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last few minutes of the talk a must see! “we have a delusion that progress reduces uncertainty”. Again, good old control raises its head again.
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v. good. agree on psychology of sharing, we could be sharing a lot more than we do today but the incentives for sharing still skewed towards the ’self-importance’. also, sites are not social, the web is.
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good notes from supernova session
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brilliant stab at explaining the nuaces and differences between OS, platform, hardware, net and web. and there ARE two perspectives on platforms – the developer’s and the user’s and they don’t always overlap.
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more on the AP vs bloggers story.
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the other side of empowerment by technology…
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use for FHT chapter
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good to see that the reason behind moving from PC to a Mac was valid… i.e. getting away from MS and Vista.
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lot of this makes sense. I am weeding out all that’s not private, i.e. addressed to me as a person and not just email, from my inbox. info goes to feed reader, impersonal comms to spam. get lot less email as result but no less communication.
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the penultimate paragraph is important, no standard API yet
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twitter’s whale is sinking? i think users are very loyal but eventually someone will come up with an acceptable alternative.. it’s a race
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agreed, I found Zittrain’s comment for the BBC rather odd but attributed that to editing.
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it does seem a small bug but it show how little traction (and trust) plaxo built with some users.
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wonderful article, goes with the stephen yegge one on superhero engineers.
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worth listening to a canadian minister pushing through their version of DMCA stumbling over the questions. it seems that now ‘intention’ is punishable, not the act itself e.g. unlocking phone to make it work abroad is fine as no _intention_ to defraud. Ba
- Author: Adriana
- Published: Jun 20th, 2008
- Category: Reading & Bookmarks
- Comments: None
links for 2008-06-20
Quote to remember
Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
- Code for the Maintainer
via Coding Horror
Cost of damage, cost of repair and unruly human behaviour
This morning I commented on JP’s blog post on Wondering about damage and repair , where he applies a useful concept of comparing the cost of damage with the cost of repair to chewing gum. It transpires that the cost of chewing gum is 3p and cost of cleaning (by councils) is 10pm and therefore the full cost born by us all as taxpayers. The question is what can be done to balance this out, as it is the balance in the right direction that keeps things ticking over – such as Wikipedia for example.
Maybe it’s time for some radical solutions. Maybe we could try something else. If a good for sale is capable of damaging “the commons” then maybe we should measure the cost of repairing that damage. If that cost exceeds the cost of damage, then we raise a tax on the good until the cost of damage is higher than the cost of repair. Half the tax is payable by the manufacturer, half by the consumer. The taxes so collected are then used to do the repairing.
To me using taxes to influence such things is anathema, here is why:
Hm, to me the problem with the ’solution’ to chewing gum is trying to control behaviour through taxing it – a slippery slope indeed. Apart from the fact that even if it works, i.e. in aggregate people stop or start doing more of whatever the tax is designed to change, there are _always_ unintended consequences that cause further distortion(s) in the market. Just look at financial regulations.
But my real objection to using any tax to control behaviour is that is it paternalistic and shifts the relationship between the state and the people from one of servant-master to master-slave.
People don’t seem to differentiate between the state and society – two separate realms that relate to the individual in fundamentally different ways. The state is political and the society, well, social. One of the features of communism (or any totalitarianism) is the explicit aim to politicise the social. In such systems, everything is political and the power is taken away from the society and individual for political purposes. Therefore, I distrust and thwart the state wherever I can. I support and strengthen society to the best of my abilities.
A bit of a political theory overkill for a chewing gum issue, however, that is the reason my alarm bells go off every time I hear proposal to tax one thing or another to change or influence human behaviour. Social solutions are always better than political and taxation IS a political solution.
The cost of repair vs cost of damange is a brilliant framework for understanding why some phenomena work and others don’t. I am with DE on how to approach it – education and lower cost of clean up.
- Author: Adriana
- Published: Jun 19th, 2008
- Category: Film, Open source/IP/DRM, Stuff
- Comments: None
Open source pr0n
Fantastic! A feast for geek eyes.
code_swarm – Apache from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.
An experiment in organic software visualization, code_swarm:
This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.
via O’Reilly’s radar
- Author: Adriana
- Published: Jun 19th, 2008
- Category: Reading & Bookmarks
- Comments: None
links for 2008-06-19
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embeddd vs leased model of data accessibility/portability etc. still not what I want – my data where I want them, not via platforms.
