Innovation is overrated. "Maintenance and repair, the building of infrastructures, the mundane labour that goes into sustaining functioning and efficient infrastructures, simply has more impact on people’s daily lives than the vast majority of technological innovations." https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more
Month: September 2017
Welcome to the freedoms of capitalism, where you have to fight for the right to maintain the lifespan of your own belongings. https://www.economist.com/news/business/21729744-tractors-smartphones-mending-things-getting-ever-harder-right-repair-movement
I think what I like about notifications of app updates from F-Droid is that, behind that little notification is a whole cycle of ideas, discussion, coding, building, testing, packaging, releasing. It’s a little reminder that a whole bunch of open source just took place somewhere.
The best way to change a bad system is to build a better one. Really cool to hear Pia Mancini talk about liquid democracy and Open Collective. https://hanselminutes.com/592/pia-mancini-explains-liquid-democracy-and-the-open-collective
Labour abuses in smartphone manufacture. Interview with Jack Qiu, author of ‘Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition’. https://therestartproject.org/podcast/islave
Is it wrong to be excited by notifications from F-Droid about app updates? Asking for a friend.
For those awesome moments when your fonts mess up and the text in your terminal and GUI disappear in Unity. Super -> Tweak -> select Unity Tweak Tool -> Text Scaling Factor -> +
I’d like to make an Anki flashcards deck for helping learn/memorise some of the topics around open cooperatives. You can build Anki decks from a CSV file. So if we had an EtherCalc sheet on it, we could co-create it. Good idea? Who’s in? And who can provide an EtherCalc grain on sandstorm?
Freedom means freedom over time as well. Any open source offering that uses a file format that can’t be viewed and edited from a 10 year old device in one way or another, or that will be unreadable 10 years from now, is badly designed in my opinion.
I’d like to have a set of BDD-style specifications of what are important functions of modern apps – like specs and user stories of Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Instagram, what have you – that document what these things do and why people want that. Then we fulfil these features piece by piece in a way that is open and free.