where a buyer is bound into an ongoing relationship with the seller with an uneven power balance, are already easy to find: John Deere suing farmers for tinkering with their tractors (with De…

It’s troubling too to think how this will encroach on more and more transactions, as so many things become are becoming so-called ‘smart’. As [[Frazee]] says in his [[Info Civics]] article, “All authority is borrowed from the server, and so the users possess no authority of their own. As a result we must describe these services as authoritarian.” It’s provocative but I think the same could be applied here.

We have an interview with one of the authors, [[Aaron Perzanowski]], here – https://therestartproject.org/podcast/crisis-copyright/.

[[The end of ownership]].

Replied to a post by Ton Zijlstra

Another good find by Neil Mather for me to read a few times more. A first reaction I have is that in my mind p2p networks weren’t primarily about evading surveillance, evading copyright, or maintaining anonymity, but one of netwerk-resilience and not having someone with power over the ‘off-switc…

Yes it’s interesting that they focus on privacy. I do agree with the main thrust of the article, that without diligence, and when just focusing on the tech, the decentralised can easily be centralised again. And in some cases the absence of privacy can be the attack vector. But I think I find things like the [[anti-disintermediation]] of blogging, email (gmail) and git (github) as more low-hanging examples of what we need to prevent against, where privacy had nothing to do with it.

It's Miller time

I made my wiki have a [[Miller columns]] view. I like it, I think it works well for wikis.

⥅ [[images/miller-wiki.png]]

I think it's probably something that could be a browsing style option built into the browser, rather than forcing it into an individual website, but hey, it's not, so here we are. Roll on [[Xanadu]]!

I copied most of the code for it from Jethro Kuan's Cortex Hugo theme (which he says he mostly copied it from azlen.me), and then wrangled it into my org-mode [[publishing]] process.