2024-04-28

• [[Ecology]]

  • [[Keystone species]]

• I should put more images in my garden.

  • I stumbled on the page on [[Jean Baudrillard]], which has no text. But the picture is fun.

• Finally finished watching [[Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain]].

  • National Working Miners Committee. David Hart.
  • Arthur Scargill. Sequestration of funds. Connection to Al-Zulfikar and Colonel Gaddafi for financial support.
  • Ultimately that negative press seemed to be the final nail in the coffin of the strike.

• Back here after a few more days of hectic travelling :) I intend to stick around in the Agora for the next few days, for a change!
• Thinking again (as per usual?) about [[open letters]] — which hasn’t necessarily meant I have been making much progress on any of them. I wonder at times why I got so enamoured of the genre even before penning my first complete one; but then again my enthusiasm is known to often predate competency ;)
• I thought about [[telling stories]].
• [[Google]]:
  • [[Letter from the Founders]]
  • [[2004 update]]

2024-04-27

• [[Digital weeding and watering]]

  • Adding a page for keeping track of little bits of content cleanup that need doing on my digital garden.
  • This has been very useful already.
  • I’ve found:
    • pages that were using old file: links (e.g. Praxis)
    • duplicate nodes (e.g. Philsophize This).
    • pages that I’m interested in, but just had never had time to write anything about (e.g. climate action)
    • mistakenly created pages
  • And it has been fun to revisit various older pages in the process.

• I am really looking forward to the release of [[Jathan Sadowski]]‘s new book.

  • [[The Mechanic and the Luddite]]

2024-04-26

2024-04-23

• Read: [[What a waste: our study shows almost half of electricals sent for recycling could be reused]]
  • [[The Restart Project]] set up in a Household Waste Recycling Centre (in Brent, London).
  • Assessed the reusability of products being brought in for recycling.
  • Shocking results: almost 50% could have an easy second life (either fully functional as is, or in need of only minor repair).
  • There needs to be less focus on recycling, and much more on reuse and repair.
  • Filtering and diverting initiatives should be mandatory.

2024-04-22

• [[Listened]] to [[There’s hope yet for UK waste and repair policy, with Green Alliance]]

2024-04-21

• Soccer96 - I was gonna fight fascism

• [[Listened]] to [[Seto Kaiba is My Role Model]]

2024-04-20

• Changes in the [[forces of production]] come into conflict with the [[relations of production]].

  • The infinite replicability of digital assets is in conflict with the wishes of corporations who profit from artificial scarcity.
  • From memory, I think Paul Mason discusses this in Post Capitalism.
  • Also the phrase [[What is possible in the information age is in direct conflict with what is permissible]] from [[the Telekommunist Manifesto]] comes to mind.

• [[Listened]] to [[The Tao of WAO: S09 Episode 4: Adam Greenfield]]

• [[Listened]] to [[How Swiss women won a landmark climate case for Europe]]

2024-04-19

• [[Replacing Google Fonts usage with locally-served font]]

  • [[What’s wrong with using Google Fonts?]]

• It could be time for a new season of [[Node Club]]…

  • AKA [[Homebrew Commons Club]]

• I should back up my Doom config on Termux.

  • Given I’ve spent enough time configuring it now that it would be a pain to have to redo it.
  • [[Backing up my Doom Emacs config on Termux]].

• Flying to the [[US]]!
  • Not staying super long, but I’m attending a wedding and visiting a few museums I’ve never visited before.
  • I slept badly tonight, and the day before, due to different reasons — the first night it was due to trip prep, the second it was due to a (surprise, as usual) allergy attack that kept me up/very uncomfortable until late. Happy to have made it to the flight only looking slightly like a cat (because of how my eyes swell, I get a bit of a feline look for hours-days after an attack).
  • Listening to [[Lex Fridman]] with [[Jimbo Wales]] on topics like the history of wikipedia. Very interesting as most Lex conversations I’ve heard as of late!
• [[Agora]]:
  • I’m back in the Agora, finally :) I took a more prolonged break from journaling as I moved with [[Lady Burup]] temporarily to [[AG]]‘s place (she is very kind!) and I adapted my routine to that space; also I’ve been busy at work and with other projects.
  • Thank you [[neil]] for keeping the journaling section of the Agora alive and interesting!
  • I reworked a bit the Agora’s [[README.md]], which is what is rendered at the Agora root URL — e.g. https://anagora.org pull. Hopefully it’s more cogent and informative without being overwhelming. But you tell me :)
  • [[Agora Development]]:
    • Fix local dev environment which is now sending https to itself even though it’s http only due to bug in agora.py:56 :).
• [[Flancia]]:
  • I thought back a bit about the history of Flancia while I was rewriting the above. It’s been running for a number of years at this stage!
  • Maybe I should write a belated update in https://flancia.org pull proper.
    • Include a reference to the [[flancia meet]] landing page.
    • Include a TLDR on what the Agora now is/how it developed through the years/where do we want to go next.
    • Maybe take the opportunity to have some extra fun and write something more clearly fictional again :)

2024-04-18

• I [[listened]] to [[Degrowth vs Eco-Modernism]].

  • It’s a good episode.
  • I like [[Kai Heron]], and I’ve found the debate between various strands of [[ecosocialist]] thought very interesting.
  • But I also lament the time spent disagreeing amongst ourselves on the left.
  • Is it ultimately useful? What if all this intellectual effort could be spent on bringing about a transition away from capitalism, and towards ecosocialism?
  • I don’t know - perhaps the debate is contributing to that transition, in part, in a roundabout. And I suppose that if we don’t know what we stand for, we can’t meaningfully work towards it.
  • But still. It has vibes of [[The People’s Front of Judea]] vs the Judean People’s Front.
  • Not got to the end yet, so perhaps this will be covered…

• Listened to [[Opening the Vicious Circle of Risk Rating (ft. Ariel Bogle)]]

2024-04-17

• [[Listened]] to [[Degrowth vs Eco-Modernism]]

• [[Listened]] to [[Is the Middle East on the brink?]]

2024-04-16

• [[Shells]].

  • Bash vs Fish vs Zsh vs Nushell? | Lobsters

• Listened to [[Israel’s AI Kill List: “Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy.”]]

  • About Israel’s AI targeting system, "[[Lavender]]".

