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Replied to Een commonplace book vind ik best lastig by Frank Meeuwsen

Een van mijn wensen die ik met dit blog heb, is om er meer een commonplace book van te maken. Een digitale plek waar ik halve gedachten kwijt kan, krabbels, een link naar een site die ik misschien een keer interessant genoeg vind om verder te bekijken. Notities, maar ook de meer traditionele blogpos…

I’m still thinking about this stuff too. I have just recently started a wiki(ish) digital commonplace book (commonplace.doubleloop.net) and it has certainly helped me to think of it as for me only (even though it is public).

Despite the naming I am not yet 100% sure about the relationship between my blog and my wiki. They are just loosely defined in my head at the moment as both simply me hypertexting to help me think. The actuality of what I post where and when (and why) is still a bit fluid.

At first I saw the blog as being the more ephemeral of the two, the stream of consciousness, and the wiki being where thoughts go when they are fully baked. But that has not been entirely the case so far. Some things I will actually write first in my wiki, completely undercooked, and shortly afterwards post to my blog timeline once I’ve thought it through a bit more in (almost) privacy.

At the moment I think I see the wiki as being ‘the bits that I want to keep’ long-term, and the blog as being ‘the thoughts that I want to share’ in the here and now. I might piece some thoughts together on the wiki, then share them via the blog for interaction, and then polish up the thoughts on the wiki based on what I’ve learned. For me (at the moment) the blog is social and interactive, the wiki is (publicly…) private and introspective.

The main technical distinction at the moment is that I *expect* to edit the text on the wiki, whereas I generally never go back and edit things I’ve posted to my blog timeline. (And in fact, I’m thinking about also automatically making timeline posts older than X months become private).

Maybe I should think of them *both* as my commonplace book, taken together.

Thanks for posting your thoughts, Frank, it made me think about some of mine.  In case you haven’t seen it, Kicks’ post on hypertexting is very good – www.kickscondor.com/hypertexting/. And Ton has some great thoughts on it of course (www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/06/the-blog-and-wiki-combo/) 🙂

Replied to a post by Panda MeryPanda Mery

Do you know the Shadoks and the Gibi? Here’s an article mentioning the Twittering Machine as well: thequietus.com/articles/25112-les-shadoks-jacques-rouxel-shadokorama-jacques-rouxel-et-les-shadoks-chateau-dannecy-review

I didn’t know about Les Shadoks, thanks!  I watched and enjoyed the clip in the article you linked.  Seems like a very interesting cartoon – politics, philosophy, musique concrete…
Listened
I like the use of the phrase ‘social industry’. I think it’s a good framing to use rather than social media. It brings to the fore the co-optation by industry of what Ton calls social software, turning it into an industry.

In the Novara interview, Seymour talks about how when using social media (controlled by social industry) you are in some ways interacting more with a machine than with other people. Likes, retweets, etc, are part of this machinery. These have become industrial abstractions of actual social relations.

Analagous in some ways I feel to how Taylorism abstracted the movements of skilled labourers into smaller and smaller discrete motions, which could then be mechanised and repeated monotonously without skill or craft.

Digital time-and-motion men have abstracted social interactions into meaningless facsimiles of real interaction, real desire or affection.

Better a social craft than a social industry I think. Small tech and social software can be part of a that I think, but re-repurposing or even breaking some of the frames that industry co-opted and mechanised.

Writing a blog post, or a considered reply to someone else’s, takes more time and emotional craft than a like. But it’s more rewarding overall. It’s hopefully less alienating.

Really want to go deep into the political history of the textile industry, any good book recommendations? It’s incredible and horrible lesson from history. Manchester is wrapped up in it.

Like before the industrial revolution, people had spinning wheels and hand looms in their homes. The industrial revolution brought in spinning frames, power looms, centralisation, mass production and a whole shitload of exploitation around the globe to go along with it. Why? Where’s that tendency come from?