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excellent tips for writing etc. but disagree that the web is not good for big picture learning – I think it’s much better at that than old style education or narrative. More complex and non-linear and thus closer to the nature of reality. And often unmedi
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interesting
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another ‘identity’ aggregator, based on what I call ’silo manipulation’.
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another reason not to rely on centralised (and badly managed) systems
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privacy is a behavioural issue and technology is a (big) part in protecting or abusing it. I wonder what will happen, even with something like the Mine! that allows people to reclaim some of their data they would otherwise scattered across the web.
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ClickFree – one to watch?
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seems like silo manipulation to me. a clever one but still. I want to be the platform and have the functionality come to me.
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interviews are not a very good way of choosing good people to work for/with you
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scary. based on lack of understanding of what a platform is. E.g. bundling together Playstation, the web, Windows, Ubuntu, Series 60 mobiles. Platforms are a hangover from hierarchical & centralised environment in a networked one. Not the future.
- Author: Adriana
- Published: Jun 18th, 2008
- Category: Reading & Bookmarks
- Comments: None
links for 2008-06-18
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Excellent. “The important thing is to be grounded in the clinical truth. Put health care first, and then use new computational methods to extract accurate information.”
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amazing how this manages to turn something personal and in flux into a boring and irrelevant.
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a conversation with Cadenhead about AP’s takedown notices – transpires this is not the first time. The lack of clarity about resolution is not encouraging either. This has implications for fair use, bloggers, journalism and how media industry will deal wi
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i hear a sound of a business model falling apart
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DMCA – the scary stuff, in practice here. I hope the blogosphere can rise and fight it. A law that cannot be enforced or is counter-productive is a bad law.
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“Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-l
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absolutely brilliant and spot on! a must read
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worth reading
- Author: Adriana
- Published: Jun 17th, 2008
- Category: Reading & Bookmarks
- Comments: 2
links for 2008-06-17
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mostly pseudo-post-modernist BS. The web is not for publishing but communications, with a printing press for each of us, if we want to. So it’s publishing that’s changed, communications that expanded and human expression broadened (whether you like it or
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another pointless cry of the pseudo-intellectual. It’s all so pointless!! At least be ‘philosophical’ about it. Human expression and freedom to do so are ALWAYS good. vacuity is in the eye of the beholder and decentralised nature of the web will ALWAYS ge
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AP saying what is more appropriate for the blogosphere and what is its spirit? How ridiculous? Samizdata has its own guidelines about quoting source text, nothing to do with what AP wants bloggers to do. unbelievable happening in 2008.
- Author: Adriana
- Published: Jun 16th, 2008
- Category: Reading & Bookmarks
- Comments: None
links for 2008-06-16
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going solo event promotion. I know i have heard about it from a few of the people in my circles, indepdentently. I didn’t go as it was expensive and not that useful for me.
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privacy an illusion in P2P networks?
- Author: Adriana
- Published: Jun 14th, 2008
- Category: Reading & Bookmarks
- Comments: None
links for 2008-06-14
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shut down, for obvious reasons!
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yep, been saying for ages that social networking is user-driven and not to be monetised.
- Author: Adriana
- Published: Jun 13th, 2008
- Category: Reading & Bookmarks
- Comments: None
links for 2008-06-13
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don’t ask why i bookmark this. one of those things I am interested in and of which I have more hunch about their relevance than any real knowledge.
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aaargh!
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identity cards via backdoor, this is intolerable. the state never gives up and it’s obvious that it has nothing to do with security
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love this. especially as i study philosophy. but does that make me a philosopher? and do the trees in the forrest care?
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looks useful
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find the whole problem and try to solve it…
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useful
Newsflash: Business run according to the wrong manual
Are current business structures and processes actually institutionalised sabotage? It would seem so as the following tips from a 1944 manual (pdf) on how to sabotage a business could read as a description of what happens in corporations around the world… (just replace “patriotic” with corporate BS about leadership and innovation).
(11) General Interference with Organisations and Production
(a) Organizations and Conferences
- Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
- Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
- When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
- Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
- Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
- Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
- Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
- Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the juris diction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
via Joho the blog
Boing Boing comes to the same conclusion: Sabotage manual from 1944 advises acting like an average 2008 manager
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