one of the things i like the most is being able to see all the stuff. just whatever i'm doing, in real life, on a computer, consuming something, making something, if i can see the entire thing somehow? that's what makes me happy. i think a major source of difficulty i have in life is just not being able to see the whole of something, either because somebody hasn't provided a way for me to do it, or the thing is multidimensional or ill-defined in a way that makes it difficult or impossible
We're losing computing history at an incredible rate, but there are people doing just amazing work out there collecting not only information about the technologies, but also the people and processes that brought them to be. If you're interested in that kind of thing but not sure where to start, let me recommend some sites that have some great stories (in no particular order):
https://folklore.org/0-index.html
https://multicians.org/
http://www.tuhs.org/
There are others, of course! #ComputerHistory
When I was a PhD student, I attended a talk by the late Robin Milner where he said two things that have stuck with me.
The first, I repeat quite often. He argued that credit for an invention did not belong to the first person to invent something but to the first person to explain it well enough that no one needed to invent it again. His first historical example was Leibniz publishing calculus and then Newton claiming he invented it first: it didn’t matter if he did or not, he failed to explain it to anyone and so the fact that Leibniz needed to independently invent it was Newton’s failure.
The second thing, which is a lot more relevant now than at the time, was that AI should stand for Augmented Intelligence not Artificial Intelligence if you want to build things that are actually useful. Striving to replace human intelligence is not a useful pursuit because there is an abundant supply of humans and you can improve the supply of intelligent humans by removing food poverty, improving access to education, and eliminating other barriers that prevent vast numbers of intelligent humans from being able to devote time to using their intelligence. The valuable tools are ones that do things humans are bad at. Pocket calculators changed the world because being able to add ten-digit numbers together orders of magnitude faster allowed humans to use their intelligence for things that were not the tedious, repetitive, tasks (and get higher accuracy for those tasks). If you want to change the world, build tools that allow humans to do more by offloading things humans are bad at and allowing them to spend more time on things humans are good at.
Anyone spending the brief liminal window between Christmas and Georgian new year in Hamburg, with the hackers, at CCC?
I am! With new research and a new talk ☺️
What happens when we center love in our understanding of privacy? What are the consequences of its disavowal, in favor of a familiar technocratic definition of privacy-as-absence, privacy-as-isolation? What role does our desire for love/fear of rejection have to do with the shape of the tech today?
halfnarp.events.ccc.de
With everything going on right now preserving, contextualizing and promoting history and digital archives is more important than ever. You have to know the past to understand the present.
Nice image from JBM. This sort of comparative perspective tends to rule out a lot of US-centric, highly contingent explanations for why things turned out as they did.
V USA rozhodla volby ekonomika = inflace
Německo, rozpad vlády a předčasné volby: jako ano, ceny v Německu vzrostly o něco méně než v USA = "a bude to stačit, myslíš?"
ČR: hold my beer aka "neříkám nic"
Thank you Mastodon and the Fediverse for being an example of communicating without billionaires and US venture capitalists calling the shots. We're going to need more of this.