• Read: [[Emacs: Dead and Loving It]]

  • "What is dead cannot die"
  • [[Emacs]]

• Working on some improvements to the look and feel of my writing mode that I use when in org-roam.for Emacs.

  • [[Improving my Emacs writing mode]]

2024-04-15

• Not sure if this has happened just recently, or I’ve been living with it for a long time, but: case sensitive node search in [[org-roam]] was starting to bug me.
  • Turns out that it’s [[Helm]] that is doing it, when set to the ‘smart’ completion algorithm.
  • I just need to (setq helm-case-fold-search t) and all is good - much smoother completion experience.
  • See: https://org-roam.discourse.group/t/v2-case-insensitive-completion-and-backlinks-not-working-as-expected/1701/17
  • In Doom, something different.
  • I’ll pop it in a separate note: [[Turning on case-insensitive search in org-roam]]

2024-04-14

• Listened to [[New Economics Podcast: Should we be going for growth?]]

  • Good discussion.
  • Growth. GDP . Degrowth. Green growth. Decoupling. Doughnut economics. Policies for alternatives to growth. Growthism. Growth is structurally baked in - how to change that?

• [[Listened]] to [[Ghosts in the Machines: Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, & Capitalism]]

  • LLMs. AGI. Political economy of AI. Neo-Luddism. [[Left spirituality]]. Fun wide ranging discussion.

• [[Habitat loss]].

  • One of the most significant threats to [[biodiversity]].

• [[Film theory]] looks at films and the effect they have on society.

  • I find this really interesting so learning a little on it via Kinnu.

2024-04-13

2024-04-12

• Did a bit more on [[Setting up a literate publish.el with org-babel]].

• The AI [[hackathon]] I’ve been working on went well \o/

2024-04-11

• Learning about [[biodiversity]] via the Kinna app.

  • Variety of species. At various levels.
  • Essential to the health of the planet.
  • Genetic diversity, species diversity, ecosystem diversity.

• Listened to [[Post Capitalism w/ Alnoor Ladha]]

  • Fascinating discussion. Post Capitalism. Post here not meaning ‘after’ but ‘in relation to’. Pluralistic. Past and present examples: Zapatistas. Rojava. Indigenous worldviews. Relational ontologies and OntoShift.

2024-04-10

• Migrating my publish.el to a [[Literate publish.el]].
  • To make it a bit more understandable to others, and also as a push for me to tidy it up.

2024-04-09

• Made good progress on [[adding planted and last tended dates to pages in my digital garden]].
  • [[Testing my org-export customisations with ERT]] was incredibly helpful, would have been a bit of a nightmare otherwise.

2024-04-08

• [[Listened]] to [[Should the UK stop arming Israel?]]

  • Drone strike killed seven aid workers. (Some of whom British).
  • While Israel says it was a mistake, suggestion is that this is in line with Israel’s current rules of engagement.
  • UK sells a small amount of arms to the UK. Sunak threatening to stop this unless more aid allowed.

• [[Nonprofits should (almost) never write their own software]]

  • From the [[Aspiration Manifesto]].
  • Being the tech lead for a non-profit that develops our own software - I fully agree. We are currently going through a process of trying to divest as much bespoke code as possible to pre-existing (FLOSS) software.
  • One alternative I see, where no other software exists for the desired purpose, is for non-profits to perhaps be incubators for the software, but always with an intention to [[exit to community]] / exit the software to cooperative.

2024-04-07

• My publish.el file would be a good candidate for a literate config approach. Would make it more useful for other people to make use of then I think. Also would make me tidy it up.

• Listened again to [[Nathan Schneider on Building Democratic Governance on the Internet]]

  • [[Parallel Polis]], Vaclav Havel.
  • Touches on similar stuff as recent [[Vincent Bevins]] podcasts re: failed revolutions of the 2010s.
    • Technology helped spread viral messaging for movements, did little to help collective decision making and long-term organisation.
  • Mentions [[Loomio]], [[Action Network]].

• When I get a moment I’ll make a page of gardening tasks for myself.

  • Just simple things like reviewing nodes that haven’t been edited for a long time; reviewing empty nodes to either prune or flesh out; etc.

• [[Ecology]].

  • interaction between organisms and their environment.
  • communities, ecosystems, biomes.
  • producers, consumers, decomposers.
  • food chains, food webs.
  • energy flows, trophic levels.
  • nutrient cycles.

2024-04-06

• If you share your [[commonplace book]] to the knowledge commons, is it then a [[commonsplace book]]?

• [[work]]
• [[flancia]]
• [[cleaning]]
• [[danger]] codes

2024-04-05

• [[Listened]] to [[Nathan Schneider on Building Democratic Governance on the Internet]]
  • Love this interview of [[Nathan Schneider]] by [[David Bollier]]. New book out, [[Governable Spaces]]. Sounds like a synthesis of a bunch of recent papers (e.g. [[Governable Stacks]]).
  • Main thesis is about the need for inclusion of democracy in our everyday online tools. To avoid ‘[[Implicit feudalism]]‘.
  • [[Decidim]] referenced favourably.
• And [[listened]] to [[Building human economies using technology]]
  • Bit of a sprawling rambling discussion, but still interesting talking points. Technology, communism. [[Telekommunisten]]. Struggles of leftist tech to get a real foothold. [[Theory of value]].

2024-04-04

• I’m getting more into the groove with [[fish]] on desktop the more that I use it.

  • Still a slamdunk win on Termux.

• I would just like to take a moment to lament the fact that I have received an email inviting me to become a Certified Generative AI Specialist.

• Idle thought: maybe the world would be a better place if the de facto ‘learn to code’ tutorial was not a todo list (individual productivity) but a simple group poll (collective decision-making).

2024-04-03

• A bit more on [[Testing my org-export customisations with ERT]].

2024-04-02

• Had a quick read about [[Passkeys]].

• Listened to [[Platforms for Public Good w/ Mathew Lawrence & Thomas Hanna]]

• [[deutsch]]

2024-04-01

• [[Listened]] to [[Hotel Bar Sessions: Whose Anthropocene?]]

  • Good discussion - is [[Anthropocene]] a useful term? Maybe [[Capitalocene]] works better? Maybe both have their uses. Good overview of the pros and cons of both.
  • There’s a geological definition of Anthropocene (descriptive), which is interesting and all, but perhaps of more genuine use is it as a definition that motivates us to act to mitigate climate catastrophe (prescriptive).

