Crank.report Survey

Currently reading: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚and it generating copious notes on the things — economic theory! — I want to learn more about.

Yes, please

People will use AI for everything from parole processing to granting mortgages, from marking middle-school tests to spotting thieves (or trying to) in shopping malls. But we’ll also use it for optimising wind turbine blades and laying out cycle lanes. Some of those have ethics issues, or bias issues, and some of them have scope to screw up and kill people, but they’re all different problems, with different questions and consequences and different kinds of expertise.

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I’ve been sharpening my thinking about the necessary conditions to do good work, and how to achieve them. Here’s a window into how I’m thinking about these ideas across three dimensions: Organizational Context, Team Leadership, and Technology Trends.

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That’s because possibility is the art of being willing to be wrong. It’s exploration. It’s far easier to explore on foot than it is on a high-speed train.

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Finished reading: The Wager by David Grann 📚like ship adventure tales? This is a good one.

I love these kinds of lists.

For example, it’s hard to write long and prolifically without cringing at the memory of some of your own work. After all, if the point of writing is to clarify your thinking and improve your understanding, then, by definition, your older work will be more muddled.

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One of my favorite quips from the very quotable Riley Quinn is that “leftists are cursed with object-permanence” – that is, we actually remember what just happened and use it to think about what’s happening now. The Memex Method is object permanence for 20+ years worth of stuff. A lot of those deep archives never see use, but there’s a surprising number of leading indicators buried in the stuff that happened in years gone by.

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I don’t write the marmot to get attention. I write the marmot to “see what I think.”

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#Area #Blogging

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Breakfast bowl: a smidge of leftover turkey meatloaf, the last of some mushrooms, cabbage that had been sliced for tacos all sautéed together and a sunny side up egg on top.

It’s tempting to imagine we have less power than we do. It lets us off the hook. For now.

#Area #Commonplace

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I’d prefer to think of it as a manifesto for diversity of communications, the freedom to share your knowledge and lived experiences on your own terms, and maintaining the independence of freedom of expression from business interests.

#Area #IndieWeb

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I think the headline says it all.

Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web. Worse still, we’ve outsourced our discovery to corporate algorithms.

#Area #Web

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Here are the books I finished reading in 2023.or at least the ones I kept track of. I can see I did t do a very good job of recording g everything.

Here’s how my imaginary program would work. There would be a pot of money at the center of it, managed by a foundation or an endowment of some kind, that would be ring-fenced to support software in the public interest. There would be no expectation that these projects would be self-sustaining: the fund would pay for them.

#Area #FOSS #Funding

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I love this idea for marking a birthday.

And I love this first wish:

I wish the form of media was fully separate from its content.

#Area #Media

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The idea of NFTs can be solid if put into practice purely on the technological aspects of what they can provide. NFTs for archiving data and records, intellectual property, concert tickets, certifications and so forth do have a potential value.

#Area #DWeb #NFTs

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