journal Archives - Page 3 of 12

2024-04-09

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.