• Also [[listened]] to [[Envisioning Platform Socialism w/ James Muldoon]]

  • Great discussion. Loads of good stuff in there, listened while doing chores so not much in the way of notes, warrants a relisten.
  • [[Platform Socialism]]. [[Guild socialism]]. [[Subsidiarity]]. Some things best as worker coops, some local municipality, some national. Some global. Global digital services. Take Google into global public ownership?
  • [[DECODE]].

2024-03-31

• Went for a walk and [[listened]] to [[The Silicon Empire in Eastern Europe (ft. Erin McElroy)]]
  • [[Silicon Valley Imperialism]].

• Following a stumble through the garden related to [[technology and political economy]], re-reading [[The Telekommunist Manifesto]].

  • [[political economy of network topologies]]
  • [[political economy of free software]]

• Also plan to re-read [[The British Digital Cooperative: A New Model Public Sector Institution]].

2024-03-30

• [[Adding planted and last tended dates to pages in my digital garden]] not as straight forward as it could be.
  • Using it as an opportunity to get familiar with ERT. [[Testing my org-export customisations with ERT]].
  • Should be simpler to write against small tests rather than having to go through the whole publish pipeline.

2024-03-29

• Late night [[listened]] to [[What’s the Value of Data? (ft. Salomé Viljoen)]]

  • [[Social data]].
  • Has [[predictive value]].
  • Three ways to extract [[surplus value]] with it:
    • 1. Just sell it on, e.g. data broker
    • 2. Use it to exploit people based on knowledge from the data
    • 3. Use it to exert power (e.g. Uber’s [[Greyball]] program)

• Also listened to [[The Supermarket into Prison Pipeline]]

• Pretty much always find [[This Machine Kills]] interesting, whatever the topic.

• Thinking about how I would go about [[adding planted and last tended dates to pages in my digital garden]].

• [[AG]] :)
• [[Lady Burup]] :)
• [[friends]]
• [[work]]
• [[party]] prep
• [[colleen]]

2024-03-28

• I’ve been picking up the [[guitar]] again regularly recently, for the first time in a long time. And I’m really enjoying it. Drop D tuning and finger picking. Still got the muscle memory for basic chords and picking patterns. Relistening to some [[John Fahey]] too.

2024-03-27

• Re: [[using org-mode for timeblocking]] and [[trying out calfw-blocks]], noticed that someone (haji-ali) has forked and updated both [[calfw]] and [[calfw-blocks]].
  • https://github.com/haji-ali/emacs-calfw
  • https://github.com/haji-ali/calfw-blocks/
  • Might be worth making use of these. Have a read through the fork changelogs.

• [[work]]
• [[social coop]]:
  • [[social coop organizing circle]]

2024-03-26

• Further to [[trying out org-timeblock]], I’m now [[trying out calfw-blocks]].
  • As part of a general attempt to be able to do timeblocking in org-mode. ([[Using org-mode for timeblocking]]).
  • I wouldn’t say it’s going swimmingly… but I’m learning plenty about spacemacs layers, doom config, and use-package. So that’s something.

2024-03-25

• Although in general it feels the same (possibly slower? because I didn’t compile it myself?), one thing that is much faster in Emacs 28 is the parsing of my huge Tasks.org file for work. Thumbs up.

  • [[What’s new in Emacs 28?]]

• I’d like to tweak my garden a bit such that I have ‘planted’ and ‘last tended’ dates on each page.

  • I already have ‘This page last updated: …’ at the bottom of every page.
  • But I’d prefer it right at the top. Not too prominent/distracting, but I have some pretty old pages knocking around now and I’d like people to be aware that they might be outdated.

• [[org-timeblock]] looks pretty good and like it’d fill my desire for a timeblocking tool for org-mode.

  • I used to use [[Goalist]] on Android and it was great, but I got annoyed that I couldn’t sync it and make use of it anywhere else.
  • So… [[trying out org-timeblock]]. However, hitting a bunch of issues from the beginning.

2024-03-24

• We [[watched]] [[Soul]] again.

  • Such a lovely film. Heartwarming message, great music, great visuals, funny for the whole family.

• I [[listened]] to [[What Social Media Meant for the Mass Protest Decade w/ Vincent Bevins]]

  • [[Vincent Bevins]] again on his book [[If We Burn]].
  • Really interesting stuff.
  • I like the very loose analogy between what happened to the internet and what happened to [[the movement of the squares]].
  • Basically a form of [[The Tyranny of Structurelessness]] in both.

• Also listened to [[Why Tech Makes Us More Insecure w/ Astra Taylor]]

  • [[Insecurity]] and [[security]] - in more of social and psychological meanings of the word than the technical sense.
  • Claim: [[Capitalism requires insecurity]].
  • Claim: [[Social insurance is a bulwark against insecurity]].
  • Also by Astra: [[The Dads of Tech]] and [[The People’s Platform]].

• We have [[national insurance]] in the UK.

  • Wonder when it was introduced?

• Never really thought much about insurance before.

  • Superficially it seems a boring topic. But this and Jathan Sadowski podcast discussion ([[How the World Became Uninsurable]]) recently making me realise it’s kind of fundamental and sadly mostly privatised.

• Returning a little to [[IndieWeb]] for following activity streams. I had been using the Fediverse for a while, but I find it a bit too fast paced, a bit too attention grabbing. For me. IndieWeb is kind of slow social media and that suits me fine.

• hyperorg could be useful for me.

  • Either for publishing wiki to web, or could be a useful internal parser for the Agora? Python based.

2024-03-23

• Listened: [[Yanis Varoufakis, "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism"]]

  • Great interview with [[Yanis Varoufakis]].
  • [[Techno-feudalism]].
  • Ultimate goal: socialisation of cloud capital (i.e. [[Big tech]])
  • Only America and China have cloud capital.
  • Glad they mention [[McKenzie Wark]] - Varoufakis says he agrees with all of it.

• [[Listened]]: [[Democracy for sale, Europe’s first black leader + tea with Obama]]

  • [[Political donations]].
  • New first minister of Wales is first black leader of a country in Europe.
  • [[Rwanda bill]].