So there’s a lot of bad in the ol’ YouTube comments, no doubt, but sometimes you know you stumble across a video where someone has revealed something deeply personal and tender in the comments that the music means to them, and lots of people leave incredibly supportive responses. That’s lovely to see. I feel like you don’t see a lot of genuine warmth on the Internet and it’s nice to know the medium doesn’t strip it out altogether.
Replied to

Uh oh.. an outbreak of PHP warnings.. prognosis not good.

On a positive, at OggCamp some associated with @theastralship was very into geodesic domes. I think the spirit lives on in many forms!

I changed my `dotspacemacs-frame-title-format` value to:

“`
dotspacemacs-frame-title-format "%t | %b"
“`

`%t` is projectile-project-name, and `%b` is buffer name. So I will see something like "org | Tasks.org" as the frame title.

The default is `"%I@%S", which is invocation-name@system-name, e.g. emacs@neil-ThinkPad-T450s, which I don’t find that useful.

Replied to How do I POSSE to Mastodon now? by an author

This is what I’m running into to try to make new Indieweb technology as simple to explain as possible. Ryan Barrett did some amazing work and made it possible to connect your own Mastodon account to your site. So you can get likes and replies from Mastodon in the comments of your own site. But you…

I wonder if it posted just the title and the link as it recognised this post as an article type (you can see objectType: article in the logs).

If you were to create a note then it would post the full content of the note as a toot, I think.

Replied to How do I POSSE to Mastodon now? by an author

This is what I’m running into to try to make new Indieweb technology as simple to explain as possible. Ryan Barrett did some amazing work and made it possible to connect your own Mastodon account to your site. So you can get likes and replies from Mastodon in the comments of your own site. But you…

The way I tested it is as you described – by adding the brid.gy/publish/mastodon link as a custom provider in Syndication Links.

My own test post wasn’t great though – it included the link back to my site (even though I have it set not to in Syndication Links), and also included the text ‘Also on’.

When I get chance I will test it further, and maybe write a blog post revisiting all the different IndieWeb to Mastodon options!

Replied to Mastodon on Bridgy by Ryan BarrettRyan Barrett

https://snarfed.org/mastodon_elephant_curious.png https://snarfed.org/mastodon_elephant_curious.png
Mastodon is now on Bridgy! Both backfeed and publish (aka POSSE) are fully supported. Feel free to try them out! And let me know if you hit any bugs, problems, or missing features.
(If you’re alread…

Woah, nice! 🎉
Reimagination of the party structure through digital platforms. Populism through digitality.

’emerging organisations such as Momentum, the Five Star Movement, Podemos, France Insoumise and many others as “digital parties”, or “platform parties,” […] following the logic of the digital platforms of contemporary capitalism and mimicking operations like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon.’

— www.plutobooks.com/blog/momentum-labour-online-digital-activism-social-media-party/

Learned a little bit about FPGAs from Alan of myStorm today. I’m a long way from clocking it all, but I think a couple of concepts sunk in… I’d like to know more about chip design and hardware, the fundamentals.

The BlackIce Mx looks super fun, an open hardware FPGA dev board. Someone was demoing the NES chips built on one, and Alan showed me an implementation of RISC-V. mystorm.uk/mystorm-opensource-fpga-hardware-blackice-mxusing-blackedge/

When you look at the resources required to do quantum research, or even just fabricate silicon chips for that matter, I think that along with small tech, appropriate tech, etc, there’s a need to think about guerrilla technology. The creative use of small technology to counter the misuse of more ‘advanced’ technology by those with access to orders of magnitude more resources. Ways of tackling the asymmetry. Better understanding of the terrain. Small units of organisation with mobility.
I don’t have a great grasp of what’s going on with quantum computing, but I saw a talk today about how it is advancing apace. IBM now at 53 qubits.

Given the stated potential of quantum computers, it seems worrying that they will be the playthings of wealthy states and corporations. Barclays recently used it for some financial application for example. The liberatory potential could be vast, but will it be used for those ends? Don’t want to be a crank, but I’m not feeling particularly hopeful…