February 2025

Wanted to share an interesting link to a blog post. Yesterday it was online and today I get a random parked domain page there OO. Good, I send a copy of the post to my note system along with the link.

I finished reading Liberation 2053-2054 by Lee Schneider.📚

So funny – but also so tragical right now :-(.

⤑ Meanwhile In America PART 6 🇺🇸🥴.

It feels strange for once to not be working on the weekend Oo.

⤑ From One Cell to a Multicellular Organism. Part 1..

Looks like genes are just big state machines.

⤑ Under the Radar #312: Our Changing Relationship with Apple - Relay.

I liked this episode and I need to also spend some time thinking about this.

Especially this part towards the end:

I think there’s just something in that of just the fundamental reality of we have more agency than sometimes I think, at least I can say for myself, I have more agency than sometimes I give myself credit for.

And I think the places I often find myself struggling is when I am unintentionally giving up that agency.

And in this case, it was sort of like giving some of my identity and focus to a company rather than being self-directed.

And part of that was just laziness, part of that was just it was fun and like there’s lots of things that go into that.

And I think it’s the reality of understanding that I have agency over what I think is important, but I value what I do with my time, what I look at and sort of engage in.

April 26 & 27, 2025! We’re coming back to London!

Looking forward to it - managed to get one of the last tickets :-)

⤑ ICBIBALLTAY — StarKid Productions.

A Well-Intended Idea, But an Impossible Execution: My Thoughts on the Environmental Responsibility Initiative (Vote on February 9th Weekend)

I’ve looked at the initiative text for the new bill, which was proposed and is up for a vote this weekend (“Volksinitiative
Für eine verantwortungsvolle Wirtschaft innerhalb der planetaren Grenzen (Umwelt-verantwortungsinitiative)”¹). Reading it leaves me feeling sad.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs...

The cargo cult metaphor is commonly used by programmers. This metaphor was popularized by Richard Feynman's "cargo cult science" talk with a vivid description of South Seas cargo cults. However, this metaphor has three major problems. First, the pop-culture depiction of cargo cults is inaccurate and fictionalized, as I'll show. Second, the metaphor is overused and has contradictory meanings making it a lazy insult. Finally, cargo cults are portrayed as an amusing story of native misunderstanding but the background is much darker: cargo cults are a reaction to decades of oppression of Melanesian islanders and the destruction of their culture. For these reasons, the cargo cult metaphor is best avoided.

⤑ The origin of the cargo cult metaphor.

I don’t like front matter as it puts a big ugly block of code at the front of my notes. But nobody seems to be talking about postmaster, which would be an acceptable compromise for me. From a technical point of view, I can understand that having the metadata at the beginning of the file makes it easier and faster to read and ignore. But then again, just read the file from the end instead of the beginning. We are in 2025, so this should be possible.