Author: Neil Mather

• 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)

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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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but I have some pretty old pages knocking around now and I’d like people to be aware that they might be outdated.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.

• 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.

• 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.