Kind: Notes

• Patient privacy fears as US spy tech firm Palantir wins £330m NHS contract | …
  • Absolutely gutted by this. Despite all the campaigning by Foxglove and Just Treatment, fucking Palantir still awarded the contract with the NHS.
  • Makes me sick. This is not the kind of organisation our health service should be in partnership with.

• Listened: Hotel Bar Sessions: Revolutionary Mathematics
  • So far, discussing frequentism and Bayesianism schools of thought in probability.

• When I’m working, I don’t log a lot in the journal, I noticed.
  • So experimenting with logging thoughts on work activities.
  • Not much detail on specifics, more reflections on activities and process.
  • I quite enjoy it so far. Useful to reflect.

Today at work I:

• Did the usual inbox trawls and day planning.
  • Day planning I do with org-mode, org-agenda and org-timeline.
• Prepped for the meetings for the day.
  • Mostly with mindmaps.
• Did some strategic planning for next year.
  • Mindmaps and freeform writing.
• Some rote work
  • processing incoming applications for things, updating website accordingly
  • always good to think with this stuff how processes could be streamlined
• Minor website content change.
  • Minor change, but thinking about the UX of it is always interesting.
  • And how it affects client agreements/expectations, too.
• Planning and assigning work for my team.
  • Bit of mindmapping combined with going through Jira.
• Reviewing new features.
  • Code and functionality. Code review is in Github.
  • Testing I tend to build the feature branch locally.
• Meetings.
  • Sometimes I jot things down on mindmap.
  • Somethings I record things straight into knowledge base.
  • Sometimes I log things straight into org as TODOs.
  • It’s a bit haphazard to he honest. Could be improved.
• Emailing external partners.
  • Always interesting the amount of work that goes into crafting an email to get across all the nuances of your position on something.
• Distracting myself with Slack threads not really related to what I’m doing.

• At work today I:
  • Trawled through inboxes after a week away.
  • Reviewed some code (Laravel/Vue).
  • Tested some functionality changes.
  • Made a little tweak to a WordPress component, with a lot of yak shaving to get my local environment up to speed.
  • Thought about UX of a couple of things.
  • Other general bits and bobs.

• We had another play of Space Cats Fight Fascism today.
  • Love these Tesa Collective games.
• We spend a not insignificant chunk of our lives just on the upkeep of our household.
  • If was a system, how would you describe it?
  • What are the stocks and flows? What are the processes? What system archetypes does it exhibit and what are the leverage points to make it function better?
  • I feel like it has a few many inputs and a blockage at the output which mean it gets easily cluttered.

• Been enjoying Superstore of late.
  • Often very funny. And also plenty of digs at corporate anti-worker practices and the tactics of worker exploitation. The staff attempt unionisation. ICE detains an undocumented worker. etc.
• We played the Rise Up board game tonight.
  • You work cooperatively as part of a movement to fight the system.
  • A lot of fun. I like the fact that they include a storytelling element to it – certain cards get you to think of an accompanying story to the system.

• Think I might play with annotating items in my garden in a more relational way.
  • So rather than objects with properties, more like things in relationship to each other.
  • e.g. rather than annotating a podcast with a ‘Series’ attribute, call it ‘Part of’. Let the entity at the other end of the link tell you what it is.
  • i.e. try a more relational ontology.
  • I don’t think this will have much practical technical benefit – it is more of a way of exploring a relational mindset. Ontology informs polity.

• Listened: WCV S2: Keir Milburn “Glorious Variation in the Global Working Class”
• Been enjoying the Working Class Voices series from GND Media.
  • Good reflections on how the environmental movement involves the working class (and also how alienates it). Main point being – it has to, one way or another, as the working class is the largest class.
  • A point that resonated with me is that community organising is a good intersection point, as it’s one way to clearly positively connect environment and cost of living.
  • Ecosocialism is another intersection.
• Digging Until Here for Years by Proem right now.
• Listened: WCV2 NY Communities for change “Let’s not replace Oil Barons’ with Solar Barons'”
  • Lots of thought provoking chat here, hanging off the recent End Fossil Fuels actions in New York.
  • Good chat on the topic of engagement of working class and how a lot of environmental activism can be off-putting.
• Listened: Hotel Bar Sessions: The Stories We Tell
  • Really fun discussion on documentary and narrative.
  • Makes me think a little about Evgeny Morozov’s comments on how he pivoted to strong narrative on The Santiago Boys

 

• Listened: WCV2: Duncan Exley “Working class campaigners want to change things”
• Listened: WCV2 NY Communities for change “Let’s not replace Oil Barons’ with Solar Barons'”

 

• Fun, busy Repair Cafe tonight.
  • I saw three things – didn’t actually fix anything, but did some good diagnosis on them.
  • CD player. Turns out the whole model had a problem that Sony offered to fix for free – until 2021.
  • Laptop. Asus Vivobook with red power light and blue processing light stuck on permanently, but no signs of life otherwise.
  • Android Phone (trying to pair to Windows laptop). Coming up with Couldn’t Connect message on the phone. But my phone could pair to the laptop. Their phone could pair to my laptop. Phone paired successfully on Linux booted from USB. So not a hardware problem – something wrong on Windows 10. Ran out of time, but they’ll try to upgrade to Windows 11 and see what happens.
• Listened: WCV S2: We’ve run with it like a dog with a burst ball
  • Great interview. Touches on how local community organising can be the way to get working class communities involved in climate related issues. Where the intersection is people, planet and pocket.

• Enjoying the This Machine Kills podcast.
  • All the episodes I’ve listened to have been excellent discussions on socialism and digital technologies so far.
• Having another attempt at getting RSS feed publishing working for commonplace. This time without trying to use a tempdir, caused too many problems last time.
• Listened: Kill the Ecomodernist in Your Head
• Listened: No King But Ludd (ft. Brian Merchant)
  • Blood in the Machine definitely sounds worth a read.
• org-roam on the mobile with Termux is going well. Using it regularly.
• Going to start posting my daily journal/log in the stream as well. So it’s a bit more discoverable/subscribeable.
• Been reading through Doughnut Economics again. Appreciating the chapter on systems thinking.
• Hugo Blanco passed away.
• Watching Captain Fantastic. A lot of fun. Points out the problems of American (Western) society. Is what they have in the woods any better though?

• Listened: The Mythology of Cybersyn (ft. Evgeny Morozov).
  • Finished it off. Such an interesting discussion.