• [[Listened]]: [[Black Box: Episode 6 – Shut it down?]]

  • [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] with AI doonerism.
  • Alternate positive view from Alex Hern.
  • One disappointment with the series as a whole is there’s no mention of environmental impact or questioning of who owns AI technology.

2024-03-22

• [[Listened]]: [[The silencing of climate protesters in English and Welsh courts]]

  • Latest in a long line of crackdowns on defences that climate protesters can use in the courts.
  • One of which made it an offence to use the words ‘climate change’ in court.

• [[Listened]]: [[Vulture Capitalism - Exposing the toxic system and how to outgrow it with Grace Blakeley]]

  • Interesting interview and book sounds worth a read.
  • A lot sounds like analysis of problems, but they talk about some potential solutions and examples too. ([[Cooperation Jackson]], [[Blaenau Ffestiniog]], [[The Lucas Plan]])

• Read: [[‘It’s Not Rocket Science – It’s Just Community’: Radical Ffestiniog]]

  • My great grandad was from [[Blaenau Ffestiniog]]. Nice to have this little connection.

• [[work]]
• followed by [[fellowship of the link]]
• followed by [[fediversalist papers]]
• followed by [[feierabend]] :)

2024-03-20

• [[Listened]]: [[Black Box: Episode four – Bing and I]]

• [[Listened]]: [[Black Box: Episode 5 – The white mask]]

• [[Listened]]: [[Hotel Bar Sessions: Immediacy (with Anna Kornbluh)]]

• [[Listened]]: [[Novara FM: Not Westminster’s Whipping Boys w/ Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram]]

2024-03-19

• I donated to the [[Amazon UK warehouse workers’ strike fund]] again.

  • https://www.foxglove.org.uk/campaigns/amazonstrikefund/
  • They are out on strike today again.

• [[Public interest technology and its origins]]

  • [[Public interest technology]]

• [[work]]
  • lunch with the [[ER-CH]].
  • then some meetings and some focus time! pretty alright :)

2024-03-18

• Listened: [[Black Box: Prologue: The collision]]

  • Woman begins dating an AI, finds genuine positivity from it. She suffers from CFS/ME and has to shield from COVID. Presenter talks about ‘AI vertigo’ - dizziness is what is coming with AI. The ‘collision’ of the title refers to the collision between artificial intelligence and us humans. We being the first generations to truly experience it.

• Listened: [[Black Box: Episode one – The connectionists]]

  • Potted history of AI. [[Perceptron]]. [[AI winter]]. [[Geoff Hinton]]. The connectionists. ImageNet victory by [[AlexNet]]. [[AlphaGo]].

• Listened: [[Black Box: Episode three – Repocalypse now]]

  • Replika, the AI companion app. What happens when they update it and mess up people’s companions. A bit like [[site deaths]] but even worse.

• Listened: [[The Problem With America’s Ban on TikTok]]

2024-03-17

• Read: [[The digital revolution has failed]]

  • "as the web declines, we need to consider what a better alternative could look like and the political project it would fit within"
  • Right on. That would be [[digital ecosocialism]] in my view.

• [[Generative AI has a ferocious environmental impact]].

• [[Generative AI is further concentrating power with Big Tech]].

• Watched: [[Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain]]

  • Shocking, the violence that was meted out by the police on picketing miners. Seemingly premeditated.
  • Then perjury.
  • All seemingly coming directly from the wishes of Margaret Thatcher.
  • The media apparently complicit, a piece of state apparatus.

• Watched: [[Avengers: Civil War]]

• [[fediversalist papers]]
• [[AI]]
  • I spoke to [[Gemini]] about the [[Agora]] :)
    • [[Gemini Agora]]

2024-03-16

• Listened: [[Medium Anxiety]]

• Listened: [[How an infamous ransomware gang found itself hacked]]

  • Fun story.
  • [[Ransomware]].
  • I did not know that [[WannaCry]] was by the North Korean state.

• Listened: [[What do the Tories consider extreme?]]

• [[Distributed digital gardens]].

• Watched: [[Ant-Man]].

• I can’t seem to find an [[IRC bouncer]] that you can easily install on [[YunoHost]]…

• spoke to [[Jack Park]] about [[Topic Maps]]!

2024-03-15

• [[What would AI for the people look like?]]

  • My biggest problem with AI are its environmental impact and the fact that it is in the hands of a cabal of big tech firms using it to turn a profit.
  • Is there a way it could be retained? Publicly owned, democratically governed, socially useful, and existing within planetary boundaries?

• Watched: [[Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain]]

  • Episode 2. Focuses on the [[Battle of Orgreave]].
  • [[Police brutality]]. [[State violence]].

• Read: [[A Modern Anarchism (Part 1): Anarchist Analysis]]

2024-03-14

• Read: [[Reframing and simplifying the idea of how to keep a Zettelkasten]]

  • Really nice summary from Chris of the minimum that you need to do to keep a ‘zettelkasten’. He cuts through a lot of the unnecessary complexity that has appeared around this.

• Contemplating whether I should send webmentions from my digital garden.

  • Maybe, maybe not.
  • There’s plenty of ways to send webmentions from a static site, plenty of people doing it.
  • So I could, but I wonder if I should.
  • Perhaps webmentions should only be sent when I post a more considered long-form article, or when I post something to my stream.
  • Not sure.
  • [[Should I send webmentions from my digital garden?]]

• Listened: [[How to talk about avoiding waste, with Keep Britain Tidy]]

  • Most people think recycling is all you need to do to prevent waste.
  • Reframe the message and move people’s consciousness up the waste hierarchy.
  • [[Buy Nothing New Month]].
  • Really interesting discussion around societal norms and reuse (e.g. what happens when you give second-hand presents at kids’ birthday parties…)

• Listened: [[Black Box: the hunt for ClothOff – the deepfake porn app]]

  • Scumbags make app to deep fake nudes of women and girls.
  • The Guardian tracks them down.

• [[Updating to Emacs 28 on Linux Mint]].

  • This time, using a PPA rather than building from source like last time ([[Installing Emacs from source]])
  • I had to manually, naughtily, uninstall the old Emacs binaries from usr/local/bin that had been built from source in order for the new emacs28 binaries from the PPA to be picked up.
  • And, of course, not it’s a new version of Emacs, spacemacs has to get all the packages from MELPA again…

• I updated packages on Mint like a good boy, and now I’m getting complaints from composer when building a project.

