Recent submissions

Comment · 9 months ago
I agree that it got appallingly little press, as do many large-scale human rights violations around the world. However, I feel like pitting it against "the rhetoric in Gaza" is wrong. Gaza is much more our war (where "we" is "the West"). Our governments directly provide the funds and weapons that are being used to commit the large-scale grave human rights violations by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. In plain English: we're funding the genocide with our tax money. In a democratic system of government, I would therefore expect and hope for these issues to take up a much larger part of public discourse.

Given the direct comparison and language of the parent comment, it's hard for me not to see an implied agenda here: Iran's regime is bad, they're islamists, just like Hamas, therefore Israel should be excused for having turned Gaza into a parking lot, or something along these lines. Our commitment to human rights should be strong enough to reject this sort of thinking and condemn every single one of these civilian deaths.

Comment · 3 years ago
Maybe the whole networked thought/Zettelkasten thing is just something that's only useful for a small subset of endeavours, and more of a hindrance for most.

Niklas Luhmann became one of the most productive sociologists of the 20th century with the help of his enormous paper-based Zettelkasten. If you look at the stuff he wrote, you can see why. He ties together publications from the fields of sociology, philosophy, legal studies, psychology, biology and surely many more, literature, journalism, film... Luhmann was a prolific reader (he did few other things as far as I know) and for him, stumbling upon a connecting thought he had ten years ago while reading a newspaper after having read a specific book, might have been crucial to maintain the density of ideas in his publications.

In short, these tools are probably only useful to you if you're in the business of generating novel ideas by interlinking a lot of other ideas that people have had in new, interesting ways. (This is the best tentative description I came up with and it's probably wrong around the edges).

If you're an engineer, or indeed also a scholar in the humanities but playing a different game than Luhmann, these tools may just be useless to you. A couple of years ago when I was thinking about this a lot, I asked one of my lecturers who was a post-doc in comparative political science about his toolset. He didn't really seem to understand the question, he told me that he sometimes writes notes on books in a Word document but mostly knows what's going on in his field and where to look for what. I later took a look at his dissertation and while I'm in no position to judge the quality of his work (it was probably pretty solid, he got it published with a reputable publisher), it seemed to have fever moving parts and threads of thought tied together than the bits of Luhmann that I've read.

My impression is that what's holding the ecosystem of tools for networked thought back right now is that the tools are not built for (or possibly even by) the people for whom networked thought may be most useful. They're trying to be better task managers, tagging systems, collection managers (as mentioned in the linked article), flashcard systems, etc. "Zettelkasten" by Daniel Lüdecke (a sociologist), the software recommended in "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens (himself a professor in the humanities), which is hailed as the bible of networked thought by many (Roam, Logseq, HN I guess), looks very different from these tools. It's an obscure piece of Java software, and while I've only briefly tried it out for a few minutes, it works very differently. Smaller notes, little structure within them, no titles. It has a "desk mode" where you can pull out notes and arrange them in a tree structure for when you're writing a paper or book (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIztPpFqCBw).

I would love to see what things could happen in the networked thought space if people who need these tools the most sat down with people who can write software. I have a few ideas, but I'm afraid I'm just not enough of a Luhmann to really know what these people need. Also, I would just be procrastinating actually writing my thesis (nod to the linked article :))

Comment · 5 years ago
Whether or not he was insured against this particular damage doesn't make the cost of the repair less outrageous. In the end, drivers will be paying for these repairs, whether directly or through "cheap" monthly insurance payments that hide these occasional events.

(I guess similar arguments could be made about other insurance markets)

Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

HEADLINE: A non-dangerous and fast release upgrade mechanism

Currently, the upgrade (as in do-release-upgrade) process takes long, very long if not on an SSD. In my experience, apps can crash during the upgrade. During a recent upgrade I did on a family member's machine, the machine was sent to sleep and the screenlocker crashed afterwards. After powering off the machine, the X session wouldn't come up anymore, I had to complete the upgrade manually on the command line. This was all on Kubuntu, but I don't expect the mechanism to be radically different in the standard flavor, it still puts the machine in a dangerous state.

Release upgrades should be as easy and quick as on iOS or Android.

Comment · 9 years ago
Maybe many people would not develop the wish to buy fashionable clothes, a bigger car or a faster smartphone if there weren't adverts and people all around us suggesting that that's the right thing to do.

I hope that humans aren't intrinsically consumerist, but I honestly don't know. Does anybody know if research has been don one this topic?

Comment · 9 years ago
That sounds like a cool side project/business! Would you mind elaborating how you got started this business and how you acquired clients?
Comment · 10 years ago
I have read the link you posted and I'm still not clear on how you would end up paying ~50% and not be able to get it back.

If your ETF is "ausländisch thesaurierend" ("foreign accumulating"), declaring it will be a bit more complicated but not that hard. Would you mind explaining your situation a bit better? Maybe I'm missing something (and I wouldn't want to, since I'm looking into this topic myself at the moment).

Comment · 10 years ago
I got my license in Germany and was never required to go that fast during any driving lessons or my test. My driving instructor told me to go roughly the recommended speed of 130km/h to practice some real-world Autobahn driving.

That said, I know of one person who was told to go fast on the Autobahn during their driving lessons by their instructor. Definitely not part of the official test though.

Comment · 10 years ago
I disagree that this is a non-problem. In our household, we store ingredients that we need rarely under our bed. Weird chinese noodles, some exotic spice that I've never heard of but is only sold in huge packages in Turkish stores, red Quinoa that's very hip these days... you get the picture. It's easy to loose track of everything you have.

That said, it has never annoyed me enough to build and maintain a personal storage system like OP did.

Comment · 10 years ago
I can't really comment on any of the courses, but taking a few months off to learn and recharge sounds like a great idea if you can afford it.

However, the problems solved at Amazon, Google and Facebook aren't necessarily more "real" than what you're solving now. Google also builds a lot of Java webapps. Sure, there are many advantages to working at these companies, but be aware that you most likely won't end up on the team that builds the algorithms for the self driving car or the machine learning powered object detection for photos.

Comment · 10 years ago
Comment · 11 years ago
Comment · 11 years ago
> It was clear when I travelled back from Marseille that many passengers hadn't realised they would be required to leave the train at the northern city of Lille for passport checks.

When I travelled to/from Romania by train two years ago, border control officers got on the stop before the border, walked through the train to check passports and got off at the next stop, probably taking the next train back. This happened both going into Romania and going back into Hungary.

So, the UK probably wouldn't even have to join Schengen to make this a less painful process.

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