Kind: Notes

Catching up with my good friend Ben from EASy, and really interesting to learn there was a stream at the most recent ALIFE conference on the socio-technical aspects of alife. The practical and societal applications always interested me so it’s great to see it’s a current of thought in the field.
Seems like there’s quite a lot of crossover between the doughnut diagram and the sustainable development goals. Or at least I recall quite a few of the planetary boundaries and social foundations being discussed in the sustainable development MOOC I did a while back.
Arriving in Newcastle on a Saturday night you learn that it’s a destination for a lot of stag dos and hen nights.

Looking forward to getting out today on the quayside and seeing the Tyne and the bridges and some of the cultural quarter.

Been watching The Big Life Fix recently. I like the premise – using design and technology to help solve problems for people – usually physical so far in the series. I find it a bit hokey sometimes in the way it’s produced, they try to make dramatic tension more than needed I think.  The human side is really interesting, but I think they could just focus on one challenge per episode, and include more info on the technical challenges and solutions. It’d also be cool if they presented it more of a collaboration than the kind of ‘star’ designer way it is now. That said, it’s uplifting to see tech being used for positive human purposes.

I liked the recent hack for the chap who is deaf, to help him follow group conversations. I think a Raspberry Pi and an Amazon Dot were involved.

Listening to the episode on economics. Starts off making the same point as Kate Raworth in Doughnut Economics, that the majority of economics education focuses only on one very narrow view of economics (neo-classical).
Listened to Owls at Dawn episode on the accelerationist manifesto. Good stuff. Good discussion of how the left should organise, horizontal vs vertical, how the left should use tech.  But with a bit more philosophical chat, for example what do they even mean by tech?

Also a bit on what they actually mean by accelerate, as that’s kind of an overloaded term now.

A mix of both horizontal and vertical seems like a sensible conclusion. I keep in mind Kevin Carson’s rebuttal to Inventing the Future though, maintaining that they straw man folk politics.

If you work with PHP, and are looking for an MVC framework, I would very highly recommend Laravel.  I came from a background working with ASP.NET MVC, and if anything I am finding Laravel more enjoyable to use.  I much prefer C# to PHP as a language, but for some reason I find Laravel incredibly feature-complete and easier to use right out of the box.  The wider ecosystem is great too – for example, we needed some auditing functionality, and lo and behold, there’s a FOSS auditing library that does 99% of what we need already.

I know that in PHP land there is something of a Symfony vs Laravel debate.  From my peruse of the discussion on that, Symfony could be seen as a more rigid and principled framework, while Laravel allows you a little more flex.  In our case this made sense, as we were migrating from a bespoke MVC framework, so a little bit of flexibility helped us reuse a lot of the existing code.