  • [[nette/schema v1.2.3 requires php >=7.1 <8.3 -> your php version (8.3.3) does not satisfy that requirement.]] etc.
  • Good-o.

2024-03-12

• Kickstarted the [[spacemacs]] / spacemacs packages update dance.

  • Because of the [[error "Invalid type in command series" from org-super-agenda]].
  • As always, kind of wish I hadn’t. [[Updating spacemacs 2024-03-12]].

• I created a [[quick function to help extract bold sections from text into bullet points]].

  • Most narrative text is usually just verbose prose around a few relevant points.
  • So when I’m parsing some text, I bold the relevant bits.
  • Then I pull those out to review them as bullets.
  • This function helps quickly pull the bold text into bullets.
  • Love the fact you can so easily configure Emacs to do this kind of thing!

• [[work]]
• [[ai]]
  • TIL about [[unsloth]]
  • will try to focus this week on colab-style work, organizing a [[hackathon]]
• [[social.coop]]
  • [[moderation]]
  • [[registrations]]
• read about [[p5js]]: https://davidmatthew.ie/p5js-vs-html-canvas/
  • [[pixi]] looks alright
  • [[easel]] seems unmaintained/abandoned
  • I think ‘bare canvas’ might be a better idea for now?
• [[abelard.org]]

2024-03-11

• [[Listened]]: [[Brian Merchant, "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech"]]

• [[Spam]].

  • Our website is experiencing an uptick in spam over the last few days.
  • Incredibly irritating.
  • With comments like 1*if(now()=sysdate(),sleep(15),0).
  • We have Akismet and a honepot enabled. Adding a very noddy manual captcha (e.g. 4+8 = ?) helps. But if it continues, we’ll probably have to enable ReCaptcha. Which I’d prefer to avoid if possible.
  • Seemingly emanating from the same IP address.
  • The host lists an abuse@ address. But when I contact that address, the mailbox is reported as being full.

• [[akshobya]]:
  • #pull [[Akshobhya]]
  • led me to [[dharani]]

2024-03-10

• [[Listened]]: [[The cybernetic jacket]]

  • The left receives threats that [[Jakarta is coming]].
  • A reference to the brutal murder of Communists in Indonesia.

• [[Read]]: [[The Jakarta Method Comes to Latin America (Review)]]

  • The Jakarta Method.
  • CIA involvement in brutally violent suppression of communist societies.

• Read: [[For years, I suspected MI5 interfered in the miners’ strike. The truth was even more shocking than I thought]]

• Great [[Flancia Meet]], then we went to [[Winterthur]] with [[AG]]! Met a [[friend]] there. I enjoyed it a lot.
• Later: [[gyokuro]], [[weed]], writing and coding :)

Suddenly you become [[[[more [[aware]] of the [[nature of existence]]]].

• I read about the [[multiverse]] and [[groups]] again after long — this reminds me that I need to finish reading [[a rosetta stone]] :) I think I will find my paper print or print it again and read it at night.

• Note [[Silverbullet]] is currently journaling at a different path, the Agora should show both in any date-matching nodes.
• [[agora development]]:
  • pull silverbullet editor somewhere in the Agora
    • host silverbullet for people with a docker container + associated git repo (maybe automatically created at git.anagora.org?)
    • write about social hosting :)
  • #pull [[index]] from now-index!
• [[agora discuss]]:
  • write about idea of [[7 ceos]] (e.g. for [[tech corporations]]), [[7 presidents]] (e.g for [[Russia]]).
• write about the nature of existence :)
• [[edit]]
• [[agora development]]:
  • implement URL pulls, it’s been on the todo for quite long! :)
    • this would make [[edit]] work (at least for me, for now) :)
    • this seems to almost work :)
  • look into the bugs that neil reported
    • finding them in [[agora discuss]] led to enjoying that space as usual! :D
• [[what if we became better protopians]]?

2024-03-09

• [[Listened]]: [[The cybernetic jacket]]

  • Ep 4 of [[The Santiago Boys]].
  • [[strike action]] across Chile.
  • And how [[Allende]]‘s government deal with it, with the help of the [[Cybersyn]] team.

• [[Watched]]: [[Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain]]

  • Finished the first episode. Focused on [[Shirebrook]]. The division between strikers and those that crossed the picket line. Still raw.

• [[Concept map]]s seem like something I’d be interested in. A visual way of organising knowledge focusing on the relationships between concepts.

• [[Vulpea]] and [[publicatorg]] look like they might be useful for my [[org-roam]] life.

• #pull beautiful [[international women’s day]]!
• went to the [[dentist]] to get an implant fixed (good progress), worked (brought [[pasteis de nata]]), spent the evening with [[AG]] talking about interesting things :)
• then [[2024-03-09]]

• [[AI]]:
  • I went to an interesting [[AI]] talk and learnt about a few new (to me) services/things that look interesting:
    • [[pikaso]] (a paint-to-image generation tool)
    • [[grok]] (a plushie voiced by [[Grimes]])

2024-03-08

• [[Listened]]: [[Jeremy Hunt’s election budget for big earners and big owners]]

  • [[Spring Statement 2024]].
  • This is a budget for big earners and big owners.
  • It’s not good for public services.

• Don’t think I’ll be able to do a [[new connections]] page.

  • At least not easily.
  • It would require amending org-roam to allow for link annotations.
  • See chat at https://org-roam.discourse.group/t/recording-the-date-that-connections-were-made/3379
  • [[Adding a new connections page to my garden]]

• Listened: [[What if we became better Protopians?]]

  • With Monika Bielskyte.
  • Good discussion, but it seemed more utopian than protopian.
  • Lots of nice things listed for how the future could be. But, not much discussion on how to get there. Even in protopian increments.

• [[Watched]]: [[Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain]]

• In the [[Agora of Flancia]], each node is an [[Agora]] — meaning a fork of the Agora that is centered around the node in question and its [[context]].

2024-03-07

• [[Listened]]: [[Stafford is going mad again]]
  • Ep 3 of [[The Santiago Boys]].

