We Need To Rewild The Internet
The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.
Bookmarks with tag “computing”:
The Internet it utterly useless
We celebrate the information age as a massive step forward for humanity. It made possible the exchange of information almost instantly across the world. Borders so it would seem are completely irrelevant and everyone can share and consume information and "content" freely.
Remote work is no longer some exotic concept and online shopping has turned from a fringe experience to the default way of doing things. Everyone can contribute, exchange ideas, publish content, shop, work, bank, ... you name it. Our lives are digital and the internet is at the very heart of it.
So how on earth would anyone consider the internet useless in any way?
Tech Independence
Tech independence is not depending on any particular company or software.
Windows93
Just give it a try, you won’t regret it.
The Old Computer Challenge
For some time I wanted to start a personal challenge, after some thoughts I want to share it with you and offer you to join me in this journey.
The point of the challenge is to replace your daily computer by a very old computer and share your feelings for the week.
A Different Internet
Today’s internet is largely shaped by a dialog between two ideas. One position considers personal data as a form of property, the opposing position considers personal data as an extension of the self. The latter grants inalienable rights because a person’s dignity - traditionally manifested in our bodies or certain rights of expression and privacy - cannot be negotiated, bought, or sold.
The internet is already over
Our God is a devourer, who makes things only for the swallowing.
In praise of Plan 9
Plan 9 is an operating system designed by Bell Labs. It’s the OS they wrote after Unix, with the benefit of hindsight. It is the most interesting operating system that you’ve never heard of, and, in my opinion, the best operating system design to date. Even if you haven’t heard of Plan 9, the designers of whatever OS you do use have heard of it, and have incorporated some of its ideas into your OS.
In praise of Alpine and apk
Since the change of year, I’ve been using Alpine Linux on my main computing device (a new desktop PC that I assembled in December). These are some notes on in, some niceties and caveats.
I used ArchLinux for over a decade before, so keep in mind that my main point of reference/background is using Arch+pacman. However, this is not an “Arch vs Alpine” article.
Fact of Fiction? The Legend of the QWERTY Keyboard
What came first: the typist or the keyboard? The answer may surprise you
Names should be cute, not descriptive
A long-standing debate between me and a peer at work has been how we should name services. His position was always that services should be named something descriptive, so that you can infer from the name what it does. My position is that the name should definitely not be descriptive, but should be something cute and wholly disconnected from the purpose. And I think this applies more broadly to projects and companies, too.
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Standards: Defending $HOME
The XDG base directory specification defines the locations where applications should store application-private files on Linux, instead of dumping them into $HOME.