notes

longer form | more photos | work

[slavin]

I remember getting there in 1992 and feeling like I had already missed the main event.

Inside my head, the whole period has the quality of dreams, not memories; it was so long ago and the images in my head feel simply too implausible to have been real.

[voyantes]

i also remember some of this although i mainly remember longing for more of this as i was only able to make it to Berlin in the weekends. what i find most striking tough, is that this was the end of the pre-internet era, recorded only in (dreamlike) memories (and a few rolls of 36mm film). this fundamentally changed right after this period came to an end.

[voyantes]

chicken @ rijsel—Rijsel does the best rotisserie chicken in Amsterdam hand down. Every time a have one of those i am reminded of an interview with a US soldier who served in Iraq in 2006 during the height of the first Iraqi insurgency. In this interview the solider spoke of how he hated paroling the streets of Bagdad in his armored vehicle unable to step out into an urban environment that was considered to be too dangerous for dismounted operations. His contempt for the Iraqi population was greatly enhanced by the fact that from his vehicle he would frequently see chicken rotisseries on the side of the road that were effectively unreachable to him despite superior equipment. To me this is remains one of the most powerful illustrations (Islamic State and all related current concerns left aside) why one should not invade and occupy countries that one does not understand: You cant invade a country and eat its chicken (at RIJSEL)

[voyantes]

anybody seen this style of wearing a button down collar (use one point button with the top most button hole of the shirt to create an assertive ensemble)? is this new?

[voyantes]

Ars Technica: A review of the Blackphone, the Android for the paranoid:

One of them is the Kismet Smarter Wi-Fi Manager, a system app that protects the phone from being spoofed to connect to untrusted networks. The software “learns” trusted Wi-Fi networks by sensing nearby cell towers. When you add a network as trusted, Smarter Wi-Fi records a location fingerprint based on the cell towers. Once you’ve learned the locations of trusted networks, Smarter Wi-Fi can use your location to control whether Wi-Fi is turned on or off. Move out of range of your home network, for example, and the app will automatically shut down the phone’s Wi-Fi until you arrive at work—where it will automatically join your trusted network there. In between, networks can’t spoof your trusted networks, track your phone by its Wi-Fi MAC address, or get it to give up which networks you’ve trusted through Wi-Fi “poll” broadcasts.

sounds like a very useful feature that does not depend on a network effects (i for myself doubt that i will have enough paranoid friends/contacts to make the secure communication features of the blackphone more than a gimmick). really hope that this makes it to the more mainstream mobile operating systems.

[voyantes]

one of the disadvantages of living a largely cashless life is that it is rather difficult to give to the homeless, people collecting for charities or others in need. given the trend towards a cashless society it was only a question of time for this to appear, but I was honestly surprised to run into my first charity pin terminal in the small church where my mother was christened. apparently innovation thrives at the edges (at Schelf Church)

[transdisciplinarycuriosity]

Analemma: The shape the sun makes in the sky over the course of a year. And also the shape of the infinity symbol (for that reason)

[voyantes]

read during the last 10 day: 3 books on capitalism in the 21st century, 2 on warfare in lower Manhattan. only the bottom one sucked (at Underneath The Mango Tree - UTMT Spa & Hotel, Sri Lanka)

[ununpentium-deactivated20220209]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Who hated this park and everyone in it

[voyantes]

that is because she is half irish and half italian

lady talking into her cellphone on Lafayette street

[voyantes]

that french economist who is all the rage these days, he was giving a lecture at cooper union a few days ago ... (then silence, then change of topic of conversation)

hipster (for lack of a better term) in a ramen bar in chinatown

[voyantes]

all the interns have left, there is very little support staff left .... we have no support, it is a joke!

middle aged man with greasy hair in a oversized pin stripe suit on 5th ave and 32nd

[mattstoller]

Uber's Algorithmic Monopoly: “We are not setting the price. The market is setting the price. We have algorithms to determine what that market is.”

That’s a remarkable quote from the CEO of Uber.

Uber of course is a cab service that lets you order a cab from your smartphone via an App. It’s really neat, you get to watch the cab approach on a map, the payment is automatically applied so you don’t have to even deal with the transaction itself. The company is now taking its approach to logistics, and moving to ‘disrupt’ the delivery industry as well, competing with courier services, UPS, Fedex, and the Post Office. It’ll be interesting to see what happens there.

Read More

[voyantes]

the Austrian National Library had a Dictator to close the door. (related: someone from the Library called me a 'Stalinist' in the middel of our meeting) (at Österreichische Nationalbibliothek - Austrian National Library)

[voyantes]

hi @dropbox meet @spideroak and realize that you will be toast once the data has been transferred. (at Österreichische Nationalbibliothek - Austrian National Library)

[tvol]

WTF

[voyantes]

this country is way beyond ridiculous. but since we are already in the business of hosting summits against imagined threats I would really like the next one to be on invasions from hostile aliens immune from dying

[voyantes]

have been thinking a lot about this short exchange from a planet money podcast on bitcoin from a few weeks back. Makes me suspect that the one bitcoin that i am keeping for my own amusement somewhere on my laptop is more evil than i initially thought it was (it is also worth much less then when i bought it but that is much less surprising)

David Kestenbaum: Ben why do you think that bitcoin does have a future? Ben Horowitz: So it's a real computer science breakthrough. So this is a problem that we have been trying to solve in computer science since the early 80s, which is how do you prevent the double spending problem Ben Horowitz: How do you make sure that it is only in one place at one time Ben Horowitz: Right David Kestenbaum: One of the problems with trying to make digital money is that, like if you have a movie online everybody can copy it and it can be in a 100 different places at once, Money that cannot happen with, right you have to, it has to... Ben Horowitz: ...that would be a bad problem, that would pretty much defeat the money. David Kestenbaum: So that was the break-through basically, someone figured out how to do that. Ben Horowitz: Exactly, exactly! David Kestenbaum: So that is one reason why Ben likes bitcoins: you cant make extra copies of them, there is no way to counterfeit them, no way for bad people to use the same bitcoin to buy two different things at once or 20 different things at once. It makes online cash possible.

Unsurprisingly there is a discussion on bitcointalk.org where people are hatching not so clever BC as DRM schemes.

[kav-k]

[voyantes]

whatever this is, i like it...