• I listened to [[l. a. paul]] with [[sam harris]].
• [[fellowship of the link]]:
  • [[composer]]

2024-03-06

• [[Listened]]:[[Nvidia: 2 Boom 2 Bust]]

  • [[Nvidia]].
  • Huge leap in value due to [[AI]].
  • [[AI bubble]]?

• Read: [[Oregon Just Struck a Blow to Parts Pairing and Won a Decade of Repair Support]]

• Read: [[What’s the latest on Right to Repair in the EU? And what it means for the UK]]

• Been having fun looking at [[repairability scores]] from the [[French repair index]] as displayed on Amazon.fr.

  • Impressive how prominent they are (being mandated to be placed next to the price).

• [[420 wedding]]

2024-03-05

• Claim: [[The free software movement is an example of neo-Luddism]].

• Claim: [[The right to repair movement is an example of neo-Luddism]].

• Both sound defensible - both movements are clearly not anti-technology, just anti the political economy of how software and hardware are controlled and commodified to the detriment of society.

• US PIRG has a short report on what it considers to be the best laptop brands for repairability.

  • [[US PIRG’s best laptop brands for repairability]].

• [[Listened]]: [[Nvidia: 2 Boom 2 Bust]]

• [[4]]: the [[Four Noble Truths]] and [[Sariputta]]
• I read previously, but now I’m noding just in case, 10 [[design principles for governing the commons]].

2024-03-04

• Nice to see a mention of the [[Austrian Repair Bonus voucher scheme in National Geographic Kids]].

  • Plus we ([[The Restart Project]]) get a shoutout :)

• Read: [[A political ecology of the repair manual]]

  • A lovely-looking political and philosophical ode to the [[repair manual]] by Shannon Mattern.
  • Ive only skim read it for now. But check out some of the historical and hand-drawn manuals.
  • Like with [[The Maintainers]], there’s also the expansion of the concept of repair and maintenance to the wider social context.

• [[iFixit and Lenovo]].

• [[Listened]]: [[Hotel Bar Sessions: Breaking Things at Work (with Gavin Mueller)]]

  • What could technology created under a different value system look like?
  • He gives [[right to repair]] as another example of neo-Luddism.
  • Right on. With that and free software, I seem to fit the description.

• Apparently there was some sort of controversy about a site called [[content nation]] in the Fediverse, and people from [[Mastodon]] came across as conservative/resistant to change/unfriendly to newcomers. I am not surprised.
  • Good thing is I found [[wedistribute]] via the article linked in the node above, and I think I’m liking this site and maybe particularly a podcast they have called [[decentered]].
• I read about [[Jim Simons]] and the [[Medallion fund]] after watching [[Veritasium]]‘s [[The Trillion Dollar Equation]].
• I read about [[Jizo]] a.k.a. [[Ksitigarbha]], which I now associate with number [[6]] (as he vowed to liberate beings in all six Buddhist realms).

2024-03-03

• How do you socialise something that has been privatised?

  • i.e. how do you enact [[deprivatisation]].

• Watched: [[Avengers: Age of Ultron]]

• Listened: [[Hotel Bar Sessions: Breaking Things at Work (with Gavin Mueller)]]

  • [[Luddism]].
  • Claim: Free software movement was a form of Luddism.
  • Great example. Hackers were clearly not anti-technology, they were concerned about the enclosure of technology for capitalism.

2024-03-02

• A ‘trick’ I use when I have some issue with a particular file in my [[org-publish]] pipeline on my remote server.

  • In org-publish-project-alist, set :base-extension "foo".
    • By default it is "org", looking at all files with org extension.
    • By setting it to foo, the publish process won’t find any files. Except..
  • Set up :include to include the file that’s got the issue.
    • e.g. :include ("file-with-a-problem.org")
  • There’s probably a better way of doing it than this, but it gets me by for now.

• Nice, I replaced a cl-loop with a mapconcat in some of my output formatting, e.g. in [[Well-connected]]. mapconcat feels a bit more functional style, and it also gets rid of the superfluous parentheses I had in the output.

• I might try and add [[Pagefind]] to my published garden.

• Trying [[fish]] out on desktop.

  • While on mobile I found them incredibly helpful, I actually find it all of the autosuggestions a bit distracting at first.
  • I’ll see how it pans out.

• Watched: [[Guardians of the Galaxy]]

• [[ec]]: "Yo adelgacé mucho gracias al vino rosado."
• #push [[Maitreya]]
  • I created a "[[GPT]]" (sigh, I get what they’re going for with the name though :)) called [[Maitreya]]. Some example prompts are in [[Maitreya AI]].

2024-03-01

• Listened: [[How the World Became Uninsurable]]

  • Insurance sector has had huge losses four years in a row.
  • Due to the general ongoing collapse of the world.
  • They are hiking insurance premiums as a result.
  • Claim: [[We need to eliminate the private insurance sector]].
  • Also bit of a chat about [[neo-Luddism]] too.

• I’ve been enjoying [[using Python in org]].

  • Workbook style.
  • Kind of literate programming/thinking/prototyping.
  • A couple of times I get to a point where it makes more sense to put figures in a spreadsheet.
  • But spiking it out in Python is way more interesting for me.

• Read: [[Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?]]

  • [[Neofeudalism]].

2024-02-29

• I am [[using Python in org]] for a few little things.

2024-02-28

2024-02-27

• Listened: [[Capitalist Manufacturing // Manufacturing Communism – Part 1 (ft. Nick Chavez)]]

  • On the need for an understanding of production in order to harness it for communism.
  • That is - how do we actually manufacture things?
  • Listened: [[The socialist spoon]]
    • Ep 2 of [[The Santiago Boys]].
    • Coup in Brazil supported by US.
    • US trying to foment the same against Allende.
    • Setting up of cybersyn and the war room.
    • ITT.

• I listened to [[David Edmons]] and [[Sam Harris]] on [[Derek Parfit]], found it highly interesting.
  • I also finished listening to the podcast with [[Peter Singer]], it was great.

2024-02-26

• [[The Web of Death (ft. Tamara Kneese)]]

  • Also brings to mind the show [[Upload]].
  • And of course [[Black Mirror]].

• [[Work Notes 2024-02-26]]

• ‘Dear Data Subject’ and other great ways to start an email.

