I find this little nugget fascinating:
The history of passports – which were introduced as a seemingly temporary measure during the first world war, but were retained in response to fears about spreading the Spanish flu – shows that pandemics can significantly influence our social infrastructure.
– Privacy is not the problem with the Apple-Google contact-tracing toolkit
The temporary becomes the norm.
Reading Hello World at the moment. Subtitled “being human in the age of algorithms”.
It’s good so far. Clear and making its point well, drawing on plenty of examples of the problems with some present uses of decision-making algorithms. It’s being framed as ‘dilemmas’, so, the idea that there’s good as well as bad in what’s going on.
I wonder what the overall thesis will be though. Will there be some call to action as to what needs to be done? Or will it just be left that there is good and bad, and we need to be aware of that. Hoping for the former, something with some teeth.
Facebook will make some changes around its policy on hateful content, but only from the threat of lost ad revenue. Not from actually caring about the victims of it.
“Let’s be honest,” said Moghal, “these tech platforms have generated income and interest from this divisive content; they won’t change their practices until they begin to see a significant cut to their revenue.”
Sucks that only big companies pulling out can have an effect on FB. But props to Stop Hate for Profit for putting pressure on companies.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/29/how-hate-speech-campaigners-found-facebooks-weak-spot (thanks Ellie for the link!)
I’m curious how people feel about comments and interaction? And also interactivity between digital gardens in general (like paths connecting the parks of a city? :)).
Chris has talked enthusiastically about interlinking wikis before (e.g. during the Gardens and Streams IndieWeb session), so I’m sure there’s something to it. For me, I think because I already get the interactivity goodness on my stream and my articles, it’s something I haven’t generally been that interested in for my wiki notes thus far.
Stian has some use cases for which he would like the interactivity:
I know comments have gotten a bad rep on the internet, attracting spam or trolls etc, but on the other hand I feel really frustrated when I can’t leave comments on Andy Matuschak’s notes…
I think Webmentions would work well here. You would write a comment as a post on your own site, and then this will notify Andy. He can choose to do whatever he wants with this comment (display the comment, display it as a backlink, ignore it completely, not display it at all, if he prefers). This way you can write a comment on whatever you want and the receiver chooses what to do with it.
Or another example – I just looked at Salman’s site about Deliberate rest (https://notes.salman.io/deliberate-rest), and thought that I just took some notes about attention restoration therapy from Deep Work – https://notes.reganmian.net/deep-work… Of course I could tell him here (I am :)) but that “doesn’t scale”…
Webmentions would work for this too – as just a simple ‘mention’, not necessarily a comment. Salman would be notified automatically that your note references his note. Salman could choose to display it as a backlink, if he liked.
Short-term, I am looking at adding at least page-level comments to my blog, using a Gatsby plugin and probably externally hosted comments.
Adding webmention support to receive comments could work here.
Also interested in experimenting with annotations, for example embedding Hypothes.is directly in the pages…
Kartik Prabhu has a nice article about receiving annotations on his posts via webmentions.
Long-term, I’m interesting in thinking about more structured ways of interlinking digital gardens – whether it looks more like interwiki links, blog backlinks, or something else, I’m not sure. I have some notes I’ll publish once I organize them a bit more.
I can definitely see the appeal of backlinks between wikis, but only in an abstract sense at the moment.
The utility is in the networked thought. I guess for me it comes down to whether I see the utility in all of this connectivity on specifically my evergreen notes, as opposed to my stream posts.
Finished Ctrl+S. It was a page turner, no doubt. Very visual, almost more a script for a film than a novel. It’s a fast-paced adventure story with a bit of a detective/whodunnit edge.
Not particularly nuanced or thought-provoking. Cliched, but good fun. The written equivalent of watching a blockbuster, I guess.
Set in a near future, where people ‘ascend’ to a virtual reality world built on quantum computers called SPACE. For many it’s a way of escaping from a dreary actual reality.
There’s a race of artificial life creatures called Slif who have evolved within SPACE.
It’s a bit gruesome in places, with this idea of harvesting and then recreating emotions from others.
I have been doing a lot of metacognition, AKA “thinking about thinking”, AKA banging on about personal wikis, lately.
I have really enjoyed reflecting on my wiki setup and how I can use it to learn and to create things. I also love a good bit of tinkering, so it’s been a lot of fun playing with org-roam and hacking on it a bit.
I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress with my tools for thought. About 2 years ago I felt like I wanted to produce more and consume less, but struggled to find a rhythm with it, perhaps partly friction in the tools, but also just not confident that I had anything useful to say. Now I’m feeling at a place where I am very well set to seek, sense and share on the things I am interested in.
So I’m feeling a hankering to get learning and writing about other things. The adventures in mental omphaloskepsis (navel-gazing, thanks Wikipedia) probably won’t stop, because I’m enjoying that immensely, but I feel like applying some of the fruits of the current deep-dive.
Plus, we are going through likely the defining moment of our generation, and the societal, political, economic (and likely technological) ramifications of this current point of history are likely to be pretty huge. Can’t not think about that.
While it wasn’t conscious or deliberate, I noticed that I have been avoiding much of the bigger picture discussion around coronavirus – just following enough to know what is and isn’t safe to do for me and those close to me. Interestingly, in A Text Renaissance Venkatesh Rao talks about some of these tools as being for extended universe building and escaped reality construction. Perhaps this metacognitive rabbit hole has been a subconscious way of diverting myself from what’s actually going on.
I don’t feel I have a particular burning thesis I want to share with the world right now. But I’ll try to return a bit more to writing about the various topics in my strapline (technology, politics, nature, culture) again.
Quick followup to yesterday’s article about my wiki graph.
As I mentioned there, I’m not (yet) convinced of their utility as sensemaking aids, and the one I have certainly needs refinement.
Despite that, after playing around for a day, it has had some other benefits.
Firstly, soon after I published it, Panda emailed me with a note that he had seen both Jane Jacobs and the Paris Commune on my graph, highlighting a shared interest in these. He shared two great resources with me off the back of that.
Second, by browsing around it I’ve discovered things I’d forgotten were in there (and its only 6 months old…). This is perhaps an another angle to the ‘on this day’ feature various sites and individuals use, where you get reminded of things you posted about in the past.
Third, like I said, I noticed a few orphan pages, as well as pages that I knew now should link to something else, I just hadn’t done so when I first wrote it.
So I would say the graph so far appears to have potential as a discovery aid, for myself and maybe for others too, as well as a good gardening aid.
Ton made a post recently about federated bookshelves, sparked by a post from Tom. It’s an idea that Gregor has done a good bit of thinking about from an IndieWeb perspective.
Book recommendations is something I’m always interested in. At base, all it needs is a feed you can follow just of what people have been reading. I’ve set up a channel in my social reader called ‘Good Reads’, and subscribed to Ton’s list of books, as the sci-fi focus looks right up my street. If anyone else has a feed of read books, let me know!
I am keeping my own list of books I’ve read in my wiki – sadly not marked up in any useful way at present – something for me to do there.
A recent discovery for me near my new home town is The Cragg – a mini-peak nestled in the outskirts of the Forest of Bowland.
It’s a short (hilly!) bike ride from my home in Lancaster.
Right now, the journey there has a lot of lapwings in the fields, with their distinctive calls, and fields full of sheep, lambs, and cows.
From The Cragg you get a close up view over towards a small hilltop windfarm of seven turbines. I love to watch them.
And it has absolutely stunning vistas – you can see the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District, and Morecambe Bay. You’re accompanied pretty much all of the way by Clougha Pike.
I feel very lucky to have it so close by, especially right now.