  • [[Matomo]].
  • They mention that they are now using a [[data broker]] for "customer and prospect data enrichment".
    • "We process this personal data on the basis of legitimate interest. Without the information we will not be able to customise our communications with you to best meet your needs".
    • I find the wording a bit weaselly to be honest. Better would be "We want this information so we can more likely retain and get new customers". Fine - just be honest about it.
    • You can opt-out. Not opt-in?

• Using Python in org, I was getting: [[Importmagic and/or epc not found]].

2024-02-25

• Listened: [[The Web of Death (ft. Tamara Kneese)]]

  • Digital decay
  • Digital memorials
  • Makes me think of the film [[Coco]]…
  • Transhumanists

• magit doesnt work properly for me in [[termux]] for some reason. I can stage but I cant commit.

  • No biggie as I just git from the terminal instead. But still, would be good to get to the bottom of it.

• Had a quick play with [[Surfacing notes in my garden that have no claims]] using [[Metabase]].

  • Easy enough to do. But has the downside for me at the moment that it’s only accessible on my laptop, which I’m not often using at the moment outside of work.
  • [[Knowledge commoning]].

• Soon :)
• I’m liking [[beeper]] a lot, here’s my [[beeper]] (which is [[matrix]]): https://matrix.to/#/@flancian:beeper.com
• I [[cried]].
  • A [[relative]] send [[30 year old videos]] my way and it was quite an experience to watch them!
  • It felt like relief in some way.
• [[Flancia]]
  • [[Flancia meet]]: at https://meet.evolix.org/flancia
• Read about [[Ahriman]] and [[Zoroastrianism]].
• Trying to figure out how to make [[silverbullet]]:
  • Easily create daily pages for me.
    • For now I need to go to another page and link the current date; or just create a page with the date as its name manually. [[Suboptimal]], although not terrible.
    • Update: it seems the [[Template]] [[plug]] is the way to go: https://silverbullet.md/Plugs/Template
      • Quote: The {[Open Daily Note]} command navigates (or creates) a daily note .
  • Let me navigate to the previous page.
    • This is easy actually, just alt-left as per browser conventions.
  • Now reading about [[plugs]]

2024-02-24

• [[AI]]

• Listened: [[The Web of Death (ft. Tamara Kneese)]]

  • Various topics related to tech and death.
  • Digital estates. What do you do with people’s digital life when they die?
  • Dead labour. Extracting value from people event after they’re dead.

• Customising some key bindings would make one-handed phone tending my garden in Emacs in termux easier.

  • Let’s have a look how best to do that…

• Read: [[AI deepfakes come of age as billions prepare to vote in a bumper year of elections]]

  • Bloody tech bros building their shit without any democratic process or thinking through the repercussions.

• Did I tell you I love [[silverbullet]]? :)
  • https://silverbullet.md
  • [[agora development]]:
    • I want to [[embed]] it in the [[Agora]] as [[default editor]].
    • I would love to contribute [[plugs]] to it.
• I remembered [[Chungking Express]].
• Started the day beautifully with [[AG]].
• [[Work]] was alright really!
  • Thinking about [[Zooglers]].
  • Thinking about [[Democracy]].
• [[yoga with x]]

2024-02-23

• [[Listened]]: [[TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 2]]

  • [[Mute Compulsion]] chapter 2.
  • [[Power]] and [[Marxism]].
  • [[Historical materialism]].
  • Violence and the state.
  • [[Hegemony]], [[ideology]].
  • First, there was too much focus on violence and the state. Then, pendulum swing to ideology and hegemony.
  • Both necessary, but missing out economic power.
  • Mau pulls in his team - Marxist feminists, Marxist ecologists, and labour theory types.

• Trying out [[fish]] shell on [[termux]] to make command line life a little easier on the phone.

  • Loving it so far. Makes me wonder why I’m still using bash on desktop.
  • For reference: [[My fish in termux setup]].

• [[flancian@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@flancian/111982933447532073 pull

• [[2024-02-23 21:32:40+00:00]] @[[flancian@social.coop]] (link):
  • Back here on [[2024-02-23]]: the transition goes so-so, I use the main https://social.coop interface a lot as I’m part of the admin group and I need to e.g. help keep it up to date.But I still enjoy [[Elk]] ;)

2024-02-22

• [[Listened]]: [[TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 1]]
  • [[Power]]. [[Capital]].

2024-02-21

• Regarding [[Surfacing notes in my garden that have no claims]], it’d be good to also surface claims that have no supporting evidence linked to them.

• Second day using [[silver bullet]], enjoying it a lot!
  • I like how I was able to specify a full path for a new page, in this case journal/2024-02-20, and it just worked (tm).
  • I also like the [[autocompletion]] for links it has; it is better than [[wiki vim]]‘s (which, granted, maybe I didn’t really get the hang of) and [[logseq]]‘s (faster).
• [[work]] was tough given that I’m still not fully recovered from flu/virus and there are some interpersonal issues that take energy to deal with, but also satisfying as I did manage to get some things done.
  • Also my team is really great, every time I go back to team-specific tasks it feels like a breath of fresh air!
• Talked to [[Berni]] and it was great.
• [[AG]] did a surprise certification today after work, impressive :)

2024-02-20

• For reference: [[My orgzly searches]].

• [[Pulling out useful information from Gravity Forms entry meta]]

• [[Surfacing notes in my garden that have no claims]]

• [[Silverbullet]] doesn’t follow the convention of using journal/ for journals; and I wonder if that’s not actually quite reasonable. Why wouldn’t an ISO-formatted-date node be enough? That’s what the [[Agora]] parses as journals ;)
• Honestly I’m maybe fine moving to journal-dir-less but I’d like to find a shortcut to ‘go/create today’s note’. I haven’t found this in menus yet.
• [[heart sutra]]

• [[work]]:
  • [[ER-CH]]
  • [[Open Letter to Z]]:
    • Advanced communications to all [[Zooglers]] incrementally.
    • [[Open Letter to Zooglers]]
• [[Open Letter to M]]:
  • [[Open Letter to Moloch]]
• Tried [[silverbullet]] finally and I like it!
  • Running it with [[docker]] and in [[vim mode]] :D 🥰
  • I noded on [[202-02-19]] without the journal/ prefix from there a bit earlier.
  • I need to figure out a few more things, like how to create journal nodes easily, and then it would seem like I’m set
  • It’s looking like it could be embedded in the [[Agora of Flancia]] as default editor for [[managed gardens]]!
  • Posted to [[Agora channels]] about it.
• Felt sick all day, including stomach pain — is this what they call a [[stomach flu]]? :)
  • Felt better stomach wise around the time I finished work (from home), but developed a fever — not terrible though, 37.2 with clear body feelings of flu
  • Trying to rest/play tonight.
• [[@neil]] told me earlier in the week about [[pattern]] by [[gordon brander]]: https://gordonbrander.com/pattern/, looking forward to reading it.
  • also about the [[neil experiments]] with [[connections]]:

    • I’ve played with them on my site here - https://commonplace.doubleloop.net/well-connected and https://commonplace.doubleloop.net/new-connections

  • I agree experimenting more with interesting connections is promising also in [[Agora contexts]].
• [[Ivo]] told me about [[link and think]].
• I’m trying to install [[return to monkey island]] on [[nostromo]], which is Linux (I previously played it on my Windows gaming machine). Hope it works!

2024-02-19

• [[Listened]]: [[The Art and Science of Communism, Part 1 (ft. Nick Chavez, Phil Neel)]]

  • More good stuff.
  • Description of working in some distribution warehouse was pretty wild.
  • They dislike [[The Ministry for the Future]].

• Read: [[Mute Compulsion]]

  • After recommendation in [[Forest and Factory]], and [[Jathan Sadowski]] raving about it.
  • In addition to coercion ([[violence]]) and consent ([[ideology]]), there is the mute compulsion of [[economic power]].

• Listened: [[TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Introduction]]

  • Very handy chat about [[Mute Compulsion]].

• [[Social reproduction]].

2024-02-18

• Read: [[Forest and Factory]]

  • Finished it.
  • Good stuff. Provocative.
  • The suggestion to focus on hard science fiction for our utopias seems a good one.
  • Though I don’t know if their piece really does that.
  • They just combine a focus on production with handwaving, rather than reproduction with handwaving.
  • Their salient point is really that we’ve stopped thinking about production, which I think is a good one.
  • Also lots of nuggets of wisdom in the footnotes to be mined.

• Listened: [[The Art and Science of Communism, Part 1 (ft. Nick Chavez, Phil Neel)]]

  • Great discussion. Based around [[Forest and Factory]]. Loads of good stuff.
  • Their insistence on starting from present conditions and working towards for me thinking about [[complex systems]] and [[chaos theory]], [[sensitive dependence on initial conditions]] in particular. Is it logical to try and completely map the present to then try and cause the future? Maybe.
  • Maybe an alternative is the utopian way of doing it. Think of elements of your desired future as attractors of sorts, then focus on how your can leverage the path of history towards those. Maybe that’s a combination of both. It obviously can’t hurt to know the present conditions, but to then assume you can trace a clear path from now to the future seems wrong.
  • Yeah I think you need both. A clear understanding of present conditions. A clear idea of how you want society to function - your attractors. And then you nudge it from A to B, making use of [[shocks]], [[leverage points]], etc.
  • They make the point that a lot of utopias focus on reproduction rather than production. (Superstructure rather than base?).

• #push [[spas]]
  • [[solbad]] near [[schönbühl]] near [[bern]] looks nice for a special day: https://www.aqua-spa-resorts.ch/en/solbad-spa-schonbuhl/about-solbad-spa
• #push [[charles darwin]]
  • https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/11/charles-darwin-entire-personal-library-revealed-first-time
• #push [[canary islands]]
  • https://www.science.org/content/article/humans-survive-alone-1000-years-desert-islands-off-africa
• [[live]]
• back to [[hypergraph categories]] after loooong :) https://via.hypothes.is/https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.08304.pdf
  • …which reminds me I wanted to finish that other category theory paper, [[a rosetta stone]] ;)
• [[future of knowledge]]

2024-02-17

• Read: [[Talking to My Daughter About the Economy]]

  • Finished it. Enjoyed it. Would recommend.
  • Need to go back and note it up a bit.

• Read: [[Theories of International Politics and Zombies]]

  • "How international relations theory can be applied to a zombie invasion"
  • Fun.
  • I remember some of [[Robert Biel]]‘s articles saying how [[international relations]] was a field that applied systems theory to politics, so was looking for something that is a bit of an easy primer - this seems like it!

• [[Shower thought]].

  • I want to make sure that I document at least the top two or three salient claims from every book and article that I read.
  • Otherwise it seems like wasted effort.
  • I’ll tag book files such that I can run a query that pulls out those that I’ve read but have no associated claims.
  • To do so will be a positive act of [[knowledge commoning]].

• On good days like today I often find myself [[vacuuming]], [[watering the plants]], [[writing]], [[booking meetings]].
  • I find myself [[playing]]!
• [[16]] stands for [[Right Mindfulness]] in the [[pattern]] language I’m working on :)

2024-02-16

• Read: [[Talking to My Daughter About the Economy]]

  • Nearly finished it now.
  • Very good all in all. Very readable intro to some economics concepts, in particular through a critical lens of capitalism.
  • Very easy to read. (As such not the most rigourous analysis, but thats fine)
  • Interesting to note he uses ‘experiential’ value rather than use value.
  • His brief suggestion of a solution to capitalism is that we need more democracy rather than more markets.
    • In ownership of the means of production and in control over how we treat the environment.

• Read: [[Forest and Factory]]

  • Deep dive into the logistics of production of motors.
  • Interesting, but still not convinced that this constitutes a scientific account of transition, in the language of their own critique.

• How repairable is a [[Vision Pro]]?

  • "…you’ve more chance of walking to Venus than getting the Apple Vision Pro repaired if you damage it." – Why Vision Pro is a repair nightmare | TechFinitive

• I’d like to add a ‘[[New connections]]‘ page to my garden.

  • [[Adding a new connections page to my garden]].

• [[Flancian]] told me about [[Orgzly Revived]].

  • This is very good news to me.

• [[eduardo carlas sala]]
• [[josé rené ivanec]]

2024-02-15

• Read: [[The high cost of Uber’s small profit]]

2024-02-14

• Volunteer at [[Ulverston Repair Cafe]] for the first time in a few months.
  • [[Ulverston Repair Cafe, February